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"I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander."
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Yes, this part of the book was the inspiration for naming the AltaVista website translation feature. At this point in the novel, Arthur Dent finds himself in a Vogon spacecraft. Their voices are not exactly music to the human ear.
Once he had the Babel Fish in his ear, Arthur understood perfectly. The Babel Fish lives on brainwave radiation from every source but its host. It then excretes enegry in the form of exactly the correct brainwaves needed by its host to understand what was just said.
The Babel Fish reverses the problem defined by its namesake; the original Tower of Babel (according to the Bible) inspired the Deity to confuse human beings by making them unable to understand each other.
Compare to the language translation machine from The Coming Race (1889) by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the translatophone from My Translatophone (1901), by Frank Stockton and the Language Rectifier from Ralph 124c 41 + (1911) by Hugo Gernsback. See also the more modern Translator Discs from Ringworld (1970) by Larry Niven and the Babel fish from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979) by Douglas Adams.
An interesting variation on this idea is the artificially produced speech, mechanically produced speech, from Hotel Cosmos (1938) by Raymond Z. Gallun. Comment/Join this discussion ( 7 ) | RSS/XML | Blog This | Additional
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