Yahoo! Gives Babel Fish a New Bowl

Good old Babel Fish, the "mascot, star, and proprietor of the oldest free, on-line translation service on the web" has a new home. He has leapt from his original bowl over at Alta Vista over to Yahoo! Go to babelfish.yahoo.com and type most anything you'd like to translate (phrases or passages under 150 words or a Web page), and Babel Fish takes care of the rest. I punched in "I really like to eat fish" in English, scrolled down the dropdown menu to my language of choice, Spanish, and got back "Realmente tengo gusto de comer pescados." Not bad. New enhancements attained over at Yahoo! include a couple of new languages (simplified Chinese into traditional Chinese, and traditional Chinese into simplified Chinese), bringing the site's total to 38 language pairs you can translate between. You'll also find a Babel Fish toolbar button as well as tighter integration between translation and Yahoo! search services, among a few other things.