BabbleFish

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The affectionate name for AltaVista's still-sometimes-useful translation service at http://babelfish.altavista.com/. Named after DouglasAdams' BabelFish, but the version on the web still definitely suffers from being in the RealWorld, and thus still producing rather bad obviously-machine-translated output.

Its quality does vary by language, though. French and German to/from English produce much more readable output than, say, Japanese to English.

: (PeterTaylor) It's pretty shocking even on English-Romance language. See BabbleFish/EngEspEng for an example, being my homepage sent both ways through it.

: Largely due to closeness of grammar and so forth. I'm very surprised AltaVista doesn't advertise this service more - it's incredibly useful for those websites that still perversely insiste on using their own superfluous languages. ;) On another note, what other web-based machine translation sites exist? I worked with a guy named Yuji who runs one, but I've forgotten the URL I'm afraid. --Vitenka

Google usually offers to "TranslateThisPage?" if it's in a foreign language. --M-A

: Which is usually pretty good, but, with this particular page at least, [could use some work].

: [Dictionary.com] have some online translation sites linked. Finding them can be a bit of a git, though. --MikeJeggo

: [WorldLingo] translator can do Japanese to English.

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