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Title: Japanese Volunteer Translators Quit After Mozilla Begins Using
Translation Bot

Link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/11/08/0754...

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."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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