Babylon, the language translation software company from Israel, has launched a free online translation website that translates text in over 700 language pairs. Check it out at http://translation.babylon.com/.
The result is impressive. The website design is pleasing to the eye and the user interface is very easy to use. Translation speed is excellent and you can see your results in near real-time. Translation quality of the few languages pairs we tested was high (considering that it is a machine translation). And the number of languages is staggering, perhaps offering the most language combos of any of the free online translation services available on the net.
Babylon has not revealed who developed the machine translations engines that it uses, but an educated guess is that they have purchased an enterprise server from California-based Language Weaver to run most of the MT processing. This is evident when comparing the list of languages supported by Language Weaver (see http://www.languageweaver.com/page.asp?intNodeID=930&intPageID=850) with those offered by Babylon's online tool. Language Weaver also lists Babylon as a partner on their website.
One exception is English-Hebrew and Hebrew-English. Babylon licenses those MT engines from LEC, another MT vendor from Waltham, MA.
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