Understanding Babel*

Just image a world where no one could understand one other; a world without communication; a world where one human could not communicate with other human. For example, a simple “hello” spoken by one is received by another as babel, a confusion of sounds. What if this lack of understanding affected your understanding of written words? For example, a boyfriend’s written love note – “Life has no meaning without your love” is also received as babel.

How would we overcome this? Would we develop other methods of communication that don’t involve verbal or written communication? Would it be similar to sign language, or something unique?

Thankfully, we don’t have to worry about the above because humans have an ability to communicate with one another. Our only problem – we aren’t always able to communicate with others who speak and write another language. As I was searching the internet for something completely different, I came across this site called Babel Fish. It’s an online translator. You can insert text in one language and it will translate it to another language.

Test sentence:

English: Today is a beautiful day and I will live it to the fullest.

Korean: 오늘은 아름다운 일 이고 나는 가장 충분할 것이 것에 그것 살l 것이다.

Russian: Сегодня будет красивейший день и я буду жить оно к самой полной.

Spanish: Hoy es un día hermoso y viviré él al más lleno.

This is amazing! My only problem is I can’t verify the translation, since I don’t speak or write any of the above languages.

* In the Bible, a city (now thought to be Babylon) in Shinar where God confounded a presumptuous attempt to build a tower into Heaven by confusing, the language of its builders into many mutually incomprehensible languages.