A device from the 1970s cult sci fi series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
Babel Fish | Hitchhikers | Fandom
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Since then, it has become the ideal for real-time translation devices
Real time translation: Can tech help you break down language barriers?
Translate this: How real-time translation breaks down barriers when you don't speak the language
- all of which, so far, have not worked:
Google's Pixel Buds are not the Babel fish they were made out to be
Translation gadgets in 2020 are nearly as good as Babel Fish | Engadget
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This is from the New European:
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Why tech will always be lost in translation
Technology may be closing in on making instant, in-ear translation services a reality. But it's still a galaxy away from truly replicating human communication.
When comedy science fiction writer Douglas Adams imagined a device that could instantly translate any language, he saw it as a small, yellow, telepathic fish that you put in your ear.
The Babel fish “excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with the nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them”. In other words, it takes words in one language and poops them out in another, straight into your brain.
It’s as good an idea as any, given the difficulty of real-time instant translation, and one which the translation and technology industry has been enthralled with since Adams’ novel, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was published in 1979.
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Let’s take the work of one of Britain’s most famous translators, Anthea Bell, as an example. Along with Derek Hockridge, her work translating the much-loved Asterix comics is as important to English readers as the art and writing of Goscinny and Uderzo. Indeed, it forms part of the writing.
For example, in French, the word melon means the same as in English, the fruit. But when the book Asterix in Britain was published in 1965, a ‘chapeaux melon’, meant a bowler hat, as worn by the typical British gentleman. It was a poke at British culture, but not directly translatable because we Brits don’t compare bowler hats to melons.
In the drawing, a grocer character is holding half a melon and arguing with a bowler-hatted Brit, while the dialogue makes use of the ‘chapeaux melon’ pun. What was Anthea Bell to do? She couldn’t change the artwork, so she needed to find an alternative pun. She changed the angry grocer’s dialogue to “OH! SO THIS MELON’S BAD IS IT?”, while the very snooty customer replies with a phrase beloved of the British upper classes, “rather, old fruit!”.
You may groan at the pun, but it perfectly illustrates the art of translation and the cultural differences that make it near-impossible to give accurate interpretations of speech in real time.
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While there are some incredible real-time translation devices available, including in-ear speakers with mics that pick up your words and translate them to a paired device in someone else’s ear, the technology is still limited to homogeneous words and concepts. To use the technology, many of us first have to translate our native speech into an approved version before that can be translated to another language, stripping us of our individuality and expression.
It will get better, but the Babel fish ideal of perfect real-time translation (which Douglas Adams joked would end in “more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation”) needs to move away from its current cultural defaults.
Being translated is not the same as being understood, and there is no such thing as universal translation because there is no such thing as universal culture. A translation device that knows this and factors it in, well, now you’re talking my language.
How close are we to making the Babel fish a reality? | The New European
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