Jollo was an online
machine translation
Machine translation is use of computational techniques to translate text or speech from one language to another, including the contextual, idiomatic and pragmatic nuances of both languages.
Early approaches were mostly rule-based or statisti ...
service where users could instantly translate texts into 23 languages, request human translations from a community of volunteers around the world, and compare the correctness of several leading machine translation websites. It was discontinued in 2012.
System
Jollo was a free
Web 2.0
Web 2.0 (also known as participative (or participatory) web and social web) refers to websites that emphasize user-generated content, ease of use, participatory culture, and interoperability (i.e., compatibility with other products, systems, a ...
website that attempted to improve the way in which people translate online through the use of existing
machine translation
Machine translation is use of computational techniques to translate text or speech from one language to another, including the contextual, idiomatic and pragmatic nuances of both languages.
Early approaches were mostly rule-based or statisti ...
websites and a community of volunteers who correct and rate translations. The system relied on a similar methodology as
computer-assisted translation
Computer-aided translation (CAT), also referred to as computer-assisted translation or computer-aided human translation (CAHT), is the use of software, also known as a translator, to assist a human translator in the translation process. The tr ...
to ensure translation quality, and featured a public
translation memory
A translation memory (TM) is a database that stores "segments", which can be sentences, paragraphs or sentence-like units (headings, titles or elements in a list) that have previously been translated, in order to aid human translators. The trans ...
that records past translations.
Jollo received some notable media attention, including in ''
The Daily Telegraph
''The Daily Telegraph'', known online and elsewhere as ''The Telegraph'', is a British daily broadsheet conservative newspaper published in London by Telegraph Media Group and distributed in the United Kingdom and internationally. It was found ...
''. According to the blog KillerStartups, Jollo combined the benefits of the speed of machine translations and human reviews to ensure translation quality. According to Jeffrey Hill from The English Blog, the community features made Jollo an interesting alternative to other online translation services.
["Jollo - Online Translation Community, The English Blog, http://jeffreyhill.typepad.com/english/2008/12/jollo-online-translation-community.html, Dec 4, 2008. Accessed Dec 8, 2008.]
Development
The Jollo website was classified as
beta
Beta (, ; uppercase , lowercase , or cursive ; or ) is the second letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 2. In Ancient Greek, beta represented the voiced bilabial plosive . In Modern Greek, it represe ...
. It was developed using
LAMP and was praised for its colorful graphics and simple user interface.
Jollo offered a simple web-based API that could be used for translations. For example, the URL: http://www.jollo.com/translate.php?st=I%20love%20you&sl=en&tl=zh was used to translate the sentence "I love you" from English into Chinese.
References
{{reflist
External links
Archive of the Jollo page
Defunct websites
Machine translation
Internet properties disestablished in 2012