The Babel fish is a fictional species in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series by Douglas Adams.
It is introduced in the first novel of the series as a species of fish that can instantly translate any language to any other language:
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The Babel fish is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix, formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear, you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. |
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Description from the film:
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The Babel fish is small, yellow, leech-ike, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy absorbing unconscious frequencies and excreting a matrix of conscious frequencies to the speech centres of the brain. the practical upshot of which is that if you stick one in your ear, you instantly understand anything said to you in any language. |
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The Babel fish was a useful plot device for Adams, as it allowed various alien races to communicate while speaking different languages. Adams wrote that the idea that all aliens would speak English was, to him, very strange. In the story, Ford Prefect gives Arthur Dent his babel fish after they have teleported to the Vogon spaceship and the Earth has been demolished. In the TV series version, Ford acquires the fish for Arthur from an aquarium-like vending machine on board. In the book So Long and Thanks for All the Fish, Arthur returns to Earth after his hitch-hiking and finally removes his babel fish – letting it swim in the goldfish bowl the dolphins have left for him and deciding that he will only now need it for watching foreign films.
The fish's name refers to the story of the Tower of Babel from the Book of Genesis - a tower that united humanity, with all people speaking a single language.
Existence of God
Adams' description of the Babel fish also triggered a digression about the existence of God, since the Babel fish was put forth as a fideist example for the non-existence of a deity:
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Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God. The argument goes something like this:
"I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
"But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves that You do exist, and so therefore, by Your own arguments, You don't. Q.E.D."
"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
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In the feature film version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, this scene was omitted and used as a bonus feature on the DVD release.
Trivia
Norwegian pop/rock band Babel Fish got their name from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, after they found out that their original name, Daily Planet, had already been registered by another Norwegian group.
Alta Vista's web translation service is named Babel Fish. Yahoo! later purchased Alta Vista along with the translator on May 9, 2008.
See also
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