BabelFish

What happened to AltaVista Babel Fish?

AltaVista's Babel Fish was one of the first free translation tools on the web. It is no longer available. This page explains what happened to it — and gives you a working translator to use instead.

To be clear: BabelFish.com is not affiliated with AltaVista, Yahoo, or Microsoft, and is not a continuation of the AltaVista Babel Fish service. We are an independent translation site that happens to share the name — both borrowed from the Babel fish in Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

A short history

AltaVista launched Babel Fish in 1997, using SYSTRAN's machine translation engine. For many people it was the first time translation had been freely available in a browser, and for years it was the default answer to "how do I translate this page?"

AltaVista changed hands more than once, eventually ending up with Yahoo, and the tool was rebranded along the way. In 2012 the Babel Fish address began redirecting to Microsoft's Bing Translator, and AltaVista itself was shut down entirely the following year. The Babel Fish brand was retired with it.

What to use instead

Any of the major engines will translate text for you. If you want something that works the way Babel Fish did — paste text, pick a language, get a translation, no account required — you can use ours below.

Up to 500 characters. No sign-up.

Translators by language

Arabic Translator Chinese Translator Danish Translator Dutch Translator English Translator French Translator German Translator Greek Translator Hindi Translator Italian Translator Japanese Translator Portuguese Translator Spanish Translator Ukrainian Translator