Babel Fish (website)
Former multilingual translation website / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Yahoo! Babel Fish was a free Web-based multilingual machine translation service of Yahoo! site. In May 2012 it was replaced by Bing Translator (now Microsoft Translator), to which queries were redirected.[1] Although Yahoo! has transitioned its Babel Fish translation services to Bing Translator, it did not sell its translation application to Microsoft outright.[2][3] As the oldest free online language translator,[4] the service translated text or Web pages in 36 pairs between 13 languages,[4] including English, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.
Type of site | Translation service |
---|---|
Owner | Yahoo! |
URL | babelfish |
Commercial | No |
Launched | December 9, 1997; 26 years ago (1997-12-09) |
Current status | Defunct |
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. 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.