One of my favourite books is Douglas Adam’s hitchhikers guide to the galaxy. Or a series rather. When I say favourite, I mean in a “when I was a teenager I liked his humour” way. Getting to the point…. in his book there is a ‘babelfish’ described thus:
The Babel fish is small, yellow and leechlike, 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 speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.
In Media Village I frequently desire such a pet so that I can understand the Afrikaans, Korean, German, Xhosa, American or any other of the many languages. Quite often you can’t tell what tongue someone is talking in - which is nice in some ways.
Anyway - I recalled the babelfish as I’ve just got back from watching Babel. It’s not the best film I’ve ever seen, but the general idea was a complete clash of cultures and languages being central to the theme and storyline. Indeed, the language list on imdb includes Japanese Sign Language, French, English, Spanish, Japanese, Berber and Arabic.
I wasn’t blown away, it was an interesting twist on a fairly typical ‘different threads of story that are very loosely linked’ such as Love Actually or Crash but it lacked the cinematography and finesse that could have made this film a lot better.
The cross language and cross cultural thing might have seemed more interesting if I hadn’t been dealing with similar issues and mis-understandings over the last two months. One nation can say one thing and mean another either due to cultural differences or bad English. Equally - one nation can say or do something that is not culturally polite or done in another nations culture (or not do).
We all have to adapt. We have been doing so and will continue to… the adventure continues.
a babelfish would be awesome! as much as i would dislike a squirmy little fish in my ear, it would truly be worth it some times! especially during a xhosa church service…. or even when those crazy brits talk, seriously they just talk gibberish! ;)