2016's about page uses language indicating that they have no idea how common online translation is, suggesting that they probably are stuck in the past in terms of what machine translation is and can be.I wonder if this barely functional tool and remnants of the knowledge base are kept online simply for ad profit, whether by the original owners or webmasters or hijackers. The Wayback Machine also shows some hijacking at least once, not long before everything was blanked. Many of the pages have been blanked, and ads appear if you disable your blocking extension. Even if it has changed since then, it may well contain elements of a non-statistical base.įunny enough, BabelFish's main business appears not to have been this dinky little site, but human translation in fact, their early descriptions of themselves forswear machine translation. This means it probably didn't begin as a statistical system (which was not the norm at the time, to my knowledge). However, it seems rather that this forms a knowledge base with upvoting, downvoting & comments and is probably separate from the machine translation engine. enlarging the corpus) or in a rule-based way (i.e. This is ambiguous since individual translations could contribute in a statistical way (i.e. There is a "submit a translation" feature. Instead, it refers directly back to the main page.Without your receiving a response from the contact form, and there being no answer when I call the phone number listed in business directories online, let's see what clues we can find on the website. Yahoo! Babel Fish should not be confused with The Babel Fish Corporation founded by Oscar Jofre, which was operated at the URL (created in 1995).Īs of June 2013, no longer refers to the Microsoft Bing Translator. The web address for Babel Fish remained until May 9, 2008, when the address changed to .Īs of May 30, 2012, the web address changed yet again, this time redirecting to when Microsoft’s Bing Translator replaced Yahoo Babel Fish. In July 2003, Overture itself was taken over by Yahoo!. In February 2003, AltaVista was bought by Overture Services, Inc. launched AltaVista Translation Service at, which was developed by a team of researchers at Digital Equipment. On December 9, 1997, Digital Equipment Corporation and SYSTRAN S.A. In turn, the name of the fictional creature refers to the biblical account of the confusion of languages that arose in the city of Babel. 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 that could instantly translate languages. As the oldest free online language translator, the service translated text or web pages between 38 languages, including English, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. Although Yahoo! has transitioned its Babel Fish translation services to Bing Translator, it did not sell its translation application to Microsoft outright. In May 2012 it was replaced by Bing Translator, to which queries were redirected. Date: Yahoo! Babel Fish was a free web-based multilingual translation application.
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