The Babel fish is a fictional species in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series by Douglas Adams. It is introduced in the first novel of the series as a species of fish that can instantly translate any language to any other language:
| “ | The Babel fish is small, yellow and leech-like, 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 Babel fish was a useful plot device for Adams, as it allowed various alien races to communicate while speaking different languages. Adams wrote that the idea that all aliens would speak English was, to him, very strange. In the story, Ford Prefect gives Arthur Dent his babel fish after they have teleported to the Vogon spaceship and the Earth has been demolished. In the TV series version, Ford acquires the fish for Arthur from an aquarium-like vending machine on board. In the book So Long and Thanks for All the Fish, Arthur returns to Earth after his hitch-hiking and finally removes his babel fish – letting it swim in the goldfish bowl the dolphins have left for him and deciding that he will only now need it for watching foreign films. The fish's name refers to the Tower of Babel, a Biblical story in the Old Testament. According to the story, people at the time all spoke the same language and built a tower to show their strength and independence. This angered God, who confused the people and spread them across the Earth, speaking different tongues, so no such union could exist. AltaVista's web translation service is named Babel Fish, after the fish.
Existence of God
Adams' description of the Babel fish also triggered a digression about the existence of God, since the Babel fish was put forth as a fideist example for the non-existence of a deity:
| “ | Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God. The argument goes something like this:
"I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing." "But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves that you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. Q.E.D." "Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic. "Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing. Most leading theologians claim that this argument isn't worth a pair of fetid dingo's kidneys, but that didn't stop Oolon Colluphid from making a fortune with his book Well That About Wraps It Up For God. |
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In the feature film version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, this scene was omitted and used as a bonus feature on the DVD release.
