Japanese Volunteer Translators Quit After Mozilla Begins Using Translation Bot (linuxiac.com) 55
Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shared this report from Linuxiac:
The Japanese branch of Mozilla's Support Mozilla (SUMO) community — responsible for localizing and maintaining Japanese-language support documentation for Firefox and other Mozilla products (consisting of Japanese native speakers) — has officially disbanded after more than two decades of voluntary work...
SUMO, short for Support Mozilla, is the umbrella project for Mozilla's user support platform, support.mozilla.org, that brings together volunteers and contributors worldwide who translate, maintain, and update documentation, tutorials, and troubleshooting guides for Firefox, Thunderbird, and other Mozilla products... According to marsf, the long-time locale leader of the Japanese SUMO team, the decision to disband was triggered by the recent introduction of an automated translation system known as Sumobot. Deployed on October 22, the bot began editing and approving Japanese Knowledge Base articles without community oversight.
The article notes marsf's complaints in a post to the SUMO discussion forum, including the fact that the new automated system automatically approved machine-translated content with only a 72-hour window for human review. As a result, more than 300 Knowledge Base articles were overwritten on the production server, which marsf called "mass destruction of our work."
SUMO, short for Support Mozilla, is the umbrella project for Mozilla's user support platform, support.mozilla.org, that brings together volunteers and contributors worldwide who translate, maintain, and update documentation, tutorials, and troubleshooting guides for Firefox, Thunderbird, and other Mozilla products... According to marsf, the long-time locale leader of the Japanese SUMO team, the decision to disband was triggered by the recent introduction of an automated translation system known as Sumobot. Deployed on October 22, the bot began editing and approving Japanese Knowledge Base articles without community oversight.
The article notes marsf's complaints in a post to the SUMO discussion forum, including the fact that the new automated system automatically approved machine-translated content with only a 72-hour window for human review. As a result, more than 300 Knowledge Base articles were overwritten on the production server, which marsf called "mass destruction of our work."
Tip of the iceberg. (Score:1)
Re:Tip of the iceberg. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll admit that "good enough to get the point across" is often not good enough for support pages, especially for non-experts.
Re:Tip of the iceberg. (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. Good translation requires understanding of the circumstances and view of the target audience. Artificial Ignorance cannot do that.
Re: Tip of the iceberg. (Score:2, Insightful)
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I have personal experience with Deepl (French/English)... it was good, and then it degraded significantly. It now proposes text in Latin (no kidding!) for English to French (yes, they have been informed... but really????). I suspect this degradation is because they decided to use a generic algorithm that isn't trained on any particular combination of languages... and Deepl assumed it would be fine. But in the end, it proposes translations that are completely wrong. It isn't just Latin, Spanish shows up as w
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This confidence that the LLM can sort everything out is misplaced.
Indeed. And it points to a rather severe dysfunction and inability on the part of the ones having that confidence.
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Yeah, but I don't really blame people. LLMs work so incredibly well and produce amazing results. Even AI experts are impressed by the results and non-AI experts are often seduced by the results. Well, except for the anti-AI folks who, as usual, see all of the warts and none of the benefits, and are thus exactly as idiotic as the all-AI-all-the-time folks, just in the opposite way.
In truth, AI does mostly-great work and will replace many jobs over the next decade; translation jobs are very high on that li
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In truth, AI does mostly-great work and will replace many jobs over the next decade
I do not agree and there is evidence. For example, about half of larger code-samples generated by AI contains vulnerabilities. That is not "mostly great", that is "pretty bad". If these are systematic (i.e. somewhat predictable for attackers, who will also use AI), then this becomes "abysmally bad". A second result is that LLM use makes coders around 20% slower (!) on average, with most mistakenly believing they are faster. Cost of worse code are not included in that.
With the job-replacement, we will haver
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"Zoo of languages". I like that.
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Why don't you kikuyu them off your grass.
my ssid is GetOffMyLan
Re: Tip of the iceberg. (Score:4, Informative)
Not really. I have done Deepl translatins of relatively simple audit reports. Complete disaster. Yes, it sounded good, but it did corrupt the results completely.
Translation joke for Japanese (Score:2, Insightful)
As a native speaker of English, if I'm talking to someone else who speaks English, then I expect a one-minute message will take one minute to transmit with 100% comprehension.
Relying on my Japanese, it will take two or three minutes and comprehension will drop to about 80%. Largely depends on how well we both understand the context around the topic.
If it's a three-way session with a human translator who doesn't know the topic of the conversation, then best case is 10 minutes and lucky to get 60%.
But when yo
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Firefox does not competely freeze for me but it does very frequently start to get laggy and consume 100% CPU. Even with just a couple of tabs. I have to restart Firefox pretty much every day. I've gone into the CPU profiler and it seems to be something in the glib event loop that is spinning. I'm also wondering if the Wayland back end is part of it.
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Thanks for additional hints about the latest Firefox bloat.
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Wouldn't call this bloat. More of a bug that is unreported: I seem to be the only one experiencing it! This has been happening to me for at least six months. I probably should run it under X11 for a few weeks and see if that behaves better. I suspect it will somehow.
I stick with Firefox because of uBlock origin, and also because I can still manage to force the UI with CSS to look somewhat closer to the way I want it to.
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I would say the timeline matches, but I don't care nearly that much about the presentation to spend time on such aspects as forcing things to look differently. I prefer tools that are easy to use. Again from the funding perspective, why would I want to buy an annoying tool?
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Automatic translation tools only provide mediocre translations - and almost certainly will for the near future. I understand that this is often "good enough", but if you want to convey competence, you need good translations, not mediocre ones. This is probably especially true when writing technical documentation where precision is extremely important.
One problem is that most people on this forum are English-native speakers and English is the "default" language for most technical documentation - hence most p
Re:icebergs sink ships (Score:1)
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Don't worry though, I'm sure those Japanese translators will also take their cohort with them. (The Japanese tend to avoid things that disrespect them. Like other East Asian cultures.) So Mozilla won't have to worry about supporting them in the future. Oh, wait, Mozilla wanted t
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And whilst they're not as accurate as a human being even the free "consumer grade" ones like Google Translate are generally good enough to get the point across.
The whole "good enough" excuse is a balancing of quality vs. cost dynamic for companies. What is the angle here? The summary seems to suggest SUMO's translators are volunteers. Mozilla isn't saving money by lowering staffing as so many tech firms are fond of doing atm. They may be rolling out documentation translations faster, but was there some big issue with work being behind to begin with?
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What is the angle here? The summary seems to suggest SUMO's translators are volunteers. Mozilla isn't saving money by lowering staffing as so many tech firms are fond of doing atm. They may be rolling out documentation translations faster, but was there some big issue with work being behind to begin with?
Mozilla is probably pushing their AI translation technology so that it can mature faster.
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Probably just completely tone-deaf authoritarian asshole "management". I see no way this is not a drastic fail for their Japanese operation.
How stupid are Mozilla? (Score:5, Insightful)
Absolutely bonkers decision.
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If you have a backlog, publish in the original language and let them find automatic translation tools if needed. Doing this on their behalf is likely to result in Firefox getting the blame for misleading information rather than the automatic translation tool. Automatic translations just aren't yet good enough (and won't be for a long time).
business as usual (Score:3)
most if not all browsers are buying into the ai craze, the most desperate ones do so desperately. once a pool of great and motivated engineers that did much good, mozilla is now a sinking ship sliding slowly into irrelevance to the cacophony of a discombobulated orchestra of c-suits feasting on the last remains until it's time to jump ship. i guess those remains come from ai related contracts atm.
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It seems to be the way they went about it, as much as anything. The volunteers would probably have accepted first drafts created by AI, or suggestions for changes, but Mozilla just overwrote their work, bypassing them entirely.
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The proverbial elephant in the china-shop comes to mind. It is really surprising that Mozilla still exists with constant management mess-ups over the last 10 years or so.
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Knowing them, they hired some AI wiz kids who wanted to move fast and break things. Meanwhile the poor engineers who are slowly making really important and valuable improvements to the core browser aren't getting any help. Maybe some vibe coded Javascript engine updates are next on the list.
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Probably. Unfortunately, we have other companies with really crappy tech that refuse to die. My take is that IT is evolving far slower than it could because too many people make tons of money producing trash.
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Ah, sorry. The German version uses an elephant.
Re: How stupid are Mozilla? (Score:1)
Have you seen the shitfest that is their current browser. Ergonomics went out the window years ago so they have form in shooting themselves - and their users, what's left of them -in the foot.
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Absolutely bonkers decision.
Yep. This is not explainable below "complete incompetence" and "extreme arrogance" and, quite important for Japan, "extreme rudeness".
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And knowing the Japanese, this is basically the kiss of death to them using Firefox.
As if Mozilla really needed ANOTHER reason to see their marketshare go down even more.
It's like they're purposely tanking their numbers so they can blame "Google monopoly!" for their dwindling numbers, when in reality it's because they're pushing users to alternative browsers.
Pushing away the
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Think about it for a minute: They are forgoing FREE work by humans, to PAY a machine to do it. Something doesn't add up here. Why are they willing to throw money away to make an inferior product?
Most importantly, why would anyone volunteer to help Mozilla ever again?
Truly psychopathic and sociopathic at the same time. Money has fucked up Mozilla.
The Lost Artbender (Score:3, Funny)
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Mod parent funny, but I'd like to know the kanji reference for "Shrine-Fork". Perhaps someone's name? The closing bit about the fox perhaps suggests an inari shrine?
The new prime minister's name consists of two kanji. The first one usually means "tall" or "expensive" and the second is generally for a "market". But that's not how people think about names? When I asked a Japanese person if it was from a market for expensive stuff or perhaps for high quality merchandise the response was "The name means nothing
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The kanji in names hold meaning, but, especially for last names, people rarely think about beyond "Oh that's an interesting combination" or "Oh another Tanaka"
But that's the same in English too. I doubt many people wonder if Jim Potter cam from a long line of potters, or wheter Tim Baker is good at baking bread...
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Just the ACK and mostly concurrence, though I think most names these days have no recognizable semantic value, in contrast to your two examples. In Japanese most kanji can't lose their meanings. (Exceptions are "illegal" or imaginary kanji.)
A human decided to Override with Bot Translation (Score:2)
and delete the former efforts of dedicated expert translations.
I'm sure potential hurt feelings did not occur to those in the Mozilla management team, or otherwise there would have been a meeting to communicate that they were planning to make a change of course.
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Robots do not consider such biological things as 'feelings'.
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Neither do CEOs.
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That's what I just said, isn't it?
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LOL, yep. :)
Abject lunacy... (Score:3)
If your options are 'nothing' and 'hire bilingual tech writer' you can see the attraction of having a not very good but extremely cheap option; but just tossing away the expertise you already get for nothing out of some sort of weird technophilia? Is there actually some nutjob out there who was all "Oh, but machine translation makes my CI pipeline so efficient" or something?
Todo: (Score:5, Insightful)
- Sprinkle tripping robots over more features. Think of novel use cases that haven't been tried before. (Let the robot restyle CSS, maybe.)
- Buy at least one random company and integrate it poorly. Have we considered lawn care?
- Volunteers are still stubbornly hanging on. Try to single out hard-to-find talent and use the robots to shit all over their work. Don't be an asshole, that makes them think someone cares. Just make it clear that we value them less than the cost of electricity it costs to replace them, poorly.
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Funny thing is that these total cretins probably think they are doing a good job...
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I wonder about that. But there's definitely a seeming drive for puffery on individual resumes, and a collective drive for puffery on the entire platform in order to drive mindshare. The same kind of short-term thinking that has people ripping out existing features to "improve" a product, so they can claim that they actually did something in their tenure there.
Instead of doing something to fix a hard problem, say the obscene memory consumption of tabs as part of the base browser, they do things to make Fir
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That is simultaneously the most damning and the most accurate description I've ever read of Mozilla's self-enshittification over the past decade or so. Thanks, I think... :-{
AI doesn't need to make people jobless (Score:1)
If people quit themselves when companies use AI.