Babelizer 2.2

What is Babelizer?

Babelizer is a toy that humorously exposes the inadequacy of machine translation. You type in a phrase, choose a language, and the Babelizer uses the Altavista translation web site to translate between English and your chosen language until the result no longer mutates.

    I speak other languages real good.

    Je parle l'autre vrai bon de langages.

    I speak other good truth about languages.

    Je parle l'autre bonne vérité au sujet des langages.

    I speak the other good truth about the languages.

I got the idea from this Usenet message several years ago. You can play with an online version of the thing here.

Babelizer is free software. It is free as in beer, and it is free as in redistributable with source code, as explained in the license, below.

How do I install Babelizer?

Install the application by copying it onto your hard drive.

How do I uninstall Babelizer?

Drag it to the Trash; empty the trash.

Why do I keep getting error messages?

This program works by accessing the Altavista translation web site. Sometimes they can't keep up with the volume of translation requests coming from all of their users, and you'll get an error message. I report these problems via red status messages at the bottom of the window.

Of course, if you see an error message that you think is unrelated to these kinds of problems, I welcome your bug reports.

What do you mean, "free"?

As in "beer": there is no charge. As in "speech": the source code is included and redistributable, per the terms of the Apache License, Version 2.0. Here is the license block as it appears in the source code:

/*
	Copyright 2008 Jonathan Feinberg

   Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
   you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
   You may obtain a copy of the License at

       http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

   Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
   distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
   WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
   See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
   limitations under the License.
 */

The program uses several free software libraries, all of which are given due credit, with their respective licenses, in the license.txt included with the download.

Version History

2.2
2009-01-06
First build for code.google.com.

2.1.1
2008-05-25
Babelfish has moved to Yahoo.

2.1.0
2004-11-05
Added support for HTTP proxies.
Improvements to UI.

2.0.2
2004-09-03
Fixed bug in third-party code which choked on bogus HTML entities sometimes retuned by Altavista.

2.0.1
2004-09-03
Fixed concurrency bug; sometimes cancelling would hang the GUI.
Now babelized text can be selected and copied.

2.0.0
2004-09-02
Reimplemented in Java. Introduced translation engine plugin system to enable future expansion.

1.5.1
2003-11-27
Built for Panther; corrected spelling of the word "Portuguese."

1.5
2003-06-07
Still yet another minor update to adapt to Babelfish output change.

1.4
2002-12-22
Yet another minor update to adapt to new babelfish URL.

1.3
2002-08-13
Minor update to catch up to a Babelfish output change.

1.2
2002-05-12
Now uses Dan Wood's CURLHandle library, which means that Babelizer respects your Internet Config proxy settings.

1.1
2002-04-02
Added Japanese and Korean.
Removed dependency on PCRE library.

1.0
2002-04-01
Initial release.