Babel Fish is a free web tool by Yahoo! that can translate up to 12 languages into or from English. It was developed by AltaVista and uses SYSTRAN technology. The tool is named after a character in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and is not perfect, often producing humorous results.
Babel Fish is a free web tool made available through Yahoo! which translates the text or websites entered. Users can enter text of up to 150 words and receive a translation, or they can enter a website address and be directed to a translated version of the site. Currently, Babel Fish has the ability to translate from or into 12 languages, although not all pairs are available. All available languages (Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish) can be translated into or from English.
Babel Fish was developed by search engine company AltaVista and became a Yahoo! service based in May 2008. The technology behind Babel Fish is SYSTRAN, one of the oldest machine translation companies, founded in 1968 in La Jolla, California. SYSTRAN was originally developed to translate Russian into English for the US Air Force during the Cold War. In 1986, SYSTRAN was purchased by the Paris-based Gachot family, although the company still maintains an office in La Jolla.
Babel Fish is named after a character in Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The character is a small yellow fish, like the translation tool logo, that can be placed in the ear to allow someone to understand any language in the universe. The character, in turn, is named after the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel, an account of the origin of the world’s languages. Genesis 11 tells of the attempt of the inhabitants of Babel to build a massive tower dedicated to the glory of man. To confuse their attempt, God scattered the people of the city and gave each person a different language so they could not communicate.
Babel Fish usually translates well enough for the user to understand the gist of the translated material, but does not claim to produce a perfect translation and especially does not handle idioms well. Roundtrip translation, in which Babel Fish is used to translate from one language to another and then back to the original, often produces humorous results.
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