Toy Translator

A silly-looking and rather clumsy device, somewhat reminiscent of a speak-n-spell. The translator was created by an advanced race of linguists, who "explored" the universe by building and using humongous radio receiver arrays to listen to signals emitted by far-away, often long-gone forms of intelligent life.

A marvel of engineering and adaptive linguistic processing by Earth standards, this was a popular toy used by children to learn the basics of xenolinguistics and translation.

The translator is initially very large and physically difficult for him to operate. Eventually he learns that it a childs casing on a more advanced sleaker unit when an alien mistakes him for a child and then eventually asks him "Why don't you just take off the kid's case".