Fish in the Ear
It’s a global world and you’re just playing in it. You want to connect to a lot of people? Start doing a little more to speak their language. Today, Yahoo! rolled out Babel Fish today, a translation site that lets you cut/paste snippets of text into a box and then request it back in other languages. The translations are never good enough to pass you off as a native speaker, but here’s the thing: people receiving your attempt at least give you credit for trying to meet them half way. It’s definitely a useful tool.
Babel Fish - [from Yahoo!]
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Comments
Peter says on April 28th, 2006 at 4:15 pm
this is available since ages ago from Altavista.
http://babelfish.altavista.com/
John says on April 28th, 2006 at 6:24 pm
Altavista has had this facility for years
David says on April 28th, 2006 at 11:20 pm
The translation services are both provided by SYSTRAN, and both appear to have numerous links into Yahoo!
It appears that (if I read this right) that AltaVista was part of Overture, which Yahoo! purchased. So the Yahoo! service is just AltaVista’s Babelfish rebranded.
Does that sound right?
And, yes, Altavista has provided these services for years and years…
dc says on April 29th, 2006 at 3:03 am
and it’s an incredible bad example for machine translation.
Roy Jacobsen says on April 30th, 2006 at 7:01 am
I would never use BabelFish to try to send a message TO somebody; it opens up way too many possibilities for misunderstanding. IMO, it’s only useful for trying to figure out the gist of what foreign language text says.
YMMV, of course.