blend into the environment of whatever time or place it lands in. The Doctor's TARDIS always resembles a 1960s London police box, an object that was very common in Britain at the time of the show's first broadcast. Owing to a malfunction in the chameleon circuit after the events of the first episode of the show, An Unearthly Child, the Doctor's TARDIS is stuck in the same disguise for a long period. The Doctor has attempted to repair the chameleon circuit, unsuccessfully in Logopolis (1981) and with only temporary success in Attack of the Cybermen (1985). In the 2005 television story "Boom Town", the Doctor reveals that he has stopped trying to repair the circuit as he has become fond of its appearance. The other TARDISes that appear in the series have chameleon circuits that are fully functional. While the exterior is of limited size, the TARDIS is famously "bigger on the inside". Behind the police box doors lies a large control room, at the centre of which is a hexagonal console for operating the TARDIS. In the middle of the console is a moving tubular device called a time rotor. The presence of a physically larger space contained within the police box is explained as "dimensionally transcendental", with the interior being a whole separate dimension containing an infinite number of rooms, corridors and storage spaces, all of which can change their appearance and configuration. The TARDIS also allows the Doctor and others to communicate with people who speak languages other than their own, as well as turn all written languages to English. The "translation circuit" (occasionally called the "translation matrix") was first explored in "The Masque of Mandragora" (1976), as the Doctor explained to his companion, Sarah Jane, "Well, I've taken you to some strange places before and you've never asked how you understood the local language. It's a Time Lord's gift I allow you to share. But tonight when you asked me how you understood Italian, I realized your mind had been taken over." The translation circuit has also been explored in comparison with real-world machine translation, with researchers Mark Halley and Lynne Bowker concluding that "when it comes to the science of translation technology, Doctor Who gets it wrong more often than it gets it right. However, perhaps we can forgive the artistic license if we recognize that, as in other science fiction works, the presentation of