It’s sad to see a community built with love for 20 years end like this. AI should help people, not replace the heart behind their work.
End of Japanese community
51–60 of 820 posts
Re: End of Japanese community
#52I've been studying Japanese for 15+ years and have really come to loathe machine translations from English. While generally the meaning gets across, they're very unnatural and often use words in contexts that sound weird or are just flat out wrong.
Re: End of Japanese community
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why? 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.
From my read, the software didn't go wrong. It did exactly what they intended it to -- machine translations replaced handwritten translations provided by community volunteers. Seems like a pretty big middle finger to those volunteers. 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 wit…
Those are a huge number of assumptions you're making, absolutely none of which are in the post.
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.
Re: End of Japanese community
#54Some people do these type of contribution or charity work not just to do some good but also to feel some autonomy and mastery in a world were much of the regular top down driven drudgery work does not provide much of that feeling. These people are canaries in the coal mine. I expect more people feel a loss of purpose and rise of anxiety and depression in the world.
Yeah I’m not even sure it’s easy to decide which side is in the right here and it’s not as simple as people think it is. 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 c…
> Mozilla is painted bad here, but who knows if the automated translations do not help more people than it hurts the translators.
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.
Re: End of Japanese community
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
They said sorry for how you feel about it which is insincere and unhelpful.
How? 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.
But he lists the problems? Pretty unambiguously.
Re: End of Japanese community
#56As a multilingual/multicultural human it’s been pretty weird witnessing what AI translation has been doing to regional languages & cultures on the internet in the last few years. 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 la…
The global trend might not reverse, but surely the people in those cultures are going to push back on low quality content and "the market will sort it out", right? For example, Mistral is has a clear interest in being the "most native-French-speaking LLM", and with that expertise they could also grow to other languages where English-native LLMs are poorly received.
Re: End of Japanese community
#57As a multilingual/multicultural human it’s been pretty weird witnessing what AI translation has been doing to regional languages & cultures on the internet in the last few years. 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 la…
I've really disliked Reddit's auto-translation. I'm bilingual (English & Japanese) and when I search for things only to get an auto-translated reddit thread it really is bizarre. The references, flow of the conversation, etc. are all just off and it feels weird.
Re: End of Japanese community
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
How? 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.
But he lists the problems? Pretty unambiguously.
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?
Re: End of Japanese community
#59As a multilingual/multicultural human it’s been pretty weird witnessing what AI translation has been doing to regional languages & cultures on the internet in the last few years. 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 la…
I'm a native English speaker fluent in Japanese, recently moved to Japan this year. The one that really gets me lately is YouTube now automatically dubbing over content in Japanese that was originally in English. It's... so uncanny.
I'm in a similar situation. I really wish there was a way to stop YouTube from suggesting me auto-dubbed videos.
Re: End of Japanese community
#60I'm sorry for how you feel about us kicking you in the balls. 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.
Yeah, the “I’m sorry you feel this way” response really irked me too. There are so many different ways to respond that would have been more appropriate and conveyed the same message.