Babelfish
Babel Fish is a web-based application developed by AltaVista which translates text from one of several languages into another.
The Babel fish is a fictional device used for instantaneous language translation in Douglas Adams' book The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. People (or other sentient beings) place the fish in one ear, where it feeds on brain waves and excretes a telepathic matrix that the brain decodes using the speech heard, leading to instant language translation.
The name Babel, in turn, is taken from the Tower of Babel, appearing in the Book of Genesis in the Old Testament of the Christian Bible. Built by the descendants of Noah, the tower was intended to reach to Heaven itself, but the Bible says God punished this act of hubris by destroying the tower and confusing the builders' language so they could no longer understand each other's speech, leading to the welter of languages in existence today.
Several online services have been implemented that use the Babel Fish service to translate back and forth between English and another language, often with humorous or strange results - called a "round-trip" translation.
