At the time, the interface of Yahoo! was available in seven languages (English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Swedish), to take into account a growing number of non-English- speaking users. When a search didn't give any result in Yahoo!, it was automatically shunted to AltaVista, and vice versa.
Babel Fish, also called AltaVista Translation, could translate webpages from English into French, German, Italian, Portuguese or Spanish, and vice versa, the original page and the translation being face-to-face on the screen. Translating any short text was also possible with a “copy and paste”. The result was far from perfect but helpful, as well as instantaneous and free unlike a high-quality professional translation. Non-English-speaking users were thrilled. Babel Fish greatly contributed to a plurilingual web.
Backed up by plurilingual dictionaries with 12.5 million entries, Babel Fish was developed by Systran (an acronym for "System Translation"), a company specializing in automated language solutions. As explained on Systran’s website: "Machine translation software translates one natural language into another natural language. MT takes into account the grammatical structure of each language and uses rules to transfer the grammatical structure of the source language (text to be translated) into the target language (translated text). MT cannot replace a human translator, nor is it intended to."
Machine translation was defined as such on the website of the European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT): "Machine translation (MT) is the application of computers to the task of translating texts from one natural language to another. One of the very earliest pursuits in computer science, MT has proved to be an elusive goal, but today a number of systems are available which produce output which, if not perfect, is of sufficient quality to be useful for certain specific applications, usually in the domain of technical documentation. In addition, translation software packages which are designed primarily to assist the human translator in the production of translations are enjoying increasing popularity within professional translation organizations."
Other translation software was developed then by Alis Technologies,
Globalink, Lernout & Hauspie and Softissimo, with paid and/or free
versions available on the web. As for Babel Fish, it moved to
Yahoo!’s website in May 2008.
1997 > THE TOOLS OF THE TRANSLATION COMPANY LOGOS
[Summary] In December 1997, Logos, a global translation company based in Modena, Italy, decided to put on the web for free the professional tools used by its translators, for the internet community to be able to use them as well. These tools were the Logos Dictionary, a multilingual dictionary with 7.5 billion words (in fall 1998); the Logos Wordtheque, a multilingual library with 328 billion words extracted from translated novels, technical manuals, and other texts; the Logos Linguistic Resources, a database of 553 glossaries; and the Logos Universal Conjugator, a database for verbs in 17 languages. In 2007, the Logos Library (formerly Wordtheque) included 710 billion words, Linguistic Resources (no change of name) included 1,215 glossaries, and the Universal Conjugator (formerly Conjugation of Verbs) included verbs in 36 languages.
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In December 1997, Logos, a global translation company, decided to put on the web all the professional tools used by its translators, for the internet community to freely use them as well.
Logos was founded by Rodrigo Vergara in 1979, with headquarters in Modena, Italy. In 1997, Logos had 300 in-house translators and 2,500 free-lance translators worldwide, who processed around 200 texts per day.