Translate Babel fish. See Spanish-English translations with audio pronunciations, examples, and word-by-word explanations. Babelfish (English to Spanish translation). Translate Babelfish to English online and download now our free translation software to use at any time. Learn the interesting history of how the Babel Fish translator came about, and its legacy as the pinnacle of online translation. We are pleased to welcome Yahoo! Babel Fish users to the Bing Translator family. We have been working closely with our friends at Yahoo! To make this an easy transition, and Bing Translator is a natural upgrade to the experience with Yahoo! Babel Fish was a free web-based multilingual translation application. In May 2012 it was replaced by Bing Translator, 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 between 38 languages, including English, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. See more at Wikipedia.org. Babel Fish was an online language translator. It was an easy-to-use way to get a quick translation of a word or phrase on the fly. The Babel Fish platform was the predecessor to Google Translate. But Google Translate took a large majority of the Babel Fish users and expanded into the influential translation tool it is today, eventually causing Babel Fish to disappear entirely. After getting its start in 1997, Babel Fish was originally called the AltaVista Translation Service (or Systran), under the URL babelfish.altavista.com: Systran, the precursor to Babelfish, in 1999 So why did AltaVista pick Babel Fish for its URL? Douglas Adams wrote a book called the, which featured a species of fish that could translate for humans. Therefore, the Babel Fish website took this name as a reference to this science fiction classic. The Babel Fish in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Jonathan Davies. CC BY 2.0 The original Babel Fish website is not functional anymore, but it sends you directly to the Yahoo. (A currently operating site under the domain name BabelFish.com has no relation to the AltaVista Babel Fish service, but it does offer translation tools for free.) How Babel Fish Eventually Went Extinct Although the Babel Fish website was a rather revolutionary development, it was plagued by near constant acquisitions. Therefore, it never seemed to gain footing with one organization, and instead, left itself open for Google to make and improve a similar program under one roof. For example, the Babel Fish system was launched in 1997, but in 2003 a company called Overture Services, Inc. Bought Babel Fish. Then Overture Services company was taken over by Yahoo later that same year. In 2008, the babelfish.altavista.com domain name changed to babelfish.yahoo.com. This was the start of Babel Fish lacking an identity. Not only did the website jump around from owner to owner, but the new owners seemed to always try to rebrand and change the name. Microsoft’s Bing Translator was eventually released, so this website replaced Yahoo Babel Fish. Although the domain name didn’t completely change this time, the babelfish.yahoo.com URL was redirected to www.microsofttranslator.com. Microsoft eventually acquired the translation module. It’s been debated whether or not any of the same technology was used in the eventual Bing Translator, but it’s entirely possible that Microsoft simply wanted to remove the competition from the market. Where Do All of These URLs Lead To Today? Over the years, we’ve seen the platform under the following domain names or redirects. We can also see which websites the domains currently lead to: • babelfish.altavista.com forwards you to the. • babelfish.yahoo.com forwards you to the Yahoo homepage. • microsofttranslator.com forwards you to the Microsoft Bing Translator. That the redirect to Yahoo was put in place around May 2009: What Was the Original Babel Fish Like? During its heyday, Babel Fish was a completely free website, so the average user could open up their browser, select two translation languages and type in a phrase or word. The tool would then deliver the translation to the best of its ability. Both web pages and text could be translated through Babel Fish. So if you wanted to paste in a bit of text you could do so. It also completed compatible translations if a user pasted in a webpage URL (kind of like a precursor to the webpage translations we see with browsers today). It didn’t have any functionality for translating when a user landed on a webpage, so you would have to copy the URL, then paste it into Babel Fish in order to see the result.
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