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THE WEB SURFER'S GUIDE TO BABEL FISH

In his classic "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," Douglas Adams created the Babel Fish, a "small, yellow and leech-like" creature that removes "all barriers to communication between different races and cultures." In fact, "if you stick a Babel Fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language." Fast forward to the Information Age. Alta Vista's Babel Fish translates search results, websites, and short passages of text from English into five different European languages, or from six European languages into English, and from French to German and back. You can also input non-English text using an online World Keyboard, save translated text, and enable automatic translation of your website. Machine translation is far from perfect: Babel Fish likes short, grammatically correct sentences, properly punctuated, free from slang, and no more than 800 words long. So human translators are not yet an endangered species. Nevertheless, Babel Fish and its ilk bring just us a bit closer to understanding one another.

Mon, 19 Jun 2000 08:07:08 -0700

Submitted by: Lois Ambash