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End of Japanese community

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Re: End of Japanese community

#81

Post by kerakaali »

crazygringo wrote: post #31
jahsome wrote: post #10

I'm not really able to understand the finer details but I think I picked up enough to get the broad strokes. 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.

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.

> the fastest way for both parties is over the phone ASAP rather than through a bunch of emails

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.

Re: End of Japanese community

#82

Post by jacquesm »

chao- wrote: post #26
jahsome wrote: post #10

I'm not really able to understand the finer details but I think I picked up enough to get the broad strokes. 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.

I am fascinated by the nuanced opinions people have about word choice. What phrase would you use to ask someone to discuss a matter, but which you feel would be more appropriate for this kind of situation?

'We're sorry you feel this way' implies that this is the fault of the person that feels that way, not of the party that made them feel that way. Given the very clear message this was entirely uncalled for. This is not the kind of feeling that goes away by being talked down to like that, it might go away after a reversal of a very bad policy decision and a very sincere apology about a mistake that was made and even then the damage is severe enough that I would not be surprised if the person that was slighted decided to stick to their decision.

Re: End of Japanese community

#83

Post by hattmall »

crazygringo wrote: post #31
jahsome wrote: post #10

I'm not really able to understand the finer details but I think I picked up enough to get the broad strokes. 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.

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.

But he fairly in depth described the problem and his reasoning for why it is a problem. There's nothing really to "jump on a quick call" about without actually first addressing the issues. Plus it just sounds, for lack of a better term, retarded. First off, in comparison to basically any other communication, calls aren't quick. Much less the one that you have to schedule around time zones. Calls require focused attention which if you are used to multi-tasking are a huge drain. Secondly I don't really feel like going too deep, but the use of the verb jump is like a bludgeon to the frontal lobe of anyone that's had to spend time listening to buzzword heavy C-suite speeches when they could have been doing their actual work.

Very bill lumbergh energy.

Re: End of Japanese community

#84

Post by [deleted] »

jogu wrote: post #65
crazygringo wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 un…

Hence why I said "from my read". This is how I view the situation, and why the lead is reacting the way they are. > 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…

[deleted]

Re: End of Japanese community

#85

Post by jacquesm »

jwpapi wrote: post #40
kaveh_h wrote: post #17

Some 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…

> 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.

- 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.

Re: End of Japanese community

#86

Post by ezoe »

panny wrote: post #76
ezoe wrote: post #66

When the machine automation quality became okay enough, this conflict of interest happens. 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 licen…

You can rescind a license. If you own a property, it is yours. Even if you licensed it to someone, you own it and you can kick someone off. They can later address you for a breach of license, but it's still your property. You own it. 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 sumob…

Once your work is published under Creative Commons license, it is irreversible. No matter you have a copyright or not. You can't undo it the fact at one point you published your work in one of Creative Commons license(there are multiple incompatible Creative Commons licenses so it's bit complicated).

You can make updated version of your work to non-CC, but the version you published under CC is CC.

Re: End of Japanese community

#87

Post by ehnto »

shusaku wrote: post #29

It’s a shame because “improve an off the shelf llm ti translate in line with this large dataset we prepared” is precisely the kind of project people love to work on. It could have been a chance to immortalize the hard work they did up until now.

Is it? I don't think you quite understood the issue.

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.

Re: End of Japanese community

#88

Post by withinrafael »

jahsome wrote: post #10

I'm not really able to understand the finer details but I think I picked up enough to get the broad strokes. 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.

Agree. "what you're struggling with" did it for me.

Re: End of Japanese community

#89

Post by rtpg »

crazygringo wrote: post #31
jahsome wrote: post #10

I'm not really able to understand the finer details but I think I picked up enough to get the broad strokes. 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.

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.

>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.

- 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.

Re: End of Japanese community

#90

Post by crazygringo »

kerakaali wrote: post #81
crazygringo wrote: post #31

Earlier 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.

> the fastest way for both parties is over the phone ASAP rather than through a bunch of emails 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 entire…

> felt entirely tone-deaf and corporate in nature. Especially in context of this being in response to the Japanese team

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.

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