Those of you who had been browsing the web in the early 2000s might’ve remembered Babel Fish, which at that time was one of the best online machine translation service. In 2003, Babel Fish was then taken over by AltaVista, one of the dominant search engines at the time. In July of the same year, AltaVista also became part of Yahoo! (who acquired Overture, the company that bought AltaVista earlier on the in year). In 2008, Yahoo! decided to rebrand Babel Fish under it’s own name, which had existed over at http://babelfish.yahoo.com since then.
Today, the official Microsoft Translator blog announced that Yahoo! Babel Fish users have been transitioned to Bing Translator, possibly as part of the Microsoft-Yahoo! search alliance. Below is the announcement:
We are pleased to welcome Yahoo! Babel Fish users to the Bing Translator family. We have been working closely with our friends at Yahoo! to make this an easy transition, and Bing Translator is a natural upgrade to the experience with Yahoo! Babel Fish. We support all the languages you used with Babel Fish, and provide a superset of all the features.
You will notice a welcome banner indicating your transition to the Bing Translator site from a Yahoo site when you arrive at Bing Translator (as shown above).
For those who would like to see Yahoo! Babel Fish one last time, below is a screenshot courtesy of Wikipedia:
