Yahoo! Babel Fish was a free web-based multilingual translation application that superseded AltaVista Babel Fish in 2003 and since May of 2012 has been redirected to Bing Translator. Yahoo! did not sell its translation application to Microsoft but simply transitioned its Babel Fish translation services to Bing Translator.
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, Swedish, and Spanish.
The internet service derived its name from the "Babel fish", a fictional species in Douglas Adams's series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that could instantly translate languages. In turn, the name of the fictional creature refers to the biblical account of the confusion of languages that arose in the city of Babel.
Read more about Yahoo! Babel Fish: History
Famous quotes containing the word fish:
“Everything seems beautiful because you don’t understand. Those flying fish, they’re not leaping for joy, they’re jumping in terror. Bigger fish want to eat them. That luminous water, it takes its gleam from millions of tiny dead bodies, the glitter of putrescence. There’s no beauty here, only death and decay.”
—Curtis Siodmak (1902–1988)