Yahoo Babel Fish

» see babelfish.altavista.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

i used babel fish. on the 33.6k modem at home in ankara, then later on ttnet adsl, the workflow was simple. you pasted a paragraph from a german or japanese forum into the box and read whatever broken-english blob came back after the page round-tripped. it was good enough to figure out if a forum post was relevant. it was not good enough to actually understand what anyone was saying with any nuance. that was fine. the bar was "is this thread about my graphics card driver or about something else."

babel fish launched on 9 december 1997 as a deal between digital equipment corporation, who ran altavista, and systran s.a., the french-american machine-translation company that had been doing rule-based translation for nato and the eu since the 60s. the partnership put systran's engine behind altavista's web frontend and made machine translation a free utility on the open web for the first time. you did not need a license and did not need to install anything. you pasted text, you got text.

the name came from douglas adams. the babel fish in "the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy" is a small yellow creature you stick in your ear that translates any language. the altavista product borrowed the joke and made it the actual name. it was that kind of era for naming web tools.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the rise ~

babel fish was useful in roughly the same way ask jeeves was useful: a layer of human-friendly framing on top of a tool whose underlying technology was rougher than the framing suggested. systran was a 30-year-old rule-based translation system, the kind that produces "the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" -> "the vodka is good but the meat is rotten" jokes. it was decent on simple sentences in a major language pair. it fell apart on idioms and on anything beyond the european languages. for years it was nonetheless the only free web translation tool, and the only one most people had ever used.

~ the cracks ~

google translate launched in april 2006 with a statistical-machine-translation approach that did not need handcrafted rules. for the first few years google was not obviously better than babel fish on basic pairs. by 2008-2010 it pulled away. statistical translation scaled with corpus size, and google had access to the largest parallel-corpus library on earth via its search index. babel fish's systran-rules approach plateaued. by the time google translate moved to neural translation in 2016, babel fish was already four years dead.

yahoo had inherited the product through the 2003 overture acquisition. it ran the service for nine more years under the yahoo brand, including the migration to babelfish.yahoo.com in may 2008 when altavista was being wound down. internally yahoo never invested in the underlying engine. when the yahoo-microsoft search alliance closed in 2012, microsoft folded babel fish's frontend into bing translator and the babelfish.yahoo.com url started redirecting.

~ what survived ~

babel fish is the death of a utility that succeeded so completely it forgot how to defend itself. the category it created, free web translation in your browser, is now entirely owned by google with deepl as a smaller premium alternative. nobody uses bing translator on purpose. the babel fish brand survived for a few years as a redirect, then went dark.

what got buried with the brand is the douglas adams reference itself. for fifteen years the joke that the web had a babel fish was a small piece of shared geek vocabulary. when yahoo turned off the lights nobody at microsoft thought to keep the name. google translate is named google translate. it works better and means less.

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