URL | babelfish.yahoo.com |
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Commercial? | No |
Type of site | Translation service |
Owner | Yahoo |
Created by | AltaVista |
Current status | Active |
Yahoo! Babel Fish is a web-based machine translation application on Yahoo! that translates text or web pages from one of several languages into another.
The translation technology for Babel Fish is provided by SYSTRAN, whose technology also powers a number of other sites and portals. It translates among English, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, and Spanish.
Founded and developed by Oscar A Jofre and his team in January 1999,[1] the application was taken over by AltaVista in 2003.[2] Named after the fictional animal, Babelfish is used for instantaneous language translation in Douglas Adams's series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The fish name is a reference to the biblical account of the city of Babel and the various languages said to have arisen there.
After a long existence at babelfish.altavista.com, the site was moved on May 9, 2008 to babelfish.yahoo.com.
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