The leader of the Japanese community SUMO (SUpport.Mozilla.Org), which provides user support and writes articles on the website support.mozilla.org, has announced its closure in protest against the imposition of the automated translation system "sumobot." On October 22, without consulting the community, Mozilla deployed this system to automatically translate articles from the support.mozilla.org knowledge base.
As a result, approximately 300 articles written by native Japanese speakers were replaced with machine translations of English-language articles, the quality of which is unacceptable. The proposed machine translation does not follow accepted translation rules and is not localized for the specific needs of Japanese users.
The machine translation system was immediately deployed on production servers without prior testing in a test environment. Direct machine translation of all archived articles was automatically approved for publication without peer review. A bot-based approval process was also introduced, requiring 72 hours of source article updates, which hinders the learning curve for new contributors.
The community is unable to control the bot's operation or influence its actions. The changes introduced are perceived as a wholesale destruction of years of community work and a violation of Mozilla's mission. Consequently, the leader of the Japanese community, SUMO, announced that he will cease his participation in maintaining support.mozilla.org and will no longer use his previously completed translations to train Mozilla's AI systems.
Source: opennet.ru
