- Babel Fish (website)
Infobox Website
name = Babel Fish
caption =
url = http://babelfish.yahoo.com/
commercial =
type = Translation service
language =
registration =
owner =Yahoo
author =AltaVista
launch date =
current status =
revenue =Babel Fish is a web-based application on
Yahoo! that machine translates text or web pages from one of several languages into another. Developed byAltaVista , the application is named after the fictional animal used for instantaneouslanguage translation inDouglas Adams 's series "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ." In turn the fish is a reference to thebiblical account of the city ofBabel and the various languages said to have arisen there.The translation technology for Babel Fish is provided by
SYSTRAN , whose technology also powers a number of other sites and portals. It translates among English,Simplified Chinese ,Traditional Chinese , Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.The service makes no claim to produce a perfect translation. A number of humour sites have sprung up that use the Babel Fish service to translate back and forth between one or more languages (a so-called
round-trip translation ).After a long existence at babelfish.altavista.com, the site was moved on
May 9 2008 to babelfish.yahoo.com.Non-ASCII urls
Unlike Google Translate Babel Fish refuses to translate site where the url contains foreign characters, for example [http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/メインページ http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/メインページ] (Wikipedia Japan's main page) This is a major hindrance on its usefulness that it is unable or refuses to handles these urls.
ee also
*
Comparison of machine translation applications
*Windows Live Translator
*Google Translate
*Asia Online External links
* [http://babelfish.yahoo.com Yahoo! Babel Fish Translation Service]
* [http://www.tashian.com/multibabel/ Lost in Translation (round-trip translation)]References
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.