Say “Hello” to my little friend
I’d like to introduce you to someone – or perhaps I should say “reintroduce” you, since you’ve probably known him for years. (Sure, he’s had a little work done, but who among us couldn’t use the help of a pixel-painting designer to freshen our look now and then?) This is the Babel Fish: mascot, star, and proprietor of the oldest free, on-line translation service on the web, babelfish.altavista.com.
Today Babel Fish is hanging his shingle here at Yahoo!, debuting Yahoo! Babel Fish across our properties worldwide. For those of you new to Babel Fish, you can visit babelfish.yahoo.com and translate text or web pages across your choice of 38 language pairs, such as English => Korean, Dutch => French, and Greek => English. It’s the same convenient, free, easy-to-use resource that people have relied on for years, and now we’ve added more features, such as:
- Two more language pair choices: Simplified Chinese into Traditional Chinese, and Traditional Chinese into Simplified Chinese;
- Yahoo! Search Translator Beta, currently available in Germany and in France, allowing users to translate queries and search for web pages, images, and videos in multiple languages simultaneously;
- Tighter integration with Yahoo! services such as:
- Yahoo! Search – With one click, use your text translation result to search the web
- Yahoo! Toolbar – Add the Babel Fish button to your Yahoo! Toolbar to enable one-click translation of web pages
- The Yahoo! network – links to Babel Fish from Search Shortcuts, the Yahoo! Services pages, and other pages in the network for easy access.
Raymond Flournoy
Linguistic Product Manager
P.S. To help us celebrate the relaunch of Yahoo! Babel Fish, why not mix up a cocktail we’re calling “The Babbling Fish”!
The Babbling Fish
4 parts vodka
2 parts Blue Cura’ao
1 part key lime juice
a spash of Midori (approximately 1/2 part)
Shake all of the above with ice and strain into a chilled martini glass. Top with brut champagne.
Decorate with a scoop of mango sorbet. Enjoy!
The color is a nice aquamarine and the champagne gives your mango fish some bubbles. And by selecting ingredients carefully you can enjoy some Russian (vodka), Dutch (Cura’ao), Japanese (Midori), and French (champagne) flavors in one glass–all languages that we translate on Babel Fish!
After a couple of those Babbling Fishes, I’ll be babbling all kinds of languages.
Haha, real good one Loren!
Could we get a babel.yahoo.com subdomain? It works with AltaVista and it’s much easier than typing the whole thing. :)
How about an API for this?
This Gold Fish translator tool is superb! Would you consider adding it on in the list of main Yahoo Services, there is no link or notation for it there, you could put it under Translation I suppose or Translator service.
Also, would you please pass onto the appropriate yahoo design folks that we, the users, need and WANT many many more color design choices for your yahoo pages?? You have had the same old ones forever, and change is good, it makes we users feel as if we are actually in control of something (even though we are not lol), perhaps you could rotate a set of choices for color selections to our yahoo main Home and subset pages? I passed this same suggestion onto msn, so get on it, okay? Although msn is so much slower to make modern changes than yahoo, which is why you all remain my fave! Good work! Thank you.
“Charming man,” he said. “I wish I had a daughter so I could
forbid her to marry one …”
“You wouldn’t need to,” said Ford. “They’ve got as much sex appeal as a road accident. No, don’t move,” he added as Arthur began to uncurl himself, “you’d better be prepared for the jump into hyperspace. It’s unpleasantly like being drunk.”
“What’s so unpleasant about being drunk?”
“You ask a glass of water.”
Arthur thought about this.
“Ford,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“What’s this fish doing in my ear?”
“It’s translating for you. It’s a Babel fish…”
:-)
-Russ
And by selecting ingredients carefully you can enjoy some Russian (vodka), Dutch (Curaçao), Japanese (Midori), and French (champagne) flavors in one glass–all languages that we translate on Babel Fish!
Well it also had Mango (Tamil), and Sorbet (Turkish).
I used Babel Fish to translate my site into other languages. But right now seems theres some troubles (probably with URL encoding). Hope it’ll be fixed soon.
PS:Great cocktail (I just done one ;)).
The drink more resembles another meme from HHGG… The Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster.
I just hope nobody attempts to insert Yahoo! in their ear…
Please switch from the drop-down menu to 2 groups of radio buttons (from, to). That’s faster and has less “conceptual load”. Sure it takes more screen space, but that’s much less of an issue 10? years later. (It’s fine to make it a preference; many people may prefer the existing UI since it’s familiar.)
I’ll bet that usability tests on new users (or a mockup with from/to using something other than language) will prove that radio buttons are faster/easier.
One more suggestion: add a button to reverse the direction (i.e. swap from/to).
Forget the cocktail, what we need is a recipe for a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster. :)
It’s interesting that babelfish played such a small role in the hitchhikers movie.
How did babelfish come to yahoo? Was it acquired?
Can babelfish try to at least guess which languages you’re trying to translate? I hate how sometimes I forget to use the pull-down menu for say, German-to-English… Doesn’t it know when text is 90% German… and can’t it guess that I’d like to be able to read it in English?
Thanks everyone for the great comments and feedback, both here and in other blogs. I can’t quite comment on everything that people have posted, but let’s just say that many of you seem to be reading our minds! You should continue to see improvements to Babel Fish as time goes on.
Rickie, the website is not linked off the front page now, but if you click on “All Y! Services” you will find a page with all Yahoo! tools and properties, and we’re included there. Or better yet, download the Yahoo! Toolbar and install the Babel Fish button! You can do one-click translations from the Toolbar, or navigate to Babel Fish with a pick from the dropdown menu. Go to babelfish.yahoo.com and there is a banner on the right for downloading the Toolbar and the Babel Fish button.
Also, on the topic of color customization, I’m afraid that we aren’t offering different colors for the Babel Fish’s waters, and the Babel Fish himself won’t be a clownfish or zebrafish any time soon, but you should definitely check out the My Yahoo! tool at my.yahoo.com. You can customize your page with over 100 themes and designs.
Sundar, thanks for catching the other international elements in our drink! We don’t offer either of those languages for translation (yet!) but we’ll see what the future holds.
Seo, sorry to hear about your troubles, and I hope those pages are translating for you now. Unfortunately there are some page elements which always confound our system. Extremely long pages, malformed HTML, certain types of javascript, very slow-loading page, … ugh! So we do our best to handle as many pages as we can, but there are some that Babel Fish still chokes on. Cheers for trying the Babbling Fish, though! I hope it helped you speak a new tongue.
Gen, Babel Fish was originally a creation of AltaVista which was purchased by Overture, which was in turn purchased by Yahoo! That’s how he came to venture into our waters.
And for everyone else, once again, thanks for the great ideas! We will take them all into consideration, and some are already in the works. Keep checking back, and keep striving to communicate with the rest of the world out there!
i hope this website will not mess up my comp. i have had a time trying to get the web site mirar.
Jolly good but have you tried translating the translation back into English? Very funny sometimes.