Babel Fish Analysis

Describe the Innovation and Related Technologies

The ‘Babel-Fish’ real-time translating earbuds enable seamless translation in real time as the user speaks. The product is produced by tech giant “Google” and harnesses their pre-existing Google; ‘Assistant’, ‘Translate’, and ‘Pixel Smartphone’ technologies.[1]

The “Babel-Fish” (being a reference to pop-culture novel “The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy) is activated by its user holding their phone out with their ‘Translate’ app open and tapping their “Babel-Fish” earbuds and speaking a sentence. As the user speaks their speech is translated into the language selected on their translate app in real-time (output through their mobile phone). The process may also be performed in reverse in order

Analyse the Impact of the Innovation

With the innovation of these translating earbuds a key impact that comes to mind is the political impact. The UN currently speaks and distributes documents in over 6 main languages. The UN at the current moment are forced to spend thousands of dollars yearly on employing translators in order to make these documents legible for UN ambassadors which require the documents in a different language.[3] This combined with the spoken discussion that occurs at UN meetings that requires a translator for language in real time can be resolved by the widespread roll-out of these ‘Babel-Fish’ earbuds.

Alongside the political purposes of this innovation, there exists a large use in the personal use and cultural use areas. As the world’s population nears 7.6[8] billion people, the language barriers dividing cultures only exists to grow and divide individuals more, isolating nations further. The advent of the ‘Babel-Fish’ earbuds allows the language barriers created by over 6909[7] unique languages worldwide to be torn down. Relatives from different countries can discover their family history with ease. Education can be taught by a single teacher without reliance on the understanding of a singular, specific language such as classrooms in multinational nations such as the United Arab Emirates only

Sociocultural

Some important sociocultural factors affecting the technology and entrepreneurial activities may include the consideration of different cultural jargon. For example, medical and legal jargon in English may potentially differ greatly to Chinese professional jargon. Alongside this the consideration of certain dialects and accents within different locations of a singular country as mentioned prior, India alone contains over 720 different dialects. Google’s deep, machine learning processes have thus far greatly aided the development of the ‘Translate’ engine.

Political

With the growing phenomenon of ‘Islamophobia’ (Dislike or Prejudice of Muslim or Islamic people) within the western world primarily caused by a high degree of misunderstanding in the west of both the religion itself as well as the Arabic language, a deep need for a bridge between the nations of the west and the middle-east was created. This in combination with the previously mentioned requirements by the United Nations for a thorough and universal real-time translation service for United Nation’s meetings are both potential contributing factions technological and entrepreneurial