Jollo

» see jollo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Turkish was on the list. It is there in the 2008 capture and still there in the last one, sitting between Thai and Ukrainian in a dropdown that had grown from twenty-three languages to more than forty. I have fed enough Turkish into these things to know why a site like this existed. The agglutination defeated the engines for years, and what came back was either a sentence or a warning with no way to tell which. Jollo's answer was to stop pretending one engine could be trusted.

You typed a phrase into one box. Jollo sent it to all of them and printed the results together, each tagged with whose machine had produced it. The 2012 homepage names the panel: Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Reverso, SDL, PONS, Linguee, LEO, WordReference, nciku, Forvo. Eleven services, some of them translators and some of them dictionaries, rendered as a row of small logos down the page. Below the machines sat the human layer. You could vote on the results and comment underneath them. You could also submit your own version and let the people who actually spoke the language argue about it.

The site kept a public translation memory of everything it had been asked, so the arguing accumulated. Members earned Jollo Points. There was a phrasebook, a forum, an RSS feed, a leaderboard of top translators, and a feature that let you record audio so a native speaker could hear what you were trying to say, which in 2008 meant a browser pop-up asking permission in a way nobody ever found reassuring. The FAQ promised the core community service "is, and will always be, free."

Who built it is the one thing the record does not give up. The about page claims no names, only a biography of sorts: "Jollo's founders have lived and worked in Australia, Austria, China, Germany, the UK and the USA." Press from December 2008, including a Daily Telegraph column, covered the site and not the people. The mascot was an owl, and in the later design the owl is doing the work in the copy, going out and fetching the best translation while you wait.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ eleven engines ~

The design conceded something the engines themselves never would. Machine translation in 2008 was sold as an answer, and Jollo treated it as a set of competing guesses that a human had to referee. That is a harder product to sell than a single answer, because the thing the user wants is one sentence rather than eleven.

It only worked while the engines were roughly equal and roughly mediocre. The moment one of them became reliably better than the others, the comparison stopped being interesting and the voting stopped being necessary. Nothing in the record says that is what happened to Jollo. The dates fit it anyway.

~ what the API did ~

You could call it with a URL. Three parameters in the query string returned a translation, with no key and no account required. The Wikipedia article still prints a working example for pushing "I love you" into Chinese.

~ the owl ~

The final working copy in the archive is dated 1 April 2012, owl still in the header, language list longer than it had ever been. Then the crawls stop. There is no capture of the site at all for nearly four years, and no closing post anywhere in between.

What comes back, in March 2016, is selling office management under the slogan "Happily Managing Your Office Space." Today it is a third company again, handing out free property reports before you buy or rent. Two different companies have since used the five letters, and neither of them has any idea the name used to belong to an owl that polled eleven machines at once.

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