How it works...

To mis-quote Douglas Adams' inspirational Hitch Hikers Guide to The Galaxy:

" The Babel Sheep is large white and sheep-like, and probably the second oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier, but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the unconscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them.

The practical upshot of this is that if you stick a Babel Sheep 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 Sheep. "

By now you should have realised, of course, that you in fact probably do not have a large ovine animal nestling in your lug-holes. So you are probably wondering just how you are managing to translate into Cumbrian using this computer thingy in front of you....
... well, that's all done by magic!

You can buy Hitch Hikers Guide series and other Douglas Adams stuff at Amazon.co.uk by clicking on the book to the right: