Babel Fish is a web-base application developed by AltaVista (part of Yahoo! since May 9, 2008) that machine translates text or web pages from one of several languages into another. It takes its name from the Babel fish, a fictional animal used for instantaneous language translation in Douglas Adams's series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The word Babel is a borrowed reference to the biblical account of the city of Babel and the various languages which were said to have arisen there.