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Babel Fish (website)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Babel Fish | |
|---|---|
 |
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| URL | http://babelfish.altavista.com/ |
| Type of site | Translation service |
| Owner | AltaVista |
| Created by | AltaVista |
Babel Fish is a web-based application developed by AltaVista (now part of Yahoo!) which machine translates text or web pages from one of several languages into another. It takes its name from the Babel fish, a fictional animal used for instantaneous language translation in Douglas Adams' novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The word Babel is a borrowed reference to the biblical account of the city of Babel and the various languages which were said to have arisen there. The translation technology for Babel Fish is provided by SYSTRAN, whose technology also powers most of the language pairs for the translator at Google Translate and a number of other sites.
It can translate 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: the best that is claimed is that it can show the gist of a page or text. Translations between European languages can be passable, but attempting to translate East Asian Languages to English often produces gibberish. 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).