In December 1997, AltaVista was the first search engine to launch a
free machine translation software called Babel Fish -- or AltaVista
Translation -, which could translate up to three pages from English
into French, German, Italian, Portuguese or Spanish, and vice versa.
The software was developed by SYSTRAN (acronym of "System
Translation"), a company specializing in automated language solutions.
Babel Fish was a hit among the 12 million internet users of the time,
with more and more non-English-speaking users, and contributed to the
plurilinguism of the web. Babel Fish was followed by other tools
developed by Alis Technologies, Globalink, Lernout & Hauspie, and
Softissimo, with free and/or paid versions available on the web.