Yahoo! Babel Fish was a free

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-based

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service by

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. In May 2012 it was replaced by Bing Translator (now

Microsoft Translator Microsoft Translator or Bing Translator is a multilingual machine translation cloud service provided by Microsoft. Microsoft Translator is a part of Microsoft Cognitive Services and integrated across multiple consumer, developer, and enterprise pro ...

), to which queries were redirected. Although Yahoo! has transitioned its Babel Fish translation services to Bing Translator, it did not sell its translation application to Microsoft outright. As the oldest free online language translator, the service translated text or Web pages in 36 pairs between 13 languages, including English,

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, Dutch, French,

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, Portuguese,

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, and

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. The internet service derived its name from the Babel fish, a fictional species in

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's book and radio series ''

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'' that could instantly translate

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s. In turn, the name of the fictional creature refers to the

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account of the confusion of languages that arose in the city of Babel.

History

On December 9, 1997,

Digital Equipment Corporation Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president until ...

(DEC) and SYSTRAN S.A. launched

AltaVista AltaVista was a web search engine established in 1995. It became one of the most-used early search engines, but lost ground to Google and was purchased by Yahoo! in 2003, which retained the brand, but based all AltaVista searches on its own sear ...

Translation Service at babelfish.altavista.com, which was developed by a team of researchers at DEC. In February 2003, AltaVista was bought by Overture Services, Inc. In July 2003, Overture, in turn, was taken over by Yahoo!. The web address for Babel Fish remained at babelfish.altavista.com until May 9, 2008, when the address changed to babelfish.yahoo.com. In 2012, the Web address changed again, this time redirecting babelfish.yahoo.com to www.microsofttranslator.com when Microsoft's Bing Translator replaced Yahoo Babel Fish. As of June 2013, babelfish.yahoo.com no longer redirects to the Microsoft Bing Translator. Instead, it refers directly back to the main Yahoo.com page.

References

External links

Archive of the Yahoo! Babel Fish page
{{DEFAULTSORT:Babel Fish (website) Discontinued Yahoo! services Machine translation software Natural language processing software Products introduced in 1997 Translation websites Babel Fish