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Realistic Translation With The Waverly Labs Ambassador
The Waverly Ambassador is an earpiece that provides close to real-time translation of twenty languages.
You might be thinking of Larry Niven's translator discs from his epic 1970 novel Ringworld, but I thought I'd mention the wonderful in-ear Babel Fish from Douglas Adams' 1979 novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
The Babel fish is small, yellow and leechlike, 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. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.
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I might also be thinking of K-9 from Doctor Who.
