[Summary]
In December 1997, the search engine AltaVista launched the first
free machine translation software called Babel Fish or AltaVista
Translation, which could translate webpages or short texts from
English into French, German, Italian, Portuguese or Spanish, and
vice versa. The software was developed by Systran (an acronym for
"System Translation"), a company specializing in automated
language solutions. Babel Fish was a “hit” among the 12 million
internet users of the time, who included more and more non-
English-speaking users, and greatly contributed to a plurilingual
web. Other tools were developed then by Alis Technologies,
Globalink, Lernout & Hauspie and Softissimo, with free and/or paid
versions available on the web.
***
In December 1997, the search engine AltaVista launched Babel Fish
as the first free machine translation software from English to
five other languages.
At the time, the interface of Yahoo! was available in seven
languages (English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian,
Swedish), to take into account a growing number of non-English-
speaking users. When a search didn't give any result in Yahoo!, it
was automatically shunted to AltaVista, and vice versa.
Babel Fish, also called AltaVista Translation, could translate
webpages from English into French, German, Italian, Portuguese or
Spanish, and vice versa, the original page and the translation
being face-to-face on the screen. Translating any short text was
also possible with a “copy and paste”. The result was far from
perfect but helpful, as well as instantaneous and free unlike a
high-quality professional translation. Non-English-speaking users
were thrilled. Babel Fish greatly contributed to a plurilingual
web.
Backed up by plurilingual dictionaries with 12.5 million entries,
Babel Fish was developed by Systran (an acronym for "System
Translation"), a company specializing in automated language
solutions. As explained on Systran’s website: "Machine translation
software translates one natural language into another natural
language. MT takes into account the grammatical structure of each
language and uses rules to transfer the grammatical structure of
the source language (text to be translated) into the target
language (translated text). MT cannot replace a human translator,
nor is it intended to."
Machine translation was defined as such on the website of the
European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT): "Machine
translation (MT) is the application of computers to the task of
translating texts from one natural language to another. One of the
very earliest pursuits in computer science, MT has proved to be an
elusive goal, but today a number of systems are available which
produce output which, if not perfect, is of sufficient quality to
be useful for certain specific applications, usually in the domain
of technical documentation. In addition, translation software
packages which are designed primarily to assist the human
translator in the production of translations are enjoying
increasing popularity within professional translation
organizations."
Other translation software was developed then by Alis Technologies,
Globalink, Lernout & Hauspie and Softissimo, with paid and/or free
versions available on the web. As for Babel Fish, it moved to
Yahoo!’s website in May 2008.