From announcement post:
Hi, I am a locale leader of SUMO Japanese community. I have contributed to the Support over 20 years, before the beginning of support.mozilla.org.
Today, November 4, we decided to end our SUMO Japanese community.
In October 22, the sumobot was introduced to Japanese KB articles. I cannot accept its behavior and no words.
- It doesn’t follow our translation guidelines.
- It doesn’t respect current localization for Japanese users, so they were lost.
- It approves its direct English MT immediately for All archived KB articles.
- It approves only in 72 hours after its updates, so we lost our work to train new contributors.
- It has been working now without our acceptance, without controls, without communications.
- Over 300 Knowledge Base articles are overridden by sumobot.
They are all happened on the product server, not on staging server. I understand that this is mass destruction of our work and explicit violation to the Mozilla mission, allowed officially.
Therefore, I (marsf) declare:
- I quit to contribute to support.mozilla.org.
- I prohibit to use all my translation as learning data for SUMO bot and AIs.
- I request to remove all my translation from learned data of SUMO AIs.
However, individual Japanese contributors may want to work in their responsibility. It is their choice, we don’t care nor support.
Bye.
Probably it could simplify their deployment process. They could package all AI translated languages at the same time of English packaging. Instead of waiting for volunteer for human translation.
However, it is extremely shortsighted, especially considering it’s Mozilla which is technically a non-profit company. It’s more understandable if it’s a public company with investor’s pressure and there are costs associated with manual translation.
But it wont’t simplify the process if the SumoBot reverts human-made translations. I read the post of Michele Rodaro who seems to bee in charge of the Italien Community, and he wrote that the Italian language is rather complex and nuanced language. Some sentences requiere more words, verbs, and phrases that doesn’t refelct the original En-US text.