Babel Fish is a web-based application on Yahoo! that machine translates text or web pages from one of several languages into another. Developed by AltaVista, the application is named after the fictional animal used for instantaneous language translation in Douglas Adams's series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In turn the fish is a reference to the biblical account of the city of Babel and the various languages said to have arisen there.
The translation technology for Babel Fish is provided by SYSTRAN, whose technology also powers a number of other sites and portals. It translates among English, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, and Spanish.
The service makes no claim to produce a perfect translation, and it is considered just a minor help in modern language industry.[who?] 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).
After a long existence at babelfish.altavista.com, the site was moved on May 9, 2008 to babelfish.yahoo.com.
Source : www.wikipedia.com
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