Space Age Language Translator!

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You can also do this with Google Translate on your phone (Android, at least. Maybe iPhone too?) There you also have the ability to do it to printed things as well, in real time, which is pretty amazing the first time you see it.

“I am to be asking what how much is the intercourse to costing we? Is five zero dollars, American, enough? What extra prices for spank and naughty me?”

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There’s a better option.

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What a great idea! Soon nobody will need to learn anything at all!

If the translations are as accurate as Google Translate’s, and we get rid of the usual conference interpreters and get these instead directly into the ears of the pols, we’re pretty much guaranteed World War III…

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nah, no one starts a war because of eels in hovercrafts

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Page: 410073, Section: 4r

Entry: CARELESS TALK

It is of course well known that careless talk costs lives, but the full scale of the problem is not always appreciated.

For instance, at the very moment that an Earthman, Arthur Dent said “I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle,” a freak wormhole opened up in the fabric of the space-time continuum and carried his words far far back in time across almost infinite reaches of space to a distant Galaxy where strange and warlike beings were poised on the brink of frightful interstellar battle.

The two opposing leaders were meeting for the last time.

A dreadful silence fell across the conference table as the commander of the Vl’hurgs, resplendent in his black jewelled battle shorts, gazed levelly at the G’Gugvuntt leader squatting opposite him in a cloud of green sweet-smelling steam, and, with a million sleek and horribly beweaponed star cruisers poised to unleash electric death at his single word of command, challenged the vile creature to take back what it had said about his mother.

The creature stirred in his sickly broiling vapor, and at that very moment the words I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle drifted across the conference table.

Unfortunately, in the Vl’hurg tongue this was the most dreadful insult imaginable, and there was nothing for it but to wage terrible war for centuries.

Eventually of course, after their Galaxy had been decimated over a few thousand years, it was realized that the whole thing had been a ghastly mistake, and so the two opposing battle fleets settled their few remaining differences in order to launch a joint attack on our own Galaxy- now positively identified as the source of the offending remark.

For thousands more years the mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across- which happened to be the Earth- where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog.

Those who study the complex interplay of cause and effect in the history of the Universe say that this sort of thing is going on all the time, but that we are powerless to prevent it.
-The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

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During a fishing dispute? :stuck_out_tongue:

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Don’t worry. You’ll still be functionally illiterate in most places.

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The annoying thing about the Babel Fish is that the vending machines for them are very tricky, requiring all sorts of items to prevent the fish from going down the drain.

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That’s September of 2017. All they have today is plastic mock-ups and some app code.

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Can you imagine the sad state of the world when language stops being a barrier?

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