Babel Fish: free translation on the web
On 9 December 1997 Digital Equipment Corporation opened a free trial translation service on the AltaVista search engine, running on SYSTRAN: anyone could translate a web page, search results or pasted text from English into Spanish, French, German, Portuguese and Italian, and back.
Why it matters
Machine translation, used for decades by governments and large companies, became available to anyone in a browser, with nothing to install or pay. Google took the same step in 2006 with a statistical system.
The release calls the service the AltaVista Web Translation Service and says SYSTRAN's dictionaries hold more than 2.5 million terms; Louis Monier of AltaVista invites 12 million monthly users to try a technology the company calls a global experiment. The release warns that translation works best on grammatical text without idioms. In July 1998 Kurt Ament wrote in TC Forum that the service's server was called Babelfish, recalling the translating fish of Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The page babelfish.altavista.digital.com, with ten translation directions and a SYSTRAN logo, survives in the archive from December 1998. What the record does not claim. The name Babel Fish is not in the announcement. Only the release itself calls it the first translation service for web content; this was not checked independently, and the user count is the company's own figure too.