Babylon, best known for its desktop translation utility everybody used to use and almost nobody seems to have anymore, has a new online text translation tool on its website.

Babylon is not the first internet translation service. Alta Vista’s Babel Fish exists for the better part of a decade but it was bought by Yahoo and disappeared into obscurity like everything else Yahoo buys; Google has a pretty good service but nobody knows it exists. Babylon is exempt from this obscurity because its translation utility is just one arm of its sprawling translation services, spearheaded by its much more useful desktop on-click translation tool. And there’s a good reason for that: these mass-text translation services suck.

Sure, sometime you come across something someone wrote in a Russian blog about you, and you need some sense of what was written — is it a secret crush? Are you being mocked? In those cases, you don’t care how quick and dirty the translation is.

In every other case, these services suck too much to be useful. In fact, they’re the butt of jokes for years — freaky lost in translation games are a favorite pastime for geeks. And some use Babylon’s name as a derogative for bad translation.

Translation is a fine art of understanding context and bridging the sensibilities and sensitivities of two languages. It’s a work of intelligence, and artificial ones, for now, won’t do. We can teach them what hot dog means and how it differs from warm canines, but almost every word has different meanings and subtle shades of meaning and the same goes for the target language. Think about how many things “ass” means.

Okay, ready? Here it is this article translated to Hebrew with Babylon.