That’s a kind of bold statement isn’t it? However I think it’s true for Jollo, a free web translation service I found just now. Jollo is basically Twitter for translating, a constantly updated stream of translation requests can be seen on the main page. By clicking on any of them you can see the translation, or give one if it doesn’t already have it. Of course you can add your own any time, indicating source and target language, and a category, so translating people can find stuff they like to work on easily

The reason the service is so powerful is that it doesn’t just allow for human translations, but will also show you the translation from Google, Yahoo, SDL BabelFish, and a couple more. You can also rate any of the translations, so readers will be able to determine which translation is the best, even if there are no human translations.

One feature I would love to see is RSS feeds. I would love to help out, but I can’t keep the site open all the time and the feed right now aggregates all translation requests, plus, it doesn’t show the languages needed. It would be great to have a feed on a language basis so I could quickly jump to the rescue when someone needs help.

The power of this service is limited to 150 words or 1,000 characters, but of course this is both understandable, and if you would paste 10 pages, probably noone would translate it anyway. The usefulness of a service such as this relies on community power, Jollo seems to have some going on, so if you need something done, it is a good place to start. If you know some languages take the time to help others out, this is what keeps the community going. Awesome site, I wish I’d thought of it!