The Babel fish translation page (2009). (Wesley Fryer on Flickt, CC BY-SA 2.0)
Some older Tradiling readers may remember the Babel fish. Among other incarnations, it was the name of the first automatic web translation service, launched in 1997 by Altavista, a popular web search engine (1 BG: 1 year before Google), and from 2003 to 2012 the service was available at the Yahoo! website.
The name of the service derived from the “Babel fish” fictional species in Douglas Adams’s book “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, which could be inserted into the human ear to instantly translate spoken languages.
This invention is a commonplace of science fiction, in which members of different cultures or even different species communicate with apparent ease. A tongue-in-cheek cameo of this kind of technology featured in the Dr Who episode The Christmas Invasion (2006).
An excerpt of The Christmas Invasion on the official Dr Who YouTube channel
Back down here on terra firma, we now seem to be on the cusp of viable software and devices that are capable of making the Babel fish dream a reality, as a result of extraordinary advances in language technology over recent years. The Babel fish scenario of 2022 is not, however, based on exotic fish or time-travelling police boxes, but rather on mobile apps of various kinds. Continue reading
