That's it.
Anything else you read into this is going to be fraught with your own coloring based on a hundred words written in text (a notoriously difficult medium to establish emotional communication over).
Regardless of how nice or not-nice the text may sound to the various cultures that have weighed in so far, the right thing to do is talk voice/video and hash out what the problems are, and work together to come up with a solution that will satisfy everyone.
That's what communication is about.
> I'm sorry for how you and the Japanese community feel about the MT workflow that we just recently introduced. Would you be interested to hop on a call with us to talk about this further? We want to make sure we trully understand what you're struggling with.
> My timezone is UTC+7, so it should be easier for us to set up time. Let me know how that sound!
What a horribly condescending and patronising response. If I'd received this it would just further vindicate my decision to quit.
It just looks like someone trying to get in contact and help out. I could've written this myself, genuinely trying to help.
English is also not my mother tongue, but this translates to "I'm sorry you feel like that, but we don't care or change anything, can I call you to convince you into doing things our way while completely being off the record?" in my mind.
This is forceful and rude in my culture, but it's very rude and a no-no in Japanese culture AFAIK.
If the person wanted to help genuinely, I'd expect to read something like "I'm sorry you feel like this. I read your comments but I want to clarify some points so I can transfer these up the chain with utmost clarity. We might have made some mistakes and don't want to leave you out in the cold".
But this is a response to someone who has just announced that they are quitting an organization they had spent 20 years of their life volunteering for, because of the disrespect they have felt from the org. This is not a "hop on a call" moment. This is a "please accept to meet so I can apologize in person, and see if we can repair this" moment, preferably after acknowledging the disrespect.
Doesn't seem weird to me, seems apt to ask to escalate the method of communication when a serious issue like this arises.
Would you consider it more respectful to deal with this issue just by posting in the thread?
Also while it's phrased as a question, it doesn't offer any alternative next step. So a better approach would be writing down the initial questions you have and then offer that you'd be open for a call if the OP prefers that. If they don't, they can immediately engage with your questions, and they are open to everybody else in the community. Whereas right now if they say "no, I don't want to call you" that's all you've given them.
(To be clear I can easily believe the writer of the response is not intending any of that and means well, but that's how it comes across)
It's like how you say "How are you" when you really don't care but it's just how you start a conversation.
If someone is frustrated, the following chats won't do much really. They have already built a wall, and we need to meet around it, not throw our letters over it.
My life experience does tell me that this is often not the case: if people are already frustrated and have built a wall, it is better to use something more impersonal, like such an online text discussion.
It is clearly this. Management hates written communication.
In the follow-up, any words concerning how the person feels, words on how to talk about this further, and wanting to truly understand what he just wrote in plain and simple terms simply reek strongly of "we really won't change anything, we've made our decision, we are disagree with you but we want you to agree with what we're already doing".
I can hear the exact same tone in exact similar situations with various customer service reps, HR, corporate smooth-talkers, public officials/politicians where the decision is already written in stone and they just pretend they're listening to the customers/employees/citizens affected to quiet down the criticism.
it's american english for "oh this must be hard for you. how can we help you to cope?" and no intent to change.
a better response would rather be:
"We're sorry, we were not aware. please can we meet and you help us understand? so we can fix this situation? We'd also like to share our intentions and we hope together we can improve the situation."
telling
The whole organisation was very efficiently structured with two separate layers of managers - those who had actual decision power, and a separate layer whose task was to 'deal with us employees' but no decision power. All communication flowing one way, the same way shit drips (the only resource following 'trickle-down' mechanics). The only time I got into contact with the former level, was after I had put in my resignation; then they suddenly wanted a 1-1 to "see if there was anything they should learn from this" (presumably to sharpen/hone their skills in mistreating the employee level more efficiently in the future).
To me that's very condescending, like someone who reads but doesn't understand
Borderline AI response
And personally offering a call is like a sidestep "lets move this problem out of the public discourse" which is especially funny considering it's about a forum
E.g. figure out why this happened, express why it shouldn't have happened, why it should happen never again, how it is understandable how they feel, express that you cannot expect them to come back, make them an actual offer that would make them come back (e.g. by giving them a better place at the table or offering compensation), etc.
But "I am sorry you feel" is bordering on gaslighting. That is as if you are sorry your wife feels sad after you beat them. You should feel sorry and ashamed for doing the beating, not for how someone feels as a result of it.
The described things are clearly unacceptable and whether someone feels outrage or not doesn't make them more or less acceptable.
> I'm sorry for how you and the Japanese community feel [...]
He's not talking about what he feels - but a very real change, detrimental change of workflow. Simply not addressed.
A decent answer would have been worded among the lines of:
"I am personally deeply sorry to see you go [acknowledge you take their decision serious]. I don't know the details, but if what you describe is true (and I have no reason to doubt it), this is clearly unacceptable and should never have happened [acknowledge the issue is serious and confirm it wasn't intentional]. You feeling betrayed as a result of this is only natural and understandable, and it is Mozilla that should feel ashamed for it coming to this [validate feeling, admit guilt]. I will investigate why this happened and want to find ways to ensure something like this never happens again [show that you're willing to do something substential solbing the root of the problem]. Nobody should have their hard work just automatically replaced by AI, not you, nor anybody else [afirm you're on the same page as them by appeal to general principle]. I know you likely don't want to have anything to do with this now, but I would be deeply grateful if you had a moment to talk about this with me, personally, not as a member of Mozilla but as a member of the community [ask them about help, acknowledging you can't expect any, show that you care about this beyond any purely official duties]."
Of course that means some work, but this is how I would answer such a thing.
It’s a tonedeaf response from the staff person. Zero respect for what’s clearly many, many hours of contribured work.
There were very clear statements of what will happen and why. First acknowledge those, express you are sorry for what happened and hint some mea culpa and how you plan to solve it.
Only then if you feel the need to talk realize that you are the one begging them, not the other way around.
I’m honestly struggling to think of a more insulting way to respond to this. At least “Fuck off” isn’t pretending to care, it’s fewer words to read and isn’t asking for an indeterminate amount of time from you.
b) don't look like you are trying to take the conversation out of the community space it's happening in and/or hiding details by going to a private call (you can offer a call, but it shouldn't be the expectation)
c) Acknowledge the concrete complaints made. Are you truly "struggling to understand" what someone means when they complain that it didn't happen in a staging environment first?
d) a-c also lead to "don't sound like any cookie-cutter PR response to a complaint ever, people have learned those are not genuine". Especially if you are a project that makes a big deal out of its community interacting with said community.
e) ideally announce some concrete first step, e.g. pausing the bot
Don't answer when you haven't done your homework. Either you check for yourself if what they claim has happened happened and acknowledge the fuckup or you just trust them as go on "if this is true and we have no reason not to trust you, it should never have happened".
But not understanding? The description of the incident was pretty clear. Maybe think about it and investigate till you understand what the problem is, and then answer.
You've turned this around into a very different quote, and shouldn't use quote marks for that. They wrote:
> We want to make sure we trully understand what you're struggling with.
I don't like their response and agree with a lot of people in the thread it looks like they are trying to do the call to take it private. But we don't have to make up stuff.
Sure there may be more fine detail to understand around the guidelines etc, but first you should acknowledge that (A) your bot fucked up big time, (B) everybody would be pissed if years of work would be overwritten in such disrespectful manner and (C) that this isn't how you want to treat your community.
If you don't manage that this person made the right call when they decided to leave.
Also I'd expect if a person volunteers as translator they'd be pretty decent at speaking.
Translators (of texts) are not interpreters.
I am not a translator and English is not my 1st language (technically) - I'd have no issues 'hopping' on a call.
> We want to make sure we trully understand what you're struggling with.
The post literally starts with a list of grievances. Maybe ask the AI for an executive summary and the key points.
It is normal to want to discuss in order to check if that was the bug, in which case fixing the bug would have solved the issues.
Mozilla's response should not be limited to clarifying these grievances. But it could have been all the staff member who responded could do.
It sounds like Mozilla just turned on the machine without consulting the human translators to see if the machine actually worked in a useful manner.
Yes. And someone should make a real apology. But learning what the machine did wrong is part of fixing a machine.
Saving zero dollars and making the product worse is not important, only that there doesn’t seem to be a browser monopoly is.
This happens all the time, in every US company I know. It's as if the Americans where entirely oblivious to the fact that the rest of the world exists.
Looking through that wiki there seems to be a lot of things that ML would get wrong.
I'm sure some translators were using ML before it was integrated, and those guidelines are here in particular to tell them about those problems.
Also, ML is now really good to translate between European languages, but Japanese is very different in its structure so ML from English to Japanese is not as good. I'm sure some people who only know English/French/Spanish/German saw that ML is pretty good, and don't realize that for some other language it just doesn't work.
As somebody who has to regularly bear "German" machine-translated UIs and manuals that originate in English, I can only say: No, it's not. It's atrocious.
The core issue here is the way the bot was deployed. The fact that they had the poor taste to make it auto-replace articles written by their own volunteers is idiotic and disrespectful in the extreme. A new bot should work entirely in the back end, sending proposals for translations to the volunteers, who can choose to accept them or ignore them. Once the rate of acceptance is very high, for a specific individual language, then you might consider automating further.
And yes, this effort needs to be done for each language separately. Just because the bot works well in Italian doesn't in any way guarantee that it will work well in Japanese. Machine translation quality varies wildly by language, this is a well known and obvious fact.
Typically, when a new page is written in English, don't automatically generate a version in all languages. When a translator starts creating the page in their language, provide a button to pre-fill with ML translation if they want to.
And for users, you can display the English version with a message, "this is not translated in your language yet but you can read an ML version if you want".
The person replying is probably not an expert in this. But they want to get more details so they can figure out how to get it to the right people with more information.
This is how it's supposed to work.
Some people just like drama.
Especially when AI is involved, the anti-AI team feels like they need to step up to the plate.
If the bot has the power to overrule the volunteer translation teams, the entire power structure is wrong from the get go.
I have had to cooperate with coporate
No, some of us can see into the future, because it flows from the past. When management shits on 20 years of work and breaks everything after not listening to your warnings, they don't suddenly start listening and understanding out of nowhere.
Or maybe an offer to set up a call and talk about the problem and possible solutions in person is not such a bad move after all? Seriously, I don't see how you can be mad at the fact that a representative of an organization wants to discuss the actual problem with an actual member of the community for a change, instead of just writing the usual "sorry but not sorry" corporate bullshit message and call it a day. Maybe it won't solve anything and they won't find a common ground anyway, but still, I cannot imagine a more honest attempt at trying.
First you have to stop the destruction. Then you can talk about how to make the bot work for humans, instead of against them.
"Explain what's wrong and how to fix it" is the wrong approach. if you need it explained to you what was broken, then you're not the expert here, just the local tinpot dictator.
With the AI juggernaut picking up steam, i expect this is going to happen sooner rather than later.
That said, Mozilla clearly handled this the wrong way; they should have informed the volunteers before throwing the switch.
There was a period where every company was trying to "crowd source" free labor. It died off because people didn't like working for corporations for free.
I can see why they have it under Mozilla.org. And lots of companies have community support.
But I do think we should ask ourselves whether companies have some sort of moral obligation to continue relying on unpaid labor because it might make the unpaid laborers feel a sense of meaning. I'm very sympathetic to the need to have a sense of meaning. But I'm less sympathetic to for-profit companies relying on unpaid labor and especially to the idea that we should encourage more of it.
I too would be upset if an organization threw out a decade of translation work without any warning or discussion, in favor of a robot pretending to understand my language and failing.
Even the paid professionals often started to work for free and then were hired by some company and the reality is that someone who is good at something and willing to do it for free is either a very good Samaritan, or there is some other issue at stake and in the end prominent free software figures often have fairly heated public keyboard wars over things with each other and most of all seem strangely fiercely loyal tribalists who suffer from an extreme case of n.i.h.-syndrome.
Mozilla is painted bad here, but who knows if the automated translations do not help more people than it hurts the translators.
What if the reduced financial pressure allows Mozilla to focus more on privacy and less on ads.
Unfortunately these things are really gray, but you really can’t expect a company to keep you paying in good will.
- No prior communications.
- No discussion about what uses the contributed information was being put to.
- No discussion about the release and the parameters around the operation of the bot.
- No discussion about whether or not this was a desirable in the first place (with the community, not just internally).
- Flippant tone to someone who is clearly severely insulted.
If it was a paid job and you treated the person who did it like this it would already be beyond rude, if it is a volunteer group then it is more than enough to throw in the towel. This isn't gray.
Everyone whose native language is not English knows. Seriously, people with this attitude should be forced to run their browser and mail client with a plugin to run everything through a couple of machine translation roundtrips. Give it two months, and I guarantee you'll understand.
If I were Lidl, I'd shut that down immediately.
The Japanese translation community leader knows, as will many members of that community, and other Japanese speakers.
This is not difficult.
Mozilla should have discussed this with the translators in advance at least.
> What if the reduced financial pressure allows Mozilla to focus more on privacy and less on ads.
My impression was marsf was a volunteer.
Mozilla destroyed decades of work on a production server without even discussing it with the passionate volunteers that provided them free labor for decades. Didn’t even evaluate on a staging server to check for quality issues.
The AI isn’t the focus of the issue. The management decision to disregard and disrespect their own unpaid contributors and their organization’s history is a clear indication of Mozilla’s current and future priorities.
The Mozilla leadership seems to have a unfortunate tendency to emulate the behaviors of the tech companies that their core Firefox project is often seen as an alternative too.
Firefox is a good browser but is prevented from capitalizing on the skepticism the consumers feel toward the tech sector by Mozilla using the exact same language and dark UI pattern to promote things like pocket that the user-base never asked for, and jump on to the lets enforce the use of AI everywhere that's driving discontent within the proprietary ecosystems, and this is yet another example of this class of behavior from the Mozilla leadership.
I don't think it's malevolence from the mozilla leadership team but more that if you hang around people who have bet their lifesaving on the success of cloud based LLMs, being cautious and making their use "optional" might begin to sound like a really controversial position even if that's actually what the users/community want from Mozilla.
Firefox market share have been declining and it's not easy to point to any obvious technical problem, so the reason for the decline is likely that the Mozilla corporation keep messing up the narrative by acting like just another Silicon Valley tech firm.
But of course, they need "competitive" salaries so they can hire "great talent" from the tech sector so that the company doesn't fall behind or something.
If it's Mozilla signed then you could give it extra permissions so it still works the same, but then people who it offends can remove it.
Like how their tab containers system is a (not pre-installed) extension
like what percent of firefox users do you think actually care about this?
Increasingly it isn’t. It’s crashing 2 or 3 times a day for me now, and video conferencing is barely usable.
Much less crashing in with it in the form of a “SumoBot,” as Mozilla seems to have done to its non-English communities… (with the disclaimer that I have zero insight into Mozilla’s process here outside of this writer’s account).
It puts a name to a considerate consensus-based way to approach change, that seems humane (and effective) in any culture—leave it to the Japanese to have a specific term for it…
I have to say it feels like a really familiar, NGO-flavored disrespect, though: “we’re doing this favor for underrepresented language communities,” regardless of whether they want/need it or not.
“There’s only X number of you having to shoulder the load in XX sub-community, don’t you want us to impose a bunch of ‘help’?”
Well, no, if the choice is between a formidable volume of slop and a smaller but well-executed volume of volunteer labor-of-love…
(…I say as a person very much without all sides of the story, and shooting from the hip a bit. I don’t mean to impugn anybody’s intentions, and I imagine at the end of the day we’re all on the same side here.)
"many of the early RFCs were actual Requests for Comments and were titled as such to avoid sounding too declarative and to encourage discussion.[8][9] The RFC leaves questions open and is written in a less formal style. This less formal style is now typical of Internet Draft documents, the precursor step before being approved as an RFC." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Request_for_Comments
For any RFC, there will be a "comment" after publication from someone who did not take earlier comments seriously enough to read them.
I already suspect that Duolingo destroyed real people's recording of Spanish conversations and replaced them with AI. For example I can quite often hear continental Spanish accent which has never been taught to me before (as I started with Duolingo as a freshman) - it used to be always American Spanish accent. Wrongly cut conversions is another matter.
If you have a better solution to correct an error or solve a problem than having a call/meeting and openly discuss situation and possible resolutions - I would love to know about that.
Acknowledging the mistake immediately seems like a good start.
I understand people have sympathy inclination to victims, so everyone would assume the victim is good and other side is bad. I have worked long enough with japanese people knowing they can throw unpredictable tantrums.
As a manager, what would be your best course of action to deal with similar situation?
Life doesn't always have to be from the perspective from “a manager”, these are community volunteers doing untold hours of unpaid work. Just be a person, whose acquaintance is upset you replaced their handmade postcard with an AI-generated one.
Agree on manager view, I was rather putting situation in a wrong perspective. It doesn't change the questions though - what would you do to resolve the situation (not to make the other side feel good)?
Long time in Japan too, I would not consider newamashi as being Japan's strengths.
The sort of consensus building ultimately involves having to do stuff to make people's opinions feel taken care of, even if their concerns are outright wrong. And you end up having to make some awkward deals.
Like with all this "Japanese business culture" stuff though, I feel like it's pretty universal in some degrees or another everywhere. Who's out there just doing things without getting _any_ form of backchannel checking first? Who wants to be surprised at random announcements from people you're working with? Apart from Musk types.
But of course some people are very comfortable just ripping the band aid off and putting people in awkward spots, because "of course" they have the right opinion and plan already.
Why context matters in judging whether some practice is good or not.
IMHO the only correct way to measure the effectiveness of decision making is from the quality of executed outcomes. It is somewhat nonsensical to sever decisions from execution, and claim that decisions have been made rapidly if the decision doesn't lend itself to crisp execution. Without that, decisions are merely intentions.
To be clear this is Japan we’re talking about with the twenty years part. The same thing applies in the US but on smaller timescales though. If people feel appreciated and respected and you have good relationships, they will basically back whatever you want.
I tend to lean towards thinking backchanneling makes sense as a general vibe, if only because it's a way of doing things that lets people have dignity, and the costs _can be_ low.
Just that lacking context one really can't make that many blanket statements.
I think the difficult cases come when people's interests aren't aligned. If you're coordinating with a vendor to basically detangle yourself from their vendor-specific tooling to be able to move away from them, at some level it doesn't really make sense to read them in on that.
There are degrees to this, and I think you can argue both sides here (so ultimately it's a question of what you want to do), but parties are rarely neutral. So the tough discussions come from ones where one party is going to be losing out on something.
How do you know what "the right thing" is at the outset without talking to the stakeholders?
I'm dealing with someone's "the right thing" that is actually wrong and dumb. They didn't ask us before rolling out the new "standard."
I think most people have at least one issue where they discount one of the stakeholder's judgement, it's all fairly contextual. But hey, if you're the CEO of some company you have the ability to act on that discounting.
Also, his demanding of not using his work for AI training is nonsense. Because entire articles, this one included is published under a Creative Commons license.
Didn't he agree on that?
Mozilla must reject his further contribution because he stated he don't understand the term of Creative Commons license. His wish granted I guess.
And
> Licensees may copy, distribute, display, perform and make derivative works and remixes based on it only if they GIVE THE AUTHOR or licensor THE CREDITS
Really though, all I needed to see was the phrase "jump on a quick call" to form an irrationally strong opinion. That phrase instantly warms my entire body with rage.
Then later, if it comes up again, they can just say "well we discussed this in a call previously and decided it was best to do it anyway" cutting off discussion and not presenting the reasoning.
It suggests a decision can be reversed with a quick call, which questions one’s choices or conviction. As if to suggest the choice was made without considerable thought and care. It’s such an unserious tone to a moment that’s very serious to the other.
It's almost always (like this time) "I'm sorry you feel that way, please spend more of your free time<EOF>", and sometimes (like this time) "[we're doing it anyway but maybe we'll make some changes]".
It feels insulting because it is insulting. The decision has been made, they just want to not feel bad about you being insulted.
So, even in the best "sorry we screwed up" scenario, the quick call covers their butt and let them leeway to backtrack as needed. That's also part of why we viscerally react to opaque meetings IMHO.
I guess it acts as a mirror of sorts though, because that's precisely how this decision appears to have been made in the first place. But it's clear that whoever represents Mozilla there is already assuming the fault lies with the person that just got kicked.
> I'm sorry for how you and the Japanese community feel ...
That may seem like an apology, but it's more a dismissing their issue as "that's a you problem".
It would be such irony if they asked GPT to reword it to a more polite tone though...
I was impressed. They actually did make their position clear, and in public, whereas I was trying to smooth things over in private. Me trying to influence and cajole behind the scenes was insult to the risk they took by putting themselves out there.
A good lesson in respect.
It seems like someone who has no awareness of the problem, who wants to learn more about the problem, and the fastest way for both parties is over the phone ASAP rather than through a bunch of emails.
When software goes wrong, you need as much information as possible to figure it how to fix it.
- No apology
- No "we stopped the bot for now"
"We're sorry for how you feel" is enterprise for "we think you're whining". Maybe not what the person meant but how anyone is going to read it.
The original sin here is Mozilla just enabling this without any input from the active translation community.
This isn't a new problem, loads of Japanese translations from tech companies have been garbage for a while. People sticking things into machine translation, translators missing context so having absolutely nothing to go on. Circle CI, when they announced their Japan office, put out a statement that was _clearly_ written in English first, then translated without any effort of localization. Plenty of UIs just have "wrong text" in actions. etc etc.
Anyways the point is just that one side of this relationship here clearly cares about the problem way less, and _even when presented with that fact_, does not even pretend to be actually sorry for the damage they are causing.
- No "we stopped the bot for now"
"We're sorry for how you feel" is enterprise for "we think you're whining".
Anyways the point is just that one side of this relationship here clearly cares about the problem way less, and _even when presented with that fact_, does not even pretend to be actually sorry for the damage they are causing.
This is just a single initial reply from a "community support manager" in Indonesia. It's not from the Mozilla CEO or the leader of the project. They surely don't have the power to stop the bot. But what they can do is find it more over a call, and then who to escalate it to. Then maybe it does get turned off before it's fixed or changed.
You seem to be confusing someone in customer support with someone who holds power over entire projects. I don't understand how you think a customer support person should be able to just turn off software across the globe in response to a single short message on a forum with few details.
Regardless they are representing the company. If they aren't the right person to respond - they should not have responded and kicked it up the chain/over the fence to the right person - instead of responding by offering to waste the complainants time on a call with someone you are asserting is not the right person to be handling this. Supposing you are correct about their position, it makes their response far worse, not better.
It is true both they and the person they are responding to are marked as "SUMO Locale Leaders"... but it seems rather clear from the context that is not the role they are inhabiting in their (non) apology and request for a "quick call" with the complainant.
The language they use is certainly not the language a peer would be expected to use either.
I do get what you're saying, and it's not like I think the CSM should be fired for the message. I just think it's bad comms.
Here are some alternative choices:
- post nothing, figure out more internally (community support is also about vouching for people!)
- post something more personal like "Thank you for posting this. I'm looking into who is working on this bot to get this information in front of them". Perhaps not allowed by Mozilla's policies
- Do some DMing (again, more personal, allowing for something direct)
But to your point... it's one person's message, and on both sides these are likely people where English isn't their native language. I'm assuming that community support managers are paid roles at mozilla, but maybe not.
And like... yeah, at one point you go into whatever company chat and you start barking up the chain. That's the work
Second, this "community support forum" isn't just a corporate help desk. It's a forum for community supporters of Mozilla, an open source organisation for which community contributions are hugely important. Mozilla can't just fuck over parts of it's community and expect that to be business as usual.
The lead realized that Mozilla doesn't care about their opinion (they did this without discussing with them) nor do they care about the work they were doing (by replacing their work with machine translations). A "quick call" doesn't solve this.
Generally speaking, orgs aren't trying to replace high-quality human translations with lower-quality machine translations. They are often trying to put machine translations in where there are no translations, though. Getting the balance right requires fine-tuning. And fine-tuning requires a quick call to start to better understand the issues in more detail.
How would you handle updates to an article? Would you blindly replace all existing translations or would you notify the maintainers and wait for them to get around to it?
I wouldn't be surprised if orgs blindly opted for the first, which also means that a single spelling correction would be enough to overwrite days of work.
Seems that this is exactly what Mozilla did? And Microsoft, and Reddit, etc.
Companies are absolutely falling over themselves to replace high quality human translations with lower quality machine translation. I’m not sure how a hacker news poster could miss this trend.
> They are often trying to put machine translations in where there are no translations, though.
And at what point are all of the translations done by machines and the work the community is doing no longer needed? At the very least, the nature of their work will change and I think they're not interested in participating anymore.
Let's just assume it is how you say it is. (The only assumption I am not willing to make is that people at Mozilla are already convinced it was a bad idea after all.) What in your opinion would be the right move now, after they rolled this bullshit auto-translator out and pissed off a lot of people in the community, including a major contributor for the last 20 years? Surely they could just ignore him and go on with this auto-translation initiative (BTW, thay don't even have to worry about whatever he wants to "prohibit" to do with his translations, because he waived off his rights by posting them). Would it be better than trying to set up a call and discuss things, try to find some compromise, gather a number of recommendations she may then pass onto people working on the auto-translator initiative (because surely this Kiki person, whoever she is, is not the sole person responsible for this and cannot magically just fix the situation)?
I think it's clear that Mozilla wants machine translation to take a bigger role in producing localized content, and this new process will be a large shift in the way things have been done. I think it's fair for Mozilla to do this, but I also think it's fair for the maintainer to be upset with this decision and no longer want to volunteer his time to clean up slop.
The initial response feels premature and tone deaf which is why people are irked by it.
Given that Mozilla "shot first" so to speak, the onus is on them to take action first e.g. disable the bot, revert changes to articles, etc. Only after doing this can discussion on a path forward happen.
Because a lot of people in this thread are whin… ahem, expressing their discontent with Mozilla, as we all usually do, but I've yet to see anybody to propose anything realistic at all, let alone better than ask an offended community member for a call and at least to try to talk it through and establish what could be some actionable steps to remedy the situation.
Are you serious? First, make a decision without consulting anyone, foist it on people that don't want it, then 'try to find a compromise'? If you care about people, you consult them before you make a decision, not after they've been burnt by it.
In Japan? Sincere appology followed by resignation.
No, the Japanese absolutely do not set up a call to discuss things after you've scerwed and disrespected them. They respectfully give you the cold shoulder.
Mozilla should not be surprised if their market share dwindles in Japan after this.
that's the problem. stop thinking about the org and think about the person. these are volunteers who feel taken advantage of, being met with corporate jargon
fly out and take him to dinner if you actually give a shit. or write a check. a "quick call" is so insulting
A quick call is a courteous first step. The other person might not have time for a long call, so you want to show you're respecting their time. Then you follow it up with a longer meeting with the relevant engineer and manager, etc. "Taking someone to dinner" is not the first step here. The way to show you care is by trying to understand the situation before anything else.
There is no world in which this is insulting.
Suggesting that such an offence can be resolved by a "quick call" is extraordinarily disrespectful. A courteous first step would have been to apologise profusely, revert the damage that the bot did, and ask to set up a call to discuss what it might take to re-enable it in the future.
Had I been thrown in this situation:
"Dear Marsf,
I'm sorry that sumobot was introduced to the Japanese SUMO community without consultation. I have disabled it, and the development team are working to undo the changes it has made. We will revert articles to how they were on 21 October. Contributions made since then by the Japanese community could be retained in the staging system, where they can be approved or rejected. Please let me know whether you would like this, or would prefer them to be discarded returning the whole system to the 21 October.
We very much appreciate the Japanese SUMO community's contributions and your work as locale leader, and we hope it can continue. Sumobot will remain disabled on the Japanese translation. If, with some changes, it could be useful to you, we can discuss that here, or schedule a meeting if you prefer.
Thank you"
In this exact situation, before sending I'd check it with my Japanese colleague.
I doubt "take them out to dinner" is the right solution in this situation, but any attempt at redressal must understand the above point and acknowledge it publicly.
"Ask for forgiveness rather than permission" is far from universally true, and carries massive cultural baggage. You cannot operate within that framework and expect all humans to cooperate with you.
Very bill lumbergh energy.
No, he didn't. I'll repeat a comment I made elsewhere:
The problems are nowhere near actionable. A lot more information is needed. E.g. literally the first bullet: "It doesn't follow our translation guidelines". OK -- where are those guidelines? Is there a way to get it to follow them, like another commenter says works? Does the person need help following the process for that? Or is there a bug? Etc.
These are the things a call can clarify. It's the necessary first step, so why are people complaining?
> Calls require focused attention which if you are used to multi-tasking are a huge drain.
Solving important problems requires focused attention. Which is why you get on calls to solve them when they're urgent and important, and not something that can be multitasked.
People don’t have a problem with real-time communication via audio or video in general. They have a problem with the suggestion that it’s a trivial issue that can be easily fixed by "jumping on a quick call."
The point about there being a "fairly in-depth" description of the issues isn’t that there’s nothing more to discuss - fixing those issues would obviously require talking through the specifics. The point is that this is a real problem that requires action and commitment, so suggesting it’s a non-issue that can be clarified with “a quick call” comes off as dismissive and unproductive, whether that’s intentional or not.
In a company you should never ever "quick call" someone (especially on a group forum) who has presented a genuine list of grievances against whatever you're doing, unless you're subtly trying to pull rank to override those grievances.
> Would you be interested to hop on a call with us to talk about this further? We want to make sure we trully understand what you're struggling with.
I don't disagree with your statement, but I read the sentence: "Would you be interested to hop on a call with us to talk about this further?" with a similar gross reaction as the OP comment did.
Reading that in response to Marsf's original message of airing grievances and feelings of disrespect towards his work felt entirely tone-deaf and corporate in nature. Especially in context of this being in response to the Japanese team, where Japanese business communication norms are often at odds with the American standard.
You might think that this method of communication is inefficient, but the heart of the matter seems that the Japanese team finds the very emphasis on efficiency as disrespectful when it comes at the cost of the human element of respect.
The person is a "Support Community Manager" in Indonesia if you click on their link. They're not the CEO of Mozilla who is supposed to be an expert in intercultural communication. I think you're being kind of harsh on someone who is presumably not high-level and just trying to do their job and get more information to be helpful.
This is completely backwards. The CEO is not expected to manage intercultural communication. You know whose job that is? The community manager.
The community manager for Indonesia wouldn't be expected to manage communication with Japan, but managing local contributors is absolutely a job for the community manager and not the CEO.
Instead it is usually a PR tactic. The goal of the call requester is to get your acquiescence. Most people are less likely to be confrontational and stand up for themselves when presented with a human - voice, video, or in person. So, the context of a call makes it much more likely for marsf to backpedal from their strongly presented opinion without gaining anything.
This is a common sleazy sales tactic. The stereotypical overly aggressive car salesman would much rather speak to you in person than via email even though the same information can be conveyed. It is also used in PR and HR situations to grind out dissenters, so it comes off in this context as corporate and impersonal.
If they truly think they're in the right, they can discuss it in public, like the poster already did.
There might be an element of personality there. I was texting with a real estate agent (for apartment rental, not purchase) in China once, when he decided that as long as we were talking he might as well call me. He didn't bother mentioning this to me beforehand.
Of course, all I could do was hang up on him. It's not like I could understand what he said. And I don't think that was especially difficult to foresee.
So he wasted some time and seriously annoyed me in the most predictable way possible. Why? Not for any reason specific to the situation. Maybe there's emphatic training somewhere that says "always call". Or maybe the type of people who become salesmen have a deep, deep instinct to call.
It was this exact part of the conversation that touched me negatively too. marsf expresses some very valid criticism that, instead of being publicly addressed, is being handled by "let's discuss it privately". This always means that they don't want to discuss, they just want to shut you down.
This stuck out to me as rude. I would never say that to someone on my team who expressed serious concerns, far less than this person quitting after years of dedication.
I would offer an apology, explanation, and follow up questions to understand more in public, then say I’m happy to set up time to talk privately if they would like to or feel more comfortable.
'I'm sorry that our actions caused such distress' come a bit closer to being a true apology.
Importantly, 'if' was changed to 'that'.
It’s that the complaint is descriptive on 5 or so actual problems and a couple of impacts that stem from them and the response doesn’t address any of them, it just looks like an attempt to take this issue out of the public space.
The only thing to ask for here are some clarifications and expanded explanations so that the original text does not get misunderstood. If the Mozilla representative does see such potential points he can perfectly ask for them publicly.
> I'm so sorry about this. We definitely screwed up here and want to
> fix things. We want to chat to you in a call if you're able?
> We will stop changing things, issue a moratorium on AI while we
> figure things out. You and communities like yours are central to
> our entire existence and purpose at Mozilla.The fact that the preceding apology was absolutely awful does not help. "I'm sorry for how you feel" is wrong, since nobody asked them to react to "feelings" but the clearly delineated problems with the automation that Mozilla rolled out.
Asking to discuss something like this over synchronous voice comms is basically asking to go off the record and handle things privately. Sometimes that's appropriate, but if that's what the correspondant wanted they would have asked for it.
These three things combine to tell anyone who is paying attention that this is damage control, not meaningful engagement, and it's offensive to act this way toward someone who has put this much time into your project.
And they’re happy to eat up more of that person’s time, probably ask them to explain all over again. Also it seems they don’t think it is worth a long call… just a quick one.
“Sorry for your feelings” comes off as dismissive and avoiding taking ownership for the lost work and years of volunteer contributions.
In the end it may boil down to some strong hatred for AI, this seems to be very common recently and "I prohibit to use all my translation as learning data for SUMO bot and AIs" certainly points that way. If that is the root cause then it may be impossible to resolve to the satisfaction of both sides.
I can’t parse what’s going on from the post or the comments here, and there’s no navigation on that page to anywhere but “support “
It sounds like something is happening. What is it?
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/forums/contributors/717387...
Could this have been a mistake rather than a malicious act?
Is there a slightly different phrasing that would make this better, or is it the sentiment that's crap?
"I'm sorry for how these changes impacted you"? Personally just the sentiment feels insincere to me haha.
The change did not fall out of thin air. It was something they did. If they do not own it explicitly then it’s insincere full stop.
However, "let's hop on a call" is just additionally dismissive.
* The infantile corporate-cutesy wording "hop on a call" is not appropriate when talking to somebody who feels that you deeply wronged them. It has the same vibes as cheery "Remember: At Juicero, we are all one big family!" signatures on termination notices, and Corporate Memphis.
* In the first sentence, Kiki says "about the MT workflow that we just recently introduced". Why is this level of detail shoehorned in? Everyone in that conversation already knows what it is about. It's as if Kiki can't resist the temptation to inject an ad/brag about their recently introduced workflow for any drive-by readers. "I'm sorry you were dissatisfied with your Apple(R) iPlunger X(TM), which is now available at major retailers for only $599!"
They don't know what exactly has gone wrong. All they can say sorry for is for how the person is feeling. Then they want to get on a call to learn more. Which is the start of helping.
The response is as sincere and helpful as it could be for an initial response from someone who wants to figure out what the problem is.
E.g. literally the first bullet: "It doesn't follow our translation guidelines". OK -- where are those guidelines? Is there a way to get it to follow them, like another commenter says works? Does the person need help following the process for that? Or is there a bug? Etc.
These are the things a call can clarify. It's the necessary first step, so why are people complaining?
It's entirely possible that such information is well-known to everyone involved in the translation community.
I would consider it outright insulting if someone who ostensibly "wants to help" doesn't know basic information like that - if the people making decisions about SumoBot are NOT aware of basic information like "where to find the local translation guidelines" then they are presumably not qualified to release a tool like SumoBot in the first place.
They should have understood the guidelines before turning on their machine translation in a given locality.
- 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.
Before fixing it and re-enabling it in some capacity, they could work with marsf to find a solution.
> Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Would you like to hop on a quick call to chat about this further?
Just a quick lil call.
Quick lil ol' callerino.
Hoppity hip hop.
Free tier Gemini CLI literally writes Android app for me by just endlessly wondering in English. AGI's here. And it struggles with Japanese. How!?
In some fields and languages, this is easier, but as soon as you need the LLM to follow rigorous instructions, it'll fail.
It doesn't mention mistranslating, so it's difficult to know the root of the problem is AI "struggling".
> It doesn't follow our translation guidelines. > It doesn't respect current localization for Japanese users, so they were lost.
I believe this is the root of the problem. There are define processes and guidelines, and LLM isn't following it. Whether these guidelines were prompted or not is unclear but regardless it should've been verified by the community leaders before it's GA'ed
Talk about being tone deaf. This was so incredibly rude. No consult, no request whether they wanted this or not. Mozilla keeps finding new ways to shoot itself in the foot, these are probably some of the most loyal people that you could wish for, that's a precious resource if there ever was one. And to add insult to injury they want to them 'hop on a call' and to 'trully[sic] understand what you're struggling with' even though they just spelled it out as clear as day.
This is a trivial operation for me to do on MediaWiki with a bot, so it must be straightforward to do here too. I think "Ask forgiveness, not permission" is fine in order to move things forward, but you do have "ask forgiveness".
It probably made a lot of sense in certain contexts, and certain side effects weren't predicted, or it just has bugs that need fixing.
Presumably nothing malicious or stupid. But just ironing out the kinks.
Sure we had machine translation before, but it was still a little off. Now the latest language models get us 99.9% there, so they are judged good enough to deploy at scale. What results is a weird twilight zone where everything is in your language, except it feels kind of wrong and doesn’t really communicate in ways specific to the culture from which the language is.
You’re in France, you search for something, a thread pops up with everyone interacting in French - seems reasonable enough, but it just reads kind of weird? Then a message is entirely out of place, and you realize that you’re reading an English language thread translated to French.
Or your mom sends you a screenshot of a Facebook thread in her native language that has her worked up - and reading it, you realize it’s an LLM translation of something that should have no bearing on her.
Same with various support pages on websites - it all reads mostly fine until you hit a weird sentence where the LLM messed up and then you’re transported back to the reality that what you’re reading was not authored by anyone who can actually operate in that language/culture.
There’s a lot of nuance in language beyond the words - how you express disagreement in English is not how you express disagreement in Japanese, how you address the reader in French is not the same as in Korean, etc. Machine translation flattens all modes of expression into a weird culturally en-US biased soup (because that’s where the companies are headquartered and where the language models are trained).
I have no illusions that this trend will reverse - high quality translation work is skill and time consuming, and thanks to LLMs anyone on Earth can now localize anything they want in any language they want for ~free in ~0 time.
The weirdest part is seeing this bubble up to the real world. I’ve been hearing young people use turns of phrases/expressions that I recognize as distinctly American, except not in English.
The classic linguist response to this, which I subscribe to, is “no language is fixed, language is ever evolving in response to various external cultural pressures“. Which is true. But it doesn’t make our post-LLM language landscape any less weird.
I can read both just fine. Platforms defaulting to always showing one or things like youtube auto-translating titles all to English or all to Spanish is frustrating because I always have to do the math in my head as to "Why does this thing I'm reading sound weird as hell" and realize its because it was lost in translation.
Hell, I watch creators/consume content where the creator or writer themself speaks/writes interchangeably in both languages often within the same sentence because Spanglish is very common, and that just destroys most of these automated generators brains.
but it only applies to that specific video, and yeah, it makes no sense that this passed sniff tests for Google.
And it cannot be disabled on mobile. The numbers must go up, I guess, but in my case it greatly reduced my usage of the app.
It was a fun little tool, but I think that really drove home for me how different Japanese is from English in how it structures itself.
There is an air of arrogance in proclaiming that it is merely language barriers that are an issue. But of course it's a convenient argument for big tech forcing MTL on all of us.
But it ultimately marginalizes smaller communities and kills languages. Cultural genocide if you will.
The dangerous thing is that the current state of MTL is serviceable and even usable, but a bilingual speaker will immediately know something is off.
I have noticed this both for French and German, two languages with lots of training material. I imagine it's much much worse for smaller languages and/or communities.
As more and more content on the web is automatically translated, we will all start to talk like translated-from-English LLMs, and that is a future I'm not looking forward to.
Calquing has been a common thing since long before AI translators, and it's not notable that it now happens for modern memes. It happens whenever a language is notable and nearby; English has a lot of calques from Greek/Latin/German/French as a result.
Ironically, "calque" is a loanword, but "loanword" is a calque.
This is caused by people active in English-speaking communities translating memes literally and spreading them in their native language communities as-is.
As the meme spreads, monolingual speakers begin using the same format and eventually they reference it off-line.
Having said that, SOTA models got much better at this kinda stuff. They're quite able to write in a way that is indistinguishable from a native speaker, colloquialisms and all, with the right prompting.
But SOTA models are also expensive. Most automated translations are done with something way cheaper and worse.
You’re in France, you search for something, a thread pops up with everyone interacting in French - seems reasonable enough, but it just reads kind of weird? Then a message is entirely out of place, and you realize that you’re reading an English language thread translated to French.
Disgusting behavior.
You mean the two+ decades of labour of love was always done to be a nameless contribution to the AI machine? Somehow I think he would have picked another hobby if he had known that back then.
This issue is specifically centred around the human element of the work and organisation. The translators were doing good work, they wanted to continue that work. Why it's important that the work done is by a human is probably only partially about quality of output and likely more about authenticity of output. The human element is not recorded in the final translation output, but it is important to people that they know something was processed by a human who had heart and the right intentions.
Not that I entirely disagree with the conclusion here, but…
It feels like that same sentiment can be used to justify all sorts of shitty translation output, like a dialog saying cutesy “let’s get you signed in”, or having dialogs with “got it” on the button label. Sure, it’s so “human” and has “heart”, but also enrages me to my very core and makes me want to find whoever wrote it and punch them in the face as hard as I can.
I would like much less “human” in my software translations, to be honest. Give me dry, clear, unambiguous descriptions of what’s happening please. If an LLM can do that and strike a consistent tone, I don’t really care much at all about the human element going into it.
it's a grift of an organization and it reflects in the simplest ways like this.
> I request to remove all my translation from learned data of SUMO AIs.
It's Mozilla's data...
> explicit violation to the Mozilla mission
I'm not sure what this is referring to. I don't see any explicit violation of Mozilla.org's mission. If anything it seems consistent with that mission to provide universal translation with quick turnaround.
His demand of not using his existing work for AI training is nonsense. Because the entire article is stated:
> Portions of this content are ©1998–2025 by individual mozilla.org contributors. Content available under a Creative Commons license.
Didn't he agree on that?
So, this contributor revealed he doesn't understand the license his work is published under. As such, Mozilla must refuse his contribution because he don't understand the idea behind Creative Commons license. His wish granted I guess.
If mozilla wants to tell him that his work was valuable and therefore has grounds to sue him for rescinding the license, they will have a lot of difficulty proving that after their sumobot summarily deleted years of it for no good reason at a whim.
Good for him. He should probably consider suing them for destruction of his work.
You can make updated version of your work to non-CC, but the version you published under CC is CC.
I am not sure how it is under Japanese law, but in some countries a creator cannot be stripped of his rights by agreeing to a license. Even without that there is often a way to rescind any gift given in good faith if the receipients behavior warrants it.
My problem with this type of gate keeping is that machine learning does open up translations that are accurate to the masses. It is quaint having a real human do your translations though. Kind of like having a real human drive your car or do your housework. Not everyone can afford that luxury. But, on the other hand, having a singular organization own the training data and the model and not publishing the model itself is where the gatekeeping continues.
But I'm not a lawyer so I don't know and in real business, they casually use the word "license" in Japan. But in my opinion, everything is contract under Japanese law.
Or to put another way, a license (a contract) is a tuple (terms, jurisdiction), and the juridical evaluation process will take both into account.
CC licenses (and some other foss licenses, e.g. Apache 2.0) are explicitly irrevocable... which is probably enough for US law though I still wonder to some degree if there isn't some country that would take issue with that term... especially a country which recognizes "Moral rights".
Some other FOSS licenses (GPL for instance) contain explicit terms allowing revocation under certain circumstances (but otherwise claim to be irrevocable).
In particular, the primary purpose of AI as we know it is to strip off attribution, which is explicitly forbidden by basically every license in existence.
To nitpick "explicitly forbidden" isn't quite right. Licenses basically only grant more permissions, they can't remove them. It's explicitly excluded from the rights granted by the license, but it's not explicitly forbidden because it is the law that might or might not forbid the activity, not the license.
And the fact 20+ years Mozilla contributor didn't understand it too. You can't restrict the usage to things you don't like it under CC.
Ironically, Japanese work culture encourages over-communication. It seems that open-source is considered a counter-culture that they want to escape japanese work culture from.
How exactly did you manage to place the blame for no communication on Japanese contributors here given the actual complaint in question?