Talk:Babel Fish (website)

message: I saw on RC a blocked user with the rule that says that Babel Fish editors are not allowed to edit Wikipedia. Where is the source?? 66.245.95.157 22:03, 20 May 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: blocked

message: Source for my change to the Babel Fish's mechanism is from an audio copy of
the Hitchhikers original radio series: it feeds on brain wave energy, absorbing all unconscious frequencies, and then excreting telepathically a matrix formed from the conscious frequencies of nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain. The practical upshot of which is if you stick one in your ear, you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech you hear decodes the brain-wave matrix.
There is a slightly different written version here. -Wikibob | Talk 21:54, 2004 Jun 29 (UTC)
The talking fish motive is from the Grimm Brothers
:It's actually older: from memory, one of the Germanic heroes, either Sigmund or Sigurd, caught a fish for a dwarf and cooked it, but was testing the flesh with his thumb (What can I say? Germanic heroes are not renowned for their intelligence) to see if it was cooked through, and scalded himself. After he sucked his thumb to take the pain away, he could understand the language of the birds. Thanks, I'd forgotten I knew that :D
:Nuttyskin (talk) 16:16, 15 May 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: source

message: The German article about the folding bridge contains the expression "Mai 2004" which is absent from the English version.  Can a fluent German speaker provide a more complete translation? Zanzare 20:25, 24 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Polished Translation 

message: the given example in the article is not a very good one in my opinion, what's more important: the translation by the german speaker is full of flaws. I (German)tried to correct but don't have the time right now to really finish. It is still not right.
If you believe this kind of example is usefull, say it here. Maybe sometime someone (me) will come back to this and finish the translation. As said, right now it is still not perfect although i corrected some of it. 
An example of Babel Fish translation and its flaws
This example comes from the folding bridge article, problem words and phrases are in italics:
Original German
...Die Hörnbrücke ist Anfang bzw. Endpunkt einer im Mai 2004 eröffneten touristischen Ferienstraße: Die Deutsche Fährstraße - von Bremervörde bis zur Kieler Förde - verbindet rund 50 verschiedene Fähren, Brücken, Schleusen, Sperrwerke und maritime Museen; Wahrzeichen sind die Schwebefähren in Rendsburg und in Osten (Oste); eine weitere Fähre dieser Art stand bis 1923 in der damaligen Kaiserlichen Werft in Kiel.
Babel Fish Translation
...The hearing bridge is at the beginning and/or terminator point of one in May 2004 opened routistic holidays road: The German driving race - from Bremervoerde to the Kieler Foerde - connects approximately 50 different ferries, bridges, air-locks, barriers and maritime museums; Landmarks are the schwebefaehren in Rendsburg and in the east (Oste); a further ferry of this kind stood until 1923 in the imperial one at that time threw in Kiel.
Version polished by a fluent German speaker
...The Hörnbrücke (about 'hearing bridge') is the beginning and terminating point of a scenic route which was opened in May 2004: this tourist route called the Deutsche Fährstraße (German Ferry Route) - from Bremervörde to the Kieler Förde - connects approximately 50 different ferries, bridges, ship locks, tidal barriers and maritime museums and its landmarks of the Rendsburg and Osten (Oste) transporter bridges.
Note that it is not called the hearing bridge but this is a reasonable literal translation
--217.185.243.243 22:25, 21 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Example (removed)

message: I was amazed at the quality of translations from Russian to English.  In fact I created a new article Russian nobility from :ru:Дворянство. Very little changes were necessary to the sentence structure.  I did have to spend some time checking that the wikilinks point to the right English articles. Petri Krohn 01:43, 11 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  BabelFish Rulez! 

message: This should be at Babel Fish which is currently a redirect to Babel fish. The fictional animal is always rendered with a lower case. There should be disambiguation notes between these pages but there is no need for the parenthetical title on this page because the capitalizataion makes it unique. savidan(talk) (e@) 20:01, 18 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Requested move (2006)

message: *Oppose It is a bad idea to disambiguate on upper and lower case letters --Philip Baird Shearer 16:29, 19 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Survey

message: savidan if you request another page move at WP:RM please follow the steps for requesting a page move which includes putting the page where the discussion about the requested move is taking place into the request on the WP:RM page. --Philip Baird Shearer 16:33, 19 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Discussion

message: Not moved, because of lack of consensus and solid rational. -- Kim van der Linde at venus 02:04, 5 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Result: not moved

message: Someone with more markup experience than me should do something about that logo image.  It needs to be set apart with a frame, and a caption.
GodSka 23:40, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  That logo... 

message: It doesn't seem ideal to be using "the first paragraph in this article" for the example translations, when that paragraph is liable to change without editors bothering to retranslate all the examples. A piece of fixed example text (the first paragraph of a public domain book?) would work better, but my current browser isn't up to dealing with Korean and Japanese translations. --McGeddon 18:27, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I'd go farther (further?) and say we shouldn't have any examples at all. The software changes over time - an example we give now may not work when somebody reads it. They can do it themselves, if they want. - DavidWBrooks 19:54, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Good point. There's some argument that example translations can demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses of the translation system, but it would be better to explain those strengths and weaknesses, than to leave the reader to pick them out. (In fact, it's not particularly demonstrative to show translations from English into other languages, because many English-speaking Wikipedia readers cannot read those languages fluently - maybe Babel Fish is great at translating English into French or Japanese, and just garbles things when going back the other way.) --McGeddon 01:07, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

text: For the examples, when inputting the first paragraph of this article into Babelfish, let's enter "Babelfish" as one word instead of two words, and see what happens? 38.100.34.2 16:23, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Example translations 

message: The website babelfish.com deserves a mention as an imposter website too. {Slash-|-Talk} 01:39, 13 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Imposter 

message: The 2007-11-06 change refers to a diplomatic incident that would have been caused by Babelfish. This is a hoax, and I've included three reasons to support this. The Dutch Foreign Minister did appear in Parliament 2 days later and didn't mention it, which is further proof. However, I cannot find references for it yet. If needed, Parlando.sdu.nl will have them very soon.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 195.64.89.205 (talk) 23:53, 9 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Jerusalem Post hoax 

message: Before Yahoo got ahold of Babelfish, you could put more than 150 words to translate. Now you can't. Should any changes between Altavista - Yahoo Babelfish be mentioned? (I prefer old Babelfish by far. The layout and stuff. Plus, they got rid of the cute, simple fish.) Neobinary (talk) 21:29, 18 May 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Yahoo and subsequent changes to Babelfish

message: They work, but wiki won't let me remove/modify the section calming they don't.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.49.112.120 (talk) 06:02, 16 November 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Non-ASCII urls

message: In the infobox, babelfish is described as noncommercial. Surely its commercial, even if you dont have to pay for it?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.195.230.149 (talk) 17:01, 18 January 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Non-commercial? 

message: I was able to use Babel Fish to translate Russian and Chinese words/sentences/texts into English, and had used it many times before. But today I was dismayed when the input Russian text (in Cyrillic alphabet) or Chinese text (in Chinese characters) were turned into garbled characters (such as & #1050; & #1080; & #1090; & #1072; & #1081;) and the output result turned into the same thing. Could anyone tell what the problem is? Where can I get help? I use Firefox on a Mac OS X machine, by the way. Many thanks!  --Roland 09:39, 29 February 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Just found that Greek alphabet are also turned into garbled characters. --Roland 01:24, 1 March 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Russian and Chinese Texts Turned into Garbled Characters

message: Hope someone can provide the information regarding where to get help when a user is in trouble. --Roland 03:09, 1 March 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Where to Get Help When in Trouble

message: http://babelfish.altavista.com seems to be dead? 70.24.251.208 (talk) 10:05, 4 June 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Try babelfish.yahoo.com, that's what I've been using for the last year or two. However, it stopped working now. It redirects to a weird Bing page that's all in German. I have no idea what it says. It seems that Microsoft think that your IP address denotes what language you speak, and as I'm currently in Germany, I must speak German. Guess what geniuses, why do you think I was at Babelfish. I suppose if Microsoft ran a zoo and they saw a Lion in the Penguin enclosure, they'd feed it small fish (shortly before being mauled because it's a Lion, not a Penguin). Time to finally switch to Google translate I guess. So long and thanks for all the fish Babelfish.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.155.175.45 (talk) 11:14, 4 June 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  babelfish.altavista.com 

message: Babel Fish is discontinued from Yahoo!, however its own brand is online again apparently since 2010, just check www.babelfish.com;
with regard to Microsoft, both babelfish.altavista.com' and babelfish.yahoo.com redirect to www.microsofttranslator.com , the official site of Bing translator, however yahoo.babelfish.com is the same site of  www.babelfish.com. Does anyone have more information on this issue?--Jorgen W (talk) 03:37, 18 June 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: When I type in  yahoo.babelfish.com I end up in google search, which leads me to  bing? Ottawahitech (talk) 21:05, 2 July 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Babel Fish 

message: My recent revision was rejected with the cited reason being "the source does not support the statement that the service "was not sold."   The source referenced was http://blogs.msdn.com/b/translation/archive/2012/05/30/welcoming-yahoo-babel-fish-users.aspx?PageIndex=4#comments however, being fairly new, I wasn't sure how to direct the attention to the fact that the source is really page 4 of the comments where someone from Microsoft is directly responding within the comments to questions posed within the comments. The actual commenter is http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/profile/microsoft%20translator/ and writes, on 10 Jun 2012 8:04 PM, questions and answers to many topics including: Did Microsoft buy Babel Fish from Yahoo!? 
Here are some of the questions/answers that Microsoft provides regarding the Yahoo! Babel Fish transition:
Q:  What happened to the Yahoo! Babel Fish site?
A: After careful consideration, Yahoo! has transitioned its Babel Fish translation services to Bing Translator, which offers additional languages and features for users.  Microsoft is pleased to welcome Yahoo! Babel Fish users to the Bing Translator family. Yahoo! and Microsoft have worked closely together to ensure as seamless a transition as possible from Babel Fish to Bing Translator.
Q: Did Microsoft buy Babel Fish from Yahoo!?  
A: No. Yahoo! has simply transitioned from Babel Fish to Bing Translator for translation services.
So...... I would hope that my carefully researched edit/contribution that I submitted on 05:40, 17 July 2012 will be accepted and that the revision that was done on 10:30, 17 July 2012 undoing my edit can now be undone by me without offending anyone. (Locosman (talk) 23:48, 20 July 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Did Microsoft buy Babel Fish from Yahoo!?   

message: There seems to be a misreading of a webpage quoted as a source, namely: http://www.businessedge.ca/archives/article.cfm/babelfish-on-the-move-3074/ The "BabelFish on the move" article at businessedge.ca is referring to The Babel Fish Corporation, a professional translation service, which owns the domain BabelFish.com --- not to be confused with the Yahoo! Babel Fish service which was run under babelfish.altavista.com then under babelfish.yahoo.com. The Yahoo! Babel Fish service (at babelfish.yahoo.com) offered instant, online translations powered by machines whereas The Babel Fish Corporation (at www.babelfish.com) was human powered with "38 employees, 75 language teachers and 7,500 certified/accredited translators". Babelfish.com had been registered by The Babel Fish Corporation on 28 June 1995. Altavista did not launch their online translation service until almost 18 months later when, on December 9, 1997, Digital Equipment Corporation and SYSTRAN S.A. launched AltaVista Translation Service. source: http://www.infotektur.com/demos/babelfish/en.html  (Locosman (talk) 21:04, 18 July 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Fair enough - I'll remove the mention of the founder. Feel free to be bold and tweak it/rewrite it as necessary, especially if you find out who the real founder was. — Mr. Stradivarius (have a chat) 21:45, 18 July 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Oh, sorry, I see you did it already. :) — Mr. Stradivarius (have a chat) 21:48, 18 July 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Yahoo! Babel Fish was not founded and developed by Oscar A Jofre 

message: When i tried it just now, babelfish.yahoo.com redirected me to yahoo.com instead of Bing Translator.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.17.201.171 (talk) 01:41, 4 June 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Yahoo/Bing redirect 

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified one external link on Babel Fish (website). Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20070708055621/http://docs.yahoo.com/docs/pr/release1102.html to http://docs.yahoo.com/docs/pr/release1102.html
When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.
Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 10:04, 13 July 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Check it. We need to add it that they now redirect to www.yahoo.com
Idk how to format it sorry :( Zappingsbrew000 (talk) 12:34, 2 April 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  babelfish.yahoo.com redirects to Yahoo's website