Translator microbes

Translator microbes are fictional micro-organisms within the Australian-American television series Farscape that allow for instantaneous near-universal translation.

Injected at birth, translator microbes colonize at the base of the brain and and allow people to instantly understand anything said to them in any language. The translator microbes work by peforming several functions. While in the brain, one group of microbes intercepts the nerve signals of spoken language that is heard by the host, which they can distinguish by "reading" subsonic vibrations, and blocks the brain from registering them.

Another group of microbes feed on brain wave energy received not from their own host but from those being translated, created while composing a sentence. They absorb all unconscious mental frequencies from this brain wave energy and then excretes into the mind (part of the brain that relate to hearing) of its host a telephatic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centers of the brain which has supplied them, leading to instant language translation. So what the host's ears hear and what their brain thinks it heard are two different things.

The speech patterns the host actually hear decode the brain wave matrix which has been fed into his or her mind by the microbes. Thus the translator microbes effectively allows someone to read the minds of people who are talking to them, and doesn't actually translate sounds per se.

A third group of microbes actually serve as brain wave modification devices. They alters brain waves in the host's visual recognition region of the brain so that they see the people being translated forming words of the user's native language with their mouths. Otherwise the host would see a mismatch between the word-shapes others make and the translated words coming from the microbes.

As good as the translator microbes are, though, they don't always catch everything. Sometimes words are untranslatable. Things like proper names, unique customs, and profanity.

The extension of one's natural life is another benefits of translator microbes. It seems translator microbes have long life spans of their own, and when their host’s body begins to age, the microbes go to work, repairing failing systems and fighting off any pesky debilitating diseases.