The Yahoo Babel Fish service was capable of translating as many as 150 words at a time in 38 language combinations. Website pages could also be translated, according to Yahoo.

Babel Fish was a creation of California technology firm AltaVista and has been available on the Internet. Yahoo added simplified and traditional Chinese to the Babel translation mix, the Sunnyvale, California, company said.

The Babel fish was a fictional creature introduced in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by the late British author Douglas Adams.

Adams described it as a fish that fed on brainwaves in such a way that, if stuck in one's ear, it enabled them to understand alien tongues.

While introducing the service on a company blog, Yahoo linguistic product manager Raymond Flournoy suggested celebrating with a "Babeling Fish" cocktail of Russian vodka, Dutch Curacao, Japanese Midori, and French Champagne.

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