Babel Fish

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Yahoo! Babel Fish
babelfish.yahoo.com
description Translation service
owner Yahoo
Originator AltaVista
status Inactive

Babel Fish was a web application from Yahoo for the automatic translation of texts. The name was based on the Babylonian fish from Douglas Adams ' novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy . On May 30, 2012, Yahoo discontinued the service and redirected requests to Microsoft's Bing Translator website .

description

Babel Fish could translate short text fragments (up to 150 words) and web pages. The aim of Babel Fish was to provide the reader with a free, quick, informative translation (" gisting translation ") of a foreign language section of text into their own language. Babel Fish was not suitable for correctly translating texts into a foreign language unknown to the user.

The software was made available by SYSTRAN , one of the oldest machine translation companies , founded in California in 1968 . The cooperation began in 1997 when the Altavista search engine first made the service available on its website, making it the first company to offer an Internet translation system. Initially, translations were possible in five languages: English, German, French, Spanish and Italian.

Babel Fish became known in German-speaking countries in 1998 through the translation of the Starr report that led to the impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton . For example, a passage in the report was translated as follows: "In the course of flirting with him, she lifted her jacket in the back and showed him the bridges of her thong underwear that stretched over her pants." The intern Monica Lewinsky was named " white housework as an intern ”translated. Despite these weaknesses, the program was very popular. In 1998 the site had around 500,000 translations per day and in 2001 1.3 million translations. The range of languages ​​on offer was expanded further in the following years. In 2003, competitor Google also started an online translation service, Google Translate , which was initially based on the Systran software. In October 2007, Google started a translation service based on software it had developed itself. From April 25, 2006, today's AltaVista parent company Yahoo offered the Babel Fish service on its websites; AltaVista ceased its service in early 2008.

literature

  • Thierry Poibeau: Machine Translation. MIT Press, 2017, ISBN 0-2625-3421-5 , pp. 227f.
  • Jin Yang, Elke Lange: Going live on the Internet, in: Harold Somers (Ed.): Computers and Translation: A translator's guide. John Benjamin Publishing, 2003, ISBN 9-0272-9669-3 , pp. 191f.
  • Jin Yang, Elke Lange: SYSTRAN on AltaVista: A User Study on Real-Time Machine Translation on the Internet. In: David Farwell, Laurie Gerber, Eduard Hovy (Eds.): Machine Translation and the Information Soup. Springer, 2003, ISBN 3-5404-9478-2 , pp. 275-285.
  • Chiew Kin Quah: Translation and Technology. Springer, 2006, ISBN 0-2302-8710-7 , pp. 86-87.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Kimberly Goetz: An Introduction to Internet-Based Financial Investigations, CRC Press, 2016 ISBN 1-3171-8171-9 , p. 118
  2. ↑ blogs.msdn.com
  3. ↑ Goodbye Babel Fish, Hello Bing Translator ghacks.net 06/04/2017
  4. ↑ Cyril Goutte (Ed.): Learning Machine Translation, MIT Press, 2009, ISBN 0-2620-72971 , p. 2
  5. ↑ Marcel Danesi: Language and Mathematics, Walter de Gruyter, 2016, ISBN 1-5015-0036-8 , p. 220
  6. ↑ Yahoo buries search engine veteran Altavista Die Welt, July 5, 2013
  7. ↑ Carol Peters: Cross-Language Information Retrieval and Evaluation, Springer, 2003, ISBN 3-5404-4645-1 , p. 41
  8. ↑ Frank Patalong: Google Translate "Chancellor Now Boasting Stratospheric Approval," Spiegel Online, May 24, 2007
  9. ↑ Jin Yang, Elke Lange: Going live on the Internet, In: Harold Somers (Ed.) Computers and Translation: A translator's guide, John Benjamin Publishing, 2003, ISBN 9-0272-9669-3 , p. 194
  10. ↑ Google now translates itself: "Your approach may be different" heise.de, October 23, 2007