Yahoo's Babel Fish Replaced with Bing Translator

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
Joined
May 9, 2000
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Goodbye Babel Fish, we hardly knew ye. Wait. What? We knew you all too well and not all that sorry to see you go. For those of us who grew up with the Internet, Babel Fish was pretty much the only alternative for free translations for a long time. In its earlier years, most of the translations would get you slapped or shot in the country of origin since it was not exactly reliable in its literal translations. :D

Still, it's something of a shame that the Babel Fish name, at least in terms of website translation, is now no more as yet another small part of early Internet culture is put out to pasture.
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The second Google Translate came out I dumped Babel fish.

What I don't get is why Yahoo is now relying upon a Microsoft product... I thought the two were competing.... now Yahoo is bending over for MS. I wish MS would just buy them out to shut em up... problem is there's really nothing of value from Yahoo xD
 
colinstu said:
The second Google Translate came out I dumped Babel fish.

What I don't get is why Yahoo is now relying upon a Microsoft product... I thought the two were competing.... now Yahoo is bending over for MS.
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Yahoo! is tied up with Microsoft for search, might as well use some other things too (Babel fish was always just interfacing someone else's translations with the web anyway).

colinstu said:
I wish MS would just buy them out to shut em up... problem is there's really nothing of value from Yahoo xD
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How about being able to make a profit online. I don't think Microsoft has figured that one out yet.

(Disclaimer: I worked at Y! Travel from 2004 to 2011)
 
Goodbye last remnants of Alta Vista. You have been conquered by Microsoft.
 
I remember being in middle school in '02 and using babelfish as a free proxy server to get around the restrictive firewall. Made doing school projects a lot easier.
 
This is actually a little sad to me...no matter how much Babel Fish sucked, it was the only show in town for so long that it's STILL the first name I think of when I need to translate something.
 
Wasn't the company behind Babel Fish called "systran" or something like that? I am pretty sure it was and they still have a free tool on their homepage which includes both "cut and paste" and URL based translation. www.systran.co.uk

You guys on the other side of the pond may need a localised version which includes your spelling of color and other such broken words. The systran.com link just ends up at some defence contractor. (Who then shows an example of spelling mistakes by using a "s" in there. Why did Babel fish never have a US to UK translation? :))
 
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