Language Matters | When AI catches up to fiction – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’s Babel fish may soon exist

In his cult science-fiction series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, originally created as a late-night BBC radio comedy in 1978, author Douglas Adams describes how Earth’s Arthur Dent is able to perfectly understand and communicate with the various alien races he encounters thanks to the Babel fish in his ear – small, yellow, leech-like, “it feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier, but from those around it […] and 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 […] if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language.”

The automatic translation of text from one language to another has indeed been one of the earliest goals for compu­ters. While auto-translation systems easily mastered single words and short sentences, longer, more complex passages still pose challenges because of different grammatical struc­tures and language subtleties as well as contextual meaning.

Nonetheless, 40 years on from The Hitchhiker’s Guide, reality has almost caught up with sci-fi. While online translation tools are often derided for producing gibberish, accuracy has improved, with apps using neural machine translation, relying on an artificial neural network simulating the human brain’s approach to translation, crucially able to “learn” through experience. Also available are wireless earbuds that translate what they hear into the language of your choice and transmit it to your ear. The translation doesn’t happen at conversational speed – not quite Babel fish – but makes it possible to have a simple, if some­what halting, chat in another language.

Digital technology has also come to the rescue of minority/endangered languages. While globalisation is often viewed as exerting pressure on smaller cultures to assimilate, modern digital tools have breathed new life into the erstwhile moribund languages of such communities. Talking dictionaries are an example, helping preserve endangered languages and prevent their extinction – the interactive online platforms comprise audio recordings of dying languagesas well as photographs of cultural objects, providing visibility and currency.