A little wonder, every day
The Babel fish and speech translation
1 / 2
Documentary contextual photograph of a hand holding a smartphone; not evidence of speech translation. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Smartphone_Use.jpg. Author Océanos y dados; CC0 1.0; unchanged.
Listen to fact0:00 / —
In Douglas Adams’s *The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy*, the Babel fish is a fictional creature placed in the ear that lets a character understand speech in any language. Modern smartphone translation apps can serve a similar purpose for human languages: they take speech through a microphone, display a translation, and, for some languages, speak it aloud. The resemblance is in the idea, not a literal prediction: apps support a limited set of languages and depend on speech recognition and translation working well.