Arthur läser en mängd olika artiklar som försvinnande osannolikt har skrivits på engelska, vilket leder till slutsatsen att Babelfish verkligen översätter text.

• Broschyren "Advice Planet":

  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.

• Ett tecken på Advice Planet

  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."

• Livsberättelsen för "Advice Oracle"

  "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.

• Bartledanian böcker och romaner

  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.

• Olika paneler på hjärtat av guld

  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.

• Tecknar på Hotblack Desiatos "Sunship"

  "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'."

• Välkomstbannern vid NowWhat spaceport

  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."

Hanteringen av skrivet språk i Douglas Adams arbete är medvetet vagt. Men Babel Fish är implicit.

Kom ihåg att mot slutet är Fit The FIRST av den ursprungliga radionusen, introducerar Ford Prefect Arthur Dent i boken. Han visar det som en handhållen enhet med en skärm och rullar genom indexet för att hitta posten för jorden. Arthur kan läsa det, vilket innebär att skärmen är på engelska. Även om detta är strax efter att Arthur får Babel Fish.

I Fit den femte kan alla läsa menyerna i Milliways, restaurangen i slutet av universum. Detta är oavsett ursprung.

I Fit den nionde lär vi oss att utanför Sirius Cybernetics Corporation är kontor ett tre mil högt upplyst tecken som bär företagsslagordet " Dela och njut ". Vi får veta att efter en jordbävning faller tecknet delvis i marken och läser nu i det lokala språket " Gå på huvudet i en gris ". Klart det är inte det engelska alfabetet. Det uttryckliga namnet på språket gör dock skämtet. Detta leder till robotens företags sång, som berömd börjar Dela och njut "och slutar" Gå fast i huvudet i en gris ".

Alla tecknen kan också läsa kontrollpanelerna i hjärtat av guld och i den sjätte matchen Hagunennon Battle Cruiser

Den andra svarar åt sidan, enligt Guide själv, är Babel Fish uttryckligen endast för talad kommunikation:

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.

Det finns dock några försiktighetsåtgärder. Guiden är inte ofelbar, och det finns några kända poster som lämnar viktiga detaljer. (Till exempel, posten till jorden.) För det andra är hjärnvågsdelen själv inte fast vid mycket bra. Arthur förstod det miljonåriga budskapet som sändes från Magrathea, till exempel.