Yesterday (April 27), Yahoo launched its online translation tool Babel Fish.
Yahoo’s Babel Fish tool employs the same technology as the similarly named service from Alta Vista, which has been online for nearly a decade. Additionally, Yahoo’s Babel Fish interface closely resembles that of Alta Vista’s translation service. However, Yahoo has upgraded its service with several new features linked to other Yahoo services.
The Babel Fish service from Alta Vista officially launched in 1997 and was the first online translation service on the Internet. At that time, Babel could only translate words, sentences, or web pages to and from English, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Italian, and Russian.
The latest version of Alta Vista’s Babel Fish has added five new languages: Greek, Dutch, Japanese, Traditional Chinese, and Simplified Chinese. Yahoo has taken a step further in developing the service by integrating additional search products and toolbar features.
Simultaneously, Yahoo introduced the beta version of Yahoo! Search Translator. Initially, this service was only launched in Germany and France, allowing users to translate search queries into various languages and perform searches based on those phrases.
Users can now try out Yahoo’s new service at http://babelfish.yahoo.com/
Hoàng Dũng
