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Babelfish vs Microsoft Translator
March 15, 2025 | Author: Adam Levine
4★
Babelfish.com is an free online translator for users to translate phrases and sentences into any language. If you’re not sure how to translate a word or phrase, post it under ‘How do you say..’ and get free help from the Babelfish community. Instantly translate entire web pages, blogs or documents in a single click using our miraculous online translation software.
3★
Microsoft Translator delivers automatic translation of text into a specified language. It is a state-of-the-art statistical machine translation system translating between any of the supported languages, and powering billions of translations every day. The Microsoft Translator API is available through the Windows Azure Marketplace.
Babelfish and Microsoft Translator share a noble purpose: making sense of the gibberish other people insist on speaking. Both are powered by advanced AI that tries very hard to sound like it understands what’s going on. They translate text, speech and in some cases, entire documents, all while pretending that human languages are logical, which they are not. Developers can also poke at them through APIs, because what’s the point of an omnipotent machine translation service if you can’t make it say something ridiculous in 47 different tongues?
Babelfish, ironically named after a fictional creature that translates perfectly, is an Amazon invention from 2021 that mostly concerns itself with databases, because what better use for a cosmic linguistic breakthrough than converting SQL queries? It exists mainly to help businesses migrate data to AWS, which is presumably very useful if you have a lot of it and don’t want to deal with the consequences of your previous database decisions. It doesn’t bother with minor details like casual conversation, preferring to specialize in making sure computers understand each other, which is probably for the best.
Microsoft Translator, on the other hand, has been wandering around since 2007, trying to make humans understand each other with mixed results. It has been crammed into Office, Skype, Edge and anything else Microsoft could think of, translating everything from corporate memos to suspiciously poetic error messages. Unlike Babelfish, it concerns itself with real-world chitchat and boasts over 100 languages, which means it has had more than enough time to learn how little sense most of them make.
See also: Top 10 Online Translators
Babelfish, ironically named after a fictional creature that translates perfectly, is an Amazon invention from 2021 that mostly concerns itself with databases, because what better use for a cosmic linguistic breakthrough than converting SQL queries? It exists mainly to help businesses migrate data to AWS, which is presumably very useful if you have a lot of it and don’t want to deal with the consequences of your previous database decisions. It doesn’t bother with minor details like casual conversation, preferring to specialize in making sure computers understand each other, which is probably for the best.
Microsoft Translator, on the other hand, has been wandering around since 2007, trying to make humans understand each other with mixed results. It has been crammed into Office, Skype, Edge and anything else Microsoft could think of, translating everything from corporate memos to suspiciously poetic error messages. Unlike Babelfish, it concerns itself with real-world chitchat and boasts over 100 languages, which means it has had more than enough time to learn how little sense most of them make.
See also: Top 10 Online Translators
