What Is a Babel Fish? The Oddest Thing in the Universe

What the Guide says a Babel fish is

Arthur Dent meets his Babel fish at the worst possible moment. Earth has just been demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass, he is hiding aboard a Vogon constructor ship in his dressing gown, and Ford Prefect produces a small yellow fish and pushes it into his ear. Arthur, reasonably, objects. Then the Vogon captain comes over the tannoy, and Arthur understands every word.

That is the whole reason the fish exists in the story: without it, nothing anybody says to Arthur for the rest of the series would mean anything. It is also why he has to understand every line of the Vogon poetry that follows shortly afterwards, which is less a gift than a curse.

The Guide's own entry opens with one of the best sentences Adams ever wrote: "The Babel fish is small, yellow, leechlike, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe." Four facts in a row, each one stranger than the last, delivered in the tone of a field guide to garden birds.

How it actually works

The Guide then explains the mechanism, and it is worth reading slowly, because Adams built a complete piece of fake biology around a joke.

The fish feeds on brainwave energy — not its host's, but that of the people around it. It absorbs their unconscious mental frequencies as food. Then it excretes into its host's mind a telepathic matrix, formed from the speaker's conscious thought frequencies combined with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of their brain. The practical upshot, as the Guide puts it, is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear, you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language.

So the fish does not translate words at all. It eats the parts of your thoughts you did not mean to share, and passes on the parts you did. Which, if you think about it, is a better description of a good interpreter than most textbooks manage.

It is also exactly what the cutaway on our diagram designs is drawing. The telepathic excretor, the conscious and unconscious frequency sensors, the extendable nerve signal sensor — none of those labels is invented. Each one is lifted from a phrase in the Guide's entry and given an organ to live in. The gill rakers, liver and heart are ordinary fish anatomy, included so the rest looks plausible.

The T-Shirts

Hitchhiker's Guide Babel Fish Diagram T-Shirt

The full cutaway, every organ labelled, with the Guide's opening line printed underneath for anyone who needs it explained. If you would rather the fish did the talking, there is the Stages t-shirt, which takes the same fish apart one layer at a time from solid to skeleton to schematic, and the plain Babel Fish t-shirt: one yellow fish, one red eye, no labels and no explanation.

View the t-shirt

The fish that disproved God

Having explained how the fish works, the Guide immediately draws the only logical conclusion. Anything this mind-bogglingly useful, it reasons, cannot possibly have evolved by chance — so some thinkers have taken it as final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.

The argument runs as a short dialogue. God refuses to prove that He exists, because proof denies faith, and without faith He is nothing. Man points out that the Babel fish is a dead giveaway: it could not have evolved by chance, so it proves God exists — and therefore, by God's own argument, He doesn't. "Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic. Man, delighted with how easy that was, goes on to prove that black is white and is killed on the next zebra crossing.

It is a perfect parody of a certain kind of clever argument, the kind that wins the debate and then walks into traffic. The Guide notes that most leading theologians dismiss it as "a load of dingo's kidneys", which did not stop Oolon Colluphid making a small fortune by using it as the theme of his bestseller, Well That About Wraps It Up For God.

And then comes the sting, in the entry's final line. The poor Babel fish, by removing every barrier to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation. Adams spends a page building the most useful animal imaginable and ends by noting, quite calmly, that perfect understanding is the last thing anybody needed.

The Babel fish that escaped the book

The name is a Bible joke — the Tower of Babel, where humanity's single language was shattered into many — and it turned out to be the most useful name Adams ever coined. In December 1997, AltaVista launched one of the first free translation services on the web, built with the translation company SYSTRAN, and called it Babel Fish. For more than a decade, millions of people pasted text into it without necessarily knowing where the name came from. It later ran under Yahoo, and in 2012 it was switched off and redirected to Bing Translator.

The fish's other great afterlife is in games. The 1984 Infocom text adventure of Hitchhiker's, co-written by Adams himself with Steve Meretzky, contains the Babel fish dispenser — one of the most notorious puzzles in the history of the genre. Getting a fish out of the machine and into your ear takes a ridiculous chain of objects and precise timing, and failing it quietly makes the game unwinnable, because later you need to read instructions written in Vogon. The puzzle became so infamous that Infocom sold t-shirts reading "I got the Babel Fish!" — which makes this, as far as we can tell, the second generation of Babel fish t-shirts.

The whale, the petunias and the Great Wave

Our Great Wave of Babel Fish t-shirt fills Hokusai's famous wave with Babel fish — two big ones riding the crest and a shoal of smaller ones down in the troughs among the fishing boats — and then drops something else into the picture.

Above the planet Magrathea, the Heart of Gold is attacked by two nuclear missiles. Arthur, with no idea what he is doing, switches on the Infinite Improbability Drive, and the missiles become two rather less threatening objects: a sperm whale and a bowl of petunias, several miles up and falling fast. The whale spends its brief life joyfully working out what everything is — including the ground, which it hopes might be friends with it. The petunias think only "Oh no, not again."

The Guide remarks that if we knew why the petunias thought that, we would know a great deal more about the nature of the Universe. A book later, in Life, the Universe and Everything, we find out: the bowl was one incarnation of Agrajag, a creature reborn endlessly only to be killed, every time, by Arthur Dent. It is one of the longest set-ups for a punchline in comic fiction, and the Great Wave shirt is for the reader who spotted it.

The Mug

Hitchhiker's Guide Babel Fish Mug

The whole biology plate wrapped around a mug: the labelled cutaway on one side, the four stages of fish on the other. It is the only way to have a Babel fish near your head that does not involve your ear. In 11oz and 15oz.

View the mug

Once you can understand everything, you will need something to understand. There is Vogon poetry, which you will regret; Marvin, fully annotated, who will tell you exactly how he feels about it; and the Don't Panic mug, for the advice that comes first.