List of races and species in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy#Babel fish

The Babel Fish (English Babelfish ) is a fictional creatures from the novel The Hitchhiker's Guide. Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, who has since become a well known symbol for machine-based translation systems The popular Internet translation service Babelfish renamed itself after the model of Adams ' novel. The Babel fish is described in the novel as a small creature that can be inserted into the ear and the carrier allows an understanding of all spoken languages ​​. This concept explains Adams, by describing the Babel fish as symbionts, which feeds on external brain waves and their meaning he retires directly into the brain of the support in the form of telepathic energy. The name Babel Fish leaned Douglas Adams on the biblical story of the Tower of Babel and the subsequent Babylonian confusion of tongues in the book of Genesis.

The absurd representation of the Babel fish is a parody of Adams ' on the implausibility of the translation machinery described in science fiction literature. In general, the diversity of languages ​​was considered by the science fiction writers merely as an annoying inconvenience and highlighting linguistic difficulties as not reader-friendly. Accordingly, translation machines functioned in the literature mostly as a mere artifice in order not to pay attention to the problems of communication between species. Also the returning to the Bible utopia of language unity, which implies the notion that the mere overcoming language barriers simultaneously effecting a mutual understanding, Adams engages in a satirical manner: Although he raises in his novel with the help of the Babel fish the Babylonian state the confusion of tongues on, but it can very fact that being " more and bloodier wars" cause as "any other creation in history".