TL;DR: Mozilla is killing localization on Support Mozilla, overwriting articles written by humans with machine generated translations. Although Mozilla knows that their AI doesn’t localize or adhere to style guides, Mozilla is going live with it anyway. I thank locale leaders and localizers for their tireless efforts. Locale leaders seem to be obviated by AI, and Mozilla has nothing to say about it.
I made a video if you want to watch instead.
My post about the deeper implications of what Mozilla is doing to the Support Mozilla community is coming, but I figured over the Thanksgiving holiday that I could focus on giving thanks.
While the title of this post is a bit tongue in cheek, I realized that some people weren’t even aware of what was going on. Support Mozilla isn’t Firefox, and if you aren’t aware of developments in AI or communities you might not be clear how it all affects you, a Firefox user.
Support Mozilla is Mozilla’s helpdesk and knowledgebase.
This is where you can get help for Mozilla products like Firefox and Thunderbird. The products themselves also link to the knowledgebase, in place of in-product documentation.
The helpdesk and knowledgebase are all volunteer driven, and people spend hours of their time helping other people use and troubleshoot Mozilla products.
Mozilla isn’t shy about asking for people’s help on the Support Mozilla website - their website says “save the world from the comfort of your couch”.
Contributors can answer support questions, write help articles, and they can also localize support content.
Mozilla is pretty complimentary towards their localizers, calling them “heroic”.
On November 4, the locale leader of the Japanese Support community on SUMO very publicly resigned.
You should read what marsf said themselves, but here’s my summary:
marsf has been contributing to Mozilla for over 20 years, even before Support Mozilla existed.
They were a locale leader, someone who coordinates localization efforts for a locale.
Mozilla enabled machine translation on October 22 on the Japanese locale. marsf quit on November 4. It took less than two weeks to scare away someone who had spent 20 years contributing to the Mozilla mission.
Prior to the introduction of machine translation, locale leaders were a core part of the localization process.
On Mozilla’s knowledgebase article for localization contributions, the documented process is to send a locale leader a private message to get started.
Let’s take a look at the kinds of things you do as a locale leader:
- Greet new members of the SUMO community who want to localize into your language
- Work together with other Locale Leaders and Reviewers on guiding all Editors in their work:
- through 1:1 mentoring on language and quality
- through documentation (for example, a Style Guide for your locale)
- Help organize and attend regional and global Mozilla events
- Communicate with and be a part of the global localization community
- Provide fair reviews of contributions provided by all Editors in your locale – and provide constructive feedback on their quality, which includes:
- Approving good revisions and encouraging Editors to continue their great work
- Rejecting revisions that can be improved, and letting their authors know what and why could be better
You can see that locale leaders do a lot of work to create community around localization.
This is all work that Mozilla is throwing away in its move to machine translation.
It is easy to see why marsf if angry and in pain. As a locale leader, marsf maintained the Japanese style guide. As a contributor for over 20 years, marsf likely had a hand in nearly every article on the locale.
Those were the articles that were overwritten by Mozilla and it’s machine translation bot, sumobot. The overwritten articles represented years of effort - a real labor of love, given that volunteers are unpaid.
Without discussion, without communication, without testing, untold years of human effort were overwritten by a machine with no love in its heart.
It is obvious that locale leaders are unable to foster a culture to train new contributors in process and style if AI is providing machine translations.
At this point, I want to thank marsf.
Thank you for the over 20 years as a Mozillian. Thank you for helping Mozilla create culture. Thank you for helping millions of Japanese Mozilla fans. Thank you for caring.
Some commenters said that none of this really mattered. Machine translations are good now, it’s not like we’re really missing anything.
I got a great comment on YouTube from pandakekok9 that dispels that notion. They said that Mozilla shouldn’t be calling what sumobot is doing “localization” if what it is doing is translation.
If that was the intent Mozilla, maybe don’t call what you’re doing “localization” then and just call it literal translation? A crucial difference between localization and translation is that former DOES add and change stuff that would not be found or recognizable in the original. As much as localization gets flak recently from Western fans of anime there are instances where localization works better than simply translating. Watch an episode of Keroro Gunsou / Sgt. Frog in English dub first, then the original Japanese dub with English subtitles. Each version has their own jokes and references that their intended audience get!
Localise.com says the difference between translation and localization is:
Translation is the process of converting text from one language to another. Localization goes beyond translation to ensure content is culturally appropriate and well-received in the target market.
Translation prioritizes language accuracy, while localization pays specific attention to cultural, social, and linguistic nuances.
Before Mozilla introduced machine translations to SUMO, locale contributors were referencing their style guides to localize content, like the Japanese one.
You might think machine translation is good now – we even have it in Firefox as a feature. Machine translation can be good – but is it better than a human that that lives in the locale and is consulting the style guide?
What Mozilla is telling us is that yes actually, the bots are better than a human.
Mozilla gave linuxiac a statement that doesn’t tell the truth.
These changes were designed to deliver additional translation support to our community and provide even more articles in local languages. Machine translation helps fill in the gaps, while contributors continue to review, edit, and approve translations to ensure quality and cultural accuracy. We introduced the change by sharing the update publicly, holding a call with the contributor community, and notifying each locale in advance of activation.
Mozilla says that the point of machine translations is to fill in the gaps, and that humans continue to review and approve translations.
But marsf is telling us otherwise: the bot isn’t filling in the gaps, it is overwriting stuff written by humans. Humans don’t need to approve the bot, the bot approves itself.
Mozilla knew when introducing machine translations that the bot doesn’t understand the style guides across various locales. Months later, marsf pointed out the same fact in their quit note.
A contributor on the call pointed out that in Dutch, there may be two words for a button, and that Firefox may use one - the localization community on SUMO would obviously always use the correct one. That is just one example, and yet – one not handled by the machine translation.
In the community call introducing machine translations, Mozilla said that they realize that AI makes mistakes and that they don’t want to force this onto the community.
Months later, when marsf pointed out that human contributions were being overwritten, Mozilla staff instead explained that it is logical for machines to overwrite human contributions.
Mozilla clearly understands on multiple levels that the AI doesn’t actually localize articles, it simply translates them, If Mozilla cared about that, Mozilla would simply revert the changes sumobot made, and the locale leader could work with developers to ensure that sumobot adhered to the guidelines in place for the locale.
Why hasn’t that happened?
Everyone is on the same page: the AI doesn’t do localization.
Since Mozilla is going forward with overwriting already localized articles with machine translated slop, Mozilla is telling their userbase that machine translations are good enough.
If Mozilla thought localization mattered, they would let their localizers words’ stand, instead of automatically believing that the bots are doing a better job.
According to the latest documentation on Machine Translations on SUMO, Mozilla says:
If your revision is based on the MT version, your changes will not require additional approval before publishing.
Mozilla is saying that they trust machine translation more than human contributions, even when those contributions have been previously approved.
This leaves locale leaders in a very strange place. They are very clearly being ignored in the move to AI, and Mozilla has said nothing about their role going forward.
More miscommunication, I guess.
On this Thanksgiving day, let us give thanks to marsf and to all the other contributors on SUMO whose contributions are being unceremoniously overwritten by a bot that has no connection to the locale it is slopping about.
Long live Mozilla!
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