Microsoft Bing Translator replaces Yahoo! Babel Fish

In the time before Google was a dominant force on the Internet, there were other search engines offering different services. One popular service was Yahoo!’s Babel Fish translator, which could arguably have been called the best translating machine, back in the day, before Google Translate. As per a recent post by the Microsoft Translator Official Team Blog, Yahoo! Babel Fish has now been replaced with Microsoft Bing, which appears to be a part of the alliance between Microsoft and Yahoo!.

'Bing'o?

A post by Microsoft reads, “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.”

They go on to state, “You will notice a welcome banner indicating your transition to the Bing Translator site from a Yahoo site when you arrive at Bing Translator.  I am pleased to introduce to you some of the great features that our translation service offers starting with a brief introduction to the technology behind the service.”

Speaking on their service, Microsoft states that their translation technology is built on over a decade of world-class work done at Microsoft Research, and it is widely used by a variety of applications and websites. They state that one may have already encountered their technology while using translation features within products, like Microsoft Office, Bing, Windows Phone, Facebook and Kindle. Microsoft goes on to claim, “We serve billions of translations every day across 38 different languages, and we continually add to the list of languages and features. We also have a fast growing developer community.”

The Bing Translate service offers features, such as Text Translator, Webpage Translator and Website Widget.

Text Translator – You can translate text snippets between the supported languages on the home page. If you aren’t sure about the language of the source text, you can always leave it as “Auto-Detect” and the translator will detect it for you. You can also listen to the translation for a subset of languages by clicking the speaker icon. Also, one can search the web with translated text snippet, or e-mail it.

Webpage Translator – By typing a webpage URL into the text entry box on the home page, one can translate a webpage. You can use the bi-lingual viewer functionality and switch between various views, including the popular side-by-side view. As you navigate through the site, the webpage translator continues translating.

Website Widget - The Microsoft Translator widget is a simple-to-use web control that can make your site available in multiple languages without any coding, while keeping users on your site. The unique collaborative translation functionality allows you to customize the translations delivered to your site by partnering with trusted users and allow your community to provide suggestions and corrections, to ensure the translations are always best suited to your content and always up-to-date.

For more information on Microsoft Bing Translator, click here.