Babelfish – Rules Based Engine

• Formerly hosted by Altavista, and more recently bought by Yahoo, Babelfish is largely based
  on an older version of SYSTRAN
  
  
• SYSTRAN, founded in 1968, is one of the oldest machine translation companies.
  
  
• Systran is primarly a rules-based translation engine that has been developed to very high
  precision over the last 40 years.


• In more recent years, SYSTRAN has blended its rules-based translation engine with a statistical
  translation engine to improve flexibility, However these changes are not reflected in BabelFish


• Rule-based translation consists of three basic steps:
  1. Sentences from the input language are broken down into pieces of ideas that are
     represented by abstract code. Meanings are reduced to a series of symbols representing
     individual ideas like cave paintings or hieroglyphics
  2. Ideas are reassembled in the output language based on syntax (parts of speech) and
     grammar rules
  3. Words or “idea fragments” that have no symbolic equivalent in the database are translated
     word by word by dictionary