Babel Fish (website)
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Babel Fish is a internet-based application developed by AltaVista which machine translates text 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.
It can translate to and from English and: Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish.
While the methods used for translation are very advanced, the translations produced often sound unusual and/or are incomprehensible. The system is not designed to produce a "genuine" translation, rather allow a reader to gain the gist of a page or text that they would not be able to do in the source language.
Several online services have been implemented that use the Babel Fish service to translate back and forth between English and one or several other languages, often with humorous or strange results - called a "round-trip" translation.
External links
- Babel Fish Translation Service (http://babelfish.altavista.com/)
- Lost in Translation ("round-trip" translation) (http://www.tashian.com/multibabel/)