Babylon 8's main window |
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| Developer(s) | Babylon Ltd. |
| Stable release | 9.0.3 (r23) (September 9, 11) [±] |
| Preview release | [±] |
| Operating system | Microsoft Windows |
| Type | Dictionary, machine translator and spell checker |
| License | Proprietary commercial software |
| Website | www.babylon.com |
Babylon is a computer dictionary and translation program for Microsoft Windows, developed by Babylon Ltd., an Israeli public company (TASE: BBYL).[1]
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In 1995, Israeli entrepreneur Amnon Ovadia identified the need for an online English–Hebrew dictionary that did not interrupt the reading process. As a result, Babylon Ltd. was founded in 1997 and launched the first version of Babylon. On 25 September 1997, the company filed a patent for text recognition and translation.[2] The year after its launch date in 1998, Babylon had 2 million users, mostly in Germany and Brazil,[3] growing from 420,000 to 2.5 million users in the course of that year. By 2000, the product had over 4 million users.[4]
When a user clicks on text with the right mouse button or combination of the right mouse button and another key, the Babylon window appears with a translation and definition of the clicked word.[5][6] It is a tool used for translation and currency conversion, as well as for obtaining other contextual information. Babylon has a patented OCR technology and a single-click activation that works in any Microsoft Windows program, such as Microsoft Word, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Excel, Internet Explorer and Adobe Reader. When activated, Babylon opens a small popup window that displays the translation.
Babylon provides full text, full Web page and full document translation in 33 languages and supports integration with Microsoft Office. Babylon enables the translation of Microsoft Word documents, PDF files and plain text files. It offers results from a database of over 1,600 sources in 75 languages.[7]
Babylon includes built-in dictionaries, community-created dictionaries (e.g., technical terms, jokes, acronyms), and premium content for an additional cost (e.g., Encyclopædia Britannica, Concise Oxford English Dictionary, Larousse, and Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary). The program also uses a text-to-speech agent to let users hear the proper pronunciation of words. Babylon Ltd. has developed 35 English-based proprietary dictionaries in 19 languages that are free of charge to purchasers of the software. These dictionaries have between 50,000 to 200,000 terms, and use a morphology engine that can recognize words in different conjugations and inflections.[8] The company has a linguistics department in charge of developing and adapting these dictionaries.[9]
Language pairs include English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Hebrew, Chinese, Dutch, Russian, Korean, Swedish, Greek, Arabic and Turkish.
In addition to its in-house dictionaries, Babylon users have compiled and sent in over 1400 reference works. These include general and technical dictionaries and monolingual glossaries in over 75 languages. They are indexed in 400 categories covering the arts, business, computers, health, law, entertainment and sports.[10]
On 7 August 2010, Microsoft antivirus products identified the software application as malware (identified as "Adware: Win32/Babylon") due to potentially intrusive behavior.[11] Sixteen days later, on 23 August 2010, Microsoft announced that Babylon Ltd. had modified the program and that it was no longer categorized as malware.[12]
Babylon Ltd. (TASE: BBYL) is a publicly traded company. The company was founded in 1997, and is based in Or Yehuda, Israel. Its IPO took place on February 2007: Israeli businessman Noam Lanir purchased controlling interests in the company for $10.5 million, sharing management with second majority shareholder Reed Elsevier[13] and the company founder Amnon Ovadia. According to Globes magazine in January 2011, Lanir received an offer for his stake from a foreign private equity fund that valued the company at NIS 248 million (approximately 70 million dollars).[14]
Since 2011, Babylon is included in the Blue-Tech 50 Index which comprises the 50 top technology and biomedical companies traded in the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange.[15]
Among Babylon's important clients is Novartis, which has purchased 40,000 licenses for the software.[16] In 2008–2009, Babylon reported earnings of NIS 50 million through its collaboration with Google. In 2010, Google Ireland signed an extended cooperation agreement with Babylon to provide it with online search and pay-per-click advertising services.[17]
In 2011, Babylon launched an on-line question and answer translation service.[18]
In July 2011, Babylon.com made the list of the top 100 sites on the Internet and became the most popular desktop language translation software with a Guinness World Records achievement for the most downloads of a translation software.[19][20][21] According to Rob Molloy, Director of Television, Guinness World Records, "this new Guinness World Records title reflects the significant reach and popularity of Babylon's translation services. It is a major achievement for Babylon and comes hot on the heels of recent records for Firefox, Facebook and Ustream." Alon Carmeli, Babylon's CEO said: "When back in 1997, Babylon launched its dictionary software, we couldn't have imagined that over 100 million people in over 200 countries and territories would be using its software."[22]
Babylon has received a mediocre user rating of 3 out of 5 stars on cnet.com, many user reviews claiming this software malicious. Babylon is reported to take over default search engines in browsers after installing, and it is impossible to completely remove Babylon from the computer without advanced technical skills. The support helpdesk is also reported to be unhelpful and unfriendly.[23]