Scaling the Tower of Babel Fish: An Analysis of the Machine Translation of Legal Information

In late 1997, Babel Fish (http://babelfish.altavista.com) debuted on the AltaVista Web site. 1 Babel Fish is a "machine translation" program that allows Internet users to translate blocks of text or entire Web pages automatically. What was a novelty in the late 1990s is now widely used--by...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Law Library Journal 2006-06, Vol.98 (3), p.481-849
Main Author: Yates, Sarah
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
automatically
available
Babel Fish
community
education law
Evaluation
evidence
librarians
Machine translation
professional
professionals
Software
translating
translation
translations
translator
World Wide Web
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Summary:In late 1997, Babel Fish (http://babelfish.altavista.com) debuted on the AltaVista Web site. 1 Babel Fish is a "machine translation" program that allows Internet users to translate blocks of text or entire Web pages automatically. What was a novelty in the late 1990s is now widely used--by law librarians, among others. 2 This article presents the results of a study that I conducted to evaluate Babel Fish's accuracy in translating texts of interest to law librarians and law library users. It should go without saying that computers cannot translate as well as trained professionals. As Scott Bennett explains, "Anyone who expects [Babel Fish] to match a professional translator's skill is asking far more than the system was intended to do." 3 On Babel Fish's FAQ page, AltaVista advises users, "Expect Babel Fish to allow you to grasp the general intent of the original, not to produce a polished translation." 4 The purpose of this article is not to prove that Babel Fish is less accurate than professional translation, which is probably not even in question. Instead, I attempt to determine whether Babel Fish succeeds according to its own standards--that is, whether it provides translations accurate enough for users in the law library community to "grasp the general intent of the original." Babel Fish was selected as the basis for this study because, in addition to being the first machine translation system freely available on the Web, today it ...
ISSN:0023-9283