Yahoo! Babel Fish was a free
Web
Web most often refers to:
* Spider web, a silken structure created by the animal
* World Wide Web or the Web, an Internet-based hypertext system
Web, WEB, or the Web may also refer to:
Computing
* WEB, a literate programming system created by ...
-based
machine translation service by
Yahoo!
Yahoo (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web portal that provides the search engine Yahoo Search and related services including My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, y!entertainment, yahoo!life, and its a ...
. In May 2012 it was replaced by
Bing Translator (now
Microsoft Translator), to which queries were redirected. Although Yahoo! has transitioned its Babel Fish translation services to Bing Translator, it did not sell its translation application to Microsoft outright.
As the oldest free online language translator,
the service translated text or Web pages in 36 pairs between 13 languages,
including
English,
Simplified Chinese
Simplification, Simplify, or Simplified may refer to:
Mathematics
Simplification is the process of replacing a mathematical expression by an equivalent one that is simpler (usually shorter), according to a well-founded ordering. Examples include: ...
,
Traditional Chinese
A tradition is a system of beliefs or behaviors (folk custom) passed down within a group of people or society with symbolic meaning or special significance with origins in the past. A component of cultural expressions and folklore, common examp ...
,
Dutch,
French,
German,
Greek,
Italian,
Japanese,
Korean,
Portuguese,
Russian, and
Spanish.
The internet service derived its name from the Babel fish, a fictional species in
Douglas Adams's book and radio series ''
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
''The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'' is a Science fiction comedy, comedy science fiction franchise created by Douglas Adams. Originally a The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (radio series), radio sitcom broadcast over two series on BBC ...
'' that could instantly translate
language
Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and signed language, signed forms, and may also be conveyed through writing syste ...
s. In turn, the name of the fictional creature refers to the
biblical
The Bible is a collection of religious texts that are central to Christianity and Judaism, and esteemed in other Abrahamic religions such as Islam. The Bible is an anthology (a compilation of texts of a variety of forms) biblical languages ...
account of the
confusion of languages that arose in the city of
Babel.
History
On December 9, 1997,
Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president until ...
(DEC) and
SYSTRAN S.A. launched
AltaVista
AltaVista was a web search engine established in 1995. It became one of the most-used early search engines, but lost ground to Google and was purchased by Yahoo! in 2003, which retained the brand, but based all AltaVista searches on its own sear ...
Translation Service at babelfish.altavista.com, which was developed by a team of researchers at DEC.
In February 2003, AltaVista was bought by
Overture Services, Inc.
In July 2003, Overture, in turn, was taken over by Yahoo!.
The web address for Babel Fish remained at babelfish.altavista.com until May 9, 2008, when the address changed to babelfish.yahoo.com.
In 2012, the Web address changed again, this time redirecting babelfish.yahoo.com to www.microsofttranslator.com when Microsoft's Bing Translator replaced Yahoo Babel Fish.
As of June 2013, babelfish.yahoo.com no longer redirects to the Microsoft Bing Translator. Instead, it refers directly back to the main Yahoo.com page.
See also
*
Apertium
*
Comparison of machine translation applications
*
Google Translate
Google Translate is a multilingualism, multilingual neural machine translation, neural machine translation service developed by Google to translation, translate text, documents and websites from one language into another. It offers a web applic ...
*
Jollo (discontinued)
*
List of Yahoo!-owned sites and services
*
Microsoft Translator
*
SYSTRAN
*
Yandex.Translate
References
External links
Archive of the Yahoo! Babel Fish page
{{DEFAULTSORT:Babel Fish (website)
Discontinued Yahoo! services
Machine translation software
Natural language processing software
Products introduced in 1997
Translation websites
Babel Fish