Babelfish Translator: Help For The Unilingual
Yahoo/Altavista Babelfish Translator, online help for people with just one language
What the heck is Babelfish? And why does it have such a silly name?
To understand why it’s called Babelfish, it’s necessary to take a step back in time to the late 1970s and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
In his stories, a Babelfish was a little fish you put into your ear. It could decode all languages and therefore caused more wars than any other being (removing the boundary between races and therefore allowing everybody to insult everybody else without fear of being misunderstood).
What is now the Yahoo! Babelfish translator was originally created by AltaVista. It is still the easiest to use (and often funniest) online translator.
What’s it good for?
Don’t rely on Babelfish to help you submit a thesis to a foreign University. But it is handy for checking your tenses, spellings of words you learned once, and have long since forgotten, or simply to send an email to a website visitor in (more or less!) their own language.
The more you know about the language you’re translating into, the less impressed you’ll be with what Babelfish spits out. It’s possible that this online version could start wars still, as there is a lot of room for misunderstandings, or pure nonsense.
Still, it’s fun, and I plan to use Babelfish Translator in a traffic-creation experiment. I’ll report back when I see how the experiment works out…
