Posted by Counselor Zweistein on August 26, 1999 at 02:24:07:

Did you know there is such a smart little creature called Babelfish? It is supposed to be an incredibly useful creature as it tries to help you understand what other people say. Sitting in your ear, he hears what other people say and tries to reword it so you can make sense out of it.

The story reaches back far into history when people built a huge tower to reach the heavens. The Gods didn't approve and thus confused their languages so they would not be able to finish the tower. Since these ages, the tower is called the Tower of Babel and people are known to speak different languages.

Even the people of Sosaria speak different languages, as many come from other worlds with their own history and language. While there is a common tongue most citizens understand, many citizens prefer to speak in their own language. Thus the Gods created the Babelfish, or Systran as it is called sometimes.

Even I come from a distant world and speak my own language which I only use when you speak it, too. Now there is a problem: The Babelfish seems to find out what my home language is, even if I talk in common speech. If you have one in your ear, it tries to translate my common speech as if it was my home language, which of course fails miserably.

The other thing about the Babelfish is, it is sometimes slow. If it doesn't understand what someone is talking about, it goes into a deep thinking and won't tell what it is thinking about until much later.

Thus, some people cannot hear what I am saying. They may become confused or even angry at me for not answering their questions. When they tell me that they did not hear anything, I explain how to remove the Babelfish from their ear and all is well, as they can then hear me speaking the Common Speech.

I will explain how to remove the Babelfish from your ear:

Actually, the Babelfish is Systran, and it is a program that sits in your computer and tries to translate what other people say. How does it accomplish this? When you use UnicodeSpeech=on in your uo.cfg, every sentence you say is tagged with a small label that specifies in which language you are talking. The client gets this from your Windows country setting, so if you are from Germany, your sentences will automatically be labeled with "GER". Now, if the UO client of another player is receiving the sentence and it sees the tag, it is being handed over to Systran to translate it into the language of the receiving player. If the German player says something in German it is quickly translated to English for the English player, more or less in the correct manner. If the German player uses an unknown word (like the German player using English) it may take a long time until the text appears for the English player, and then the unknown words are enclosed in >?> phrases.

You can prevent these things from happening by disabling "Automatically translate incoming text" in the Language settings. Select the big "A" from the options setting (use ALT-O or OPTIONS from the paperdoll). This will prevent Systran from immediately translating the spoken words, but you can still have it translate the sentence by single clicking on the spoken text. If you never expect to need translation, you can disable Systran by unchecking "Enable Translation Server".

And to close this essay, here is what acres and tons are all about. If a German speaks the English words "are" and "to", the babelfish translates this "German" to "acres" and "tons" and thats the reason why you see them so often.

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