Babel Fish (website)

Babel Fish is a internet-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 translation technology for Babel Fish is provided by SYSTRAN, whose technology also powers the translator at Google and a number of other sites.

Related Topics:
Internet - AltaVista - Yahoo! - Machine translates - Babel fish - Language - Translation - Douglas Adams - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - SYSTRAN - Google

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It can translate among English, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.

Related Topics:
English - Simplified Chinese - Traditional Chinese - Dutch - French - German - Greek - Italian - Japanese - Korean - Portuguese - Russian - Spanish

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While the methods used for translation are advanced, the service makes no claim to produce a perfect translation: the best that is claimed is that it can allow a reader to gain the gist of a page or text. The quality of translation depends on the languages in question (English-French can be passable, but Japanese-English usually 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), generally with amusing results.

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