Fans of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy will remember the Babel Fish.
The Babel fish is small, yellow, leech-like – and probably the oddest thing in the universe. It feeds on brain wave energy, absorbing all unconscious frequencies and then excreting telepathically a matrix formed from the conscious frequencies and nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain, the practical upshot of which is that if you stick one in your ear, you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language: the speech you hear decodes the brain wave matrix.
With automated translation services and devices, we’re getting steadily closer to that dream. But with Google Translate available on our iPhone, is there any place for a dedicated translation gadget like Langogo?
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