• A brochura "Planeta de conselhos":

  Ha! Brochure!" spat the old woman. She seemed to be waving her bat more or less at random now.

  Arthur fished the crumpled-up brochure from his pocket. He wasn't quite certain why. He had already read it and she, he expected, wouldn't want to.

• Um sinal no Planeta de Aconselhamento

  There was a sign by the entrance saying, "I just don't know any more. Try next door , but that's just a suggestion, not formal oracular advice."

• A história da vida do "Oracle de conselhos"

  "This is, er, this your advice then, is it?" said Arthur, leafing through them uncertainly.

  "No," said the old lady. "It's the story of my life. You see, the quality of any advice anybody has to offer has to be judged against the quality of life they actually lead. Now, as you look through this document you'll see that I've underlined all the major decisions I ever made to make them stand out. They're all indexed and cross-referenced. See? All I can suggest is that if you take decisions that are exactly opposite to the sort of decisions that I've taken, then maybe you won't finish up at the end of your life..." she paused, and filled her lungs for a good shout, "... in a smelly old cave like this!"

  ...

  He was just about to embark on reading the photocopied life history of the oracle, when he was rather startled to hear a slight cough behind him.

• livros e romances Bartledanos

  He preferred not to think about it. He preferred just to sit and read-or at least he would prefer it if there was anything worth reading. But nobody in Bartledanian stories ever wanted anything. Not even a glass of water. Certainly, they would fetch one if they were thirsty, but if there wasn't one available, they would think no more about it. He had just read an entire book in which the main character had, over the course of a week, done some work in his garden, played a great deal of netball, helped mend a road, fathered a child on his wife and then unexpectedly died of thirst just before the last chapter. In exasperation Arthur had combed his way back through the book and in the end had found a passing reference to some problem with the plumbing in Chapter 2. And that was it. So the guy dies. It just happens.

• Vários painéis sobre o Coração de Ouro

  Arthur listened for a short while, but being unable to understand the vast majority of what Ford was saying he began to let his mind wander, trailing his fingers along the edge of an incomprehensible computer bank, he reached out and pressed an invitingly large red button on a nearby panel. The panel lit up with the words Please do not press this button again. He shook himself.

• Sinais de "Sunship" de Hotblack Desiato

  "Well, just over here in fact," said Arthur, pointing at a dark control box in the rear of the cabin, "Just under the word 'emergency', above the word 'system' and beside the sign saying 'out of order'."

• O banner de boas-vindas no espaçoporto NowWhat

  Arthur Dent had been in some hell-holes in his life, but he had never before seen a spaceport which had a sign saying, "Even travelling despondently is better than arriving here."

O manuseio da linguagem escrita no trabalho de Douglas Adams é deliberadamente vago. No entanto, o Babel Fish está implícito.

Lembre-se que no final Encaixe o primeiro da série de rádio original, Ford Prefect apresenta Arthur Dent ao livro. Ele mostra isso como um dispositivo portátil com uma tela e rola pelo índice para encontrar a entrada para a Terra. Arthur pode lê-lo, implicando que a exibição está em inglês. Embora isso seja logo depois que Arthur recebe o Babel Fish.

Em Fit the Fifth, todos podem ler os menus no Milliways, o Restaurante no Fim do Universo. Isto é, independentemente da sua origem.

Em Fit the nono, ficamos sabendo que, fora dos escritórios da Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, há uma placa de três quilômetros de altura iluminada com o slogan da empresa " Compartilhar e aproveitar ". Dizem-nos que, depois de um terremoto, a placa cai parcialmente no chão e agora lê na língua local " Vá enfiar a cabeça em um porco ". Claramente, esse não é o alfabeto inglês. A menção explícita da linguagem, no entanto, faz a piada. Isso leva à música corporativa do robô que começa com " Compartilhar e Divirta-se " e termina " Enfie sua cabeça em um porquinho ".

Todos os personagens também são capazes de ler os painéis de controle do Coração de Ouro e, em Fit the Sixth, o Hagunennon Battle Cruiser

Deixando de lado as outras respostas, de acordo com o The Guide, o Babel Fish é explicitamente apenas para comunicação falada:

The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.

Há algumas ressalvas, no entanto. O Guia não é infalível e existem algumas entradas conhecidas que deixam de fora detalhes importantes. (Por exemplo, a entrada para a Terra.) Em segundo lugar, a parte das ondas cerebrais em si não está presa a muito bem. Arthur entendeu a mensagem de milhões de anos transmitida de Magrathea, por exemplo.

Não

No capítulo 22 do restaurante no final do universo, Arthur não pode ler os rótulos dos freezers de Golgafrenchham:

He rubbed the frost clear and examined the engraved characters. To Arthur they looked like the footprints of a spider that had had one too many of whatever it is that spiders have on a night out, but Ford instantly recognized an early form of Galactic Eezeereed.

It says 'Golgafrincham Ark Fleet, Ship B, Hold Seven, Telephone Sanitizer Second Class' - and a serial number."

Isso prova que o Babel Fish não traduz texto escrito, além disso nos dá uma razão possível para que ele possa ler basicamente tudo o que as outras respostas mencionam: essa cena acontece milhões de anos antes de qualquer outro evento na série, e mesmo então a galáxia teve uma forma padronizada de comunicação escrita, pode ser que, no momento em que os eventos do resto da série ocorram, Eezeereed tenha se tornado tão fácil de ler que Arthur pode.