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Babel: Around the World In 20 Languages
by Gaston Dorren
(Profile Books, £14.99)
IT SEEMED like far-flung whimsy when Douglas Adams created the Babel fish, a universal language translator, in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
The idea is nonetheless revisited in Gaston Dorren’s whirlwind tour of mother tongues, in which the author suggests that the silicon translator being developed by Google could help bring English’s status as a lingua franca to an end.
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