Yahoo! Babel Fish

Babelfish was a web application from Yahoo for the automatic translation of texts. The name was a reference to the Babel Fish from Douglas Adams ' novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. On May 30, 2012 Yahoo hired the service and passes the requests to the page of Microsoft's Bing Translator.

With Babel Fish could be translated short text fragments (up to 150 words) and Web pages. The goal of Babelfish was to allow the reader a free fast Informative translation ( " gisting translation" ) of a foreign-language text segment into their own language. Babelfish was not suitable texts to translate correctly in a foreign language unknown to the user.

The software has been provided by the company founded in California in 1968 Systran, one of the oldest companies in the field of machine translation. The collaboration began in 1997 when the search engine AltaVista the service for the first time offered on their website and the first company offering an internet translation tool. First of all translations were possible in six languages: English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian.

The tool enjoyed despite its weaknesses some popularity; already in 2001, translations were performed per day over a million. The Language offer was expanded over the following years. In 2003 also the rival Google launched an online translation service based on a self-developed software. Since 25 April 2006, the current AltaVista parent company Yahoo provided the Babel Fish service on its websites; AltaVista, the service was discontinued in early 2008.

Translation offers

  • Chinese (Simplified) to English
  • Chinese (Simplified) to English
  • English to Chinese ( Simplified)
  • English to Chinese (Traditional )
  • English into Dutch
  • English into French
  • English to German
  • English into Greek
  • English into Italian
  • English into Japanese
  • English into Korean
  • English into Portuguese
  • English into Russian
  • English into Spanish
  • Dutch to English
  • Dutch to French
  • French into English
  • French into German
  • French into Greek
  • French to Italian
  • French to Portuguese
  • French into Dutch
  • French to Spanish
  • German into English
  • German into French
  • Greek into English
  • Greek into French
  • Italian into English
  • Italian into French
  • Japanese to English
  • Korean into English
  • Portuguese into English
  • Portuguese into French
  • Russian into English
  • Spanish into English
  • Spanish into French

Weaken

Like many other programs for the translation of continuous text into other languages ​​has also Babelfish significant problems to grasp situations and correctly translate or recognize proper names and just do not translate. Therefore, the translated texts are flawed to completely incomprehensible circumstances. One calls such texts also Babel -Fish accidents.

This text was translated in August 2005 as follows:

In a new translation of the same text in 2008, slight improvements are noted on the fundamental property that the meaning not be able to detect, but nothing has changed:

In a direct comparison with other online services, it is apparent that Babelfish in terms of translation is still expandable. For example, translated the also free web application Google Translate the text in 2011 as:

List of races and species in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy#Babel fish Korean language
95790
de