Don't panic! Just hang this cross stitch on your wall to understand what other people are saying to you. In the universe of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the Babel Fish is an incredibly useful yet entirely natural object that translates speech:
The Babel fish is small, yellow, leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier, but from those around it. It absorbs all unconcious 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 conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. 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.
Etsy seller Jen made this cross stitch piece illustrating the internal composition of the wondrous animal. You can buy her pattern here.