Re:After Babel Fish
by jazzypants on Saturday September 20, 2025 @04:26PM
(#45317132)
Yeah, you seem to remember correctly. Apparently, it just didn't reached its "public beta" until 2006 so that's when they date it's beginning.
I’m guessing it may have been available in 2004 in some form but the official launch seems to been in 2006 so the quote seems accurate.
Technically true but misleading. translate.google.com was launched in beta in 2001. But it took until 2005ish to convince Larry and Sergey that "Google Translate" was a better name than "translate.google.com". They had a lot of strong ideas about branding but never did think of a better name. Source: I wrote translate.google.com starting in 2000. Sergey told me it would take "a couple months" when I was hired. Also the Wayback machine shows a version from August 2002 so you don't have to trust a rando on the internet. I entirely agree that it wasn't any good until I handed it off to people who actually knew what they were doing.
You know, Google has Orwellian-retconned the fact that Translate was available in 2004 (based on my memory and Internet Archive), no idea why. I remember using it in December 2004 to translate winhistory.de.