Babel Fish (website)
From Free net encyclopedia
Babel Fish is a web-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 word Babel is a borrowed reference to the biblical account of the city of Babel and the various languages which allegedly arose there. The translation technology for Babel Fish is provided by SYSTRAN, whose technology also powers the translator at Google and a number of other sites.
It can translate among English, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.
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. If the user has a basic understanding of the target language, he or she may use the translator to undertake the basic translation and then fine tune the result.
The quality of translation depends on the languages in question (Most inter-European language translations 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.