Babel Fish (website)

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 by AltaVista, the application is named after the fictional animal used for instantaneous language translation in Douglas Adams's series "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." In turn the fish is a reference to the biblical account of the city of Babel 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.

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