Once considered the standard in its field, the online translation tool Babel Fish has been replaced by Microsoft Translator.
Originally developed in the laboratories of the Systran translation specialist, the Babel Fish service was positioned at a top number in automated translation. Since 1997, Babel Fish has offered translations in a dozen languages. In February 2003, AltaVista was bought by the company Overture, which was itself engulfed by Yahoo! five months later. That year, the translation tool received an average of 15 million hits per month.
Renamed Yahoo! Babel Fish since 2008, the translator is no longer available since late last week. Indeed, on one on its official blogs except Microsoft, that announced it was replaced by Bing Translator. This migration, is probably done after the partnership between the two parties signed in July 2009 in the field of online research, allowing Microsoft to get better position against Google Translator. Google Translator was initially built around Systran then migrated to a technology developed by Google.
Microsoft Translator, first introduced under the name Windows Live Translator in 2007, is based on the work of Microsoft Research, and allows you to translate portions of text or web pages. Microsoft also offers widgets for web developers.
The Redmond company seems like expanding its work in the field of automated translation. In March 2010, Microsoft Research presented the project Translating Telephone offering a the-fly translation of sentences in a conversation conducted by VoIP. Then last year the engineers were interested in instant messaging Lync by unveiling Chat Translator. Currently, Microsoft is planning to make a software that can replicate a voice and use it to translate a message into a foreign language.
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