Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

End of Japanese community

support.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 820 posts

Re: End of Japanese community

#211

Post by Symbiote »

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…

> who knows if the automated translations do not help more people than it hurts the translators.

The Japanese translation community leader knows, as will many members of that community, and other Japanese speakers.

This is not difficult.

Re: End of Japanese community

#212

Post by tsimionescu »

pseudalopex wrote: post #19
totetsu wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These ones? https://github.com/mozilla-japan/translation/wiki/L10N-Guide... Looking through that wiki there seems to be a lot of things that ML would get wrong.

I edited my comment to clarify I hope. Imagining what it could have done wrong and knowing what it did wrong are different.

Do you expect someone who has just watched a bot replace 20 years of their work, with no prior consultation or review, to now write a detailed post about how translations by the bot are not specifically wrong?

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.

Re: End of Japanese community

#213

Post by small_scombrus »

layer8 wrote: post #20
barbazoo wrote: post #2

> They are all happened on the product server, not on staging server. I understand that this is mass destruction of our work and explicit violation to the Mozilla mission, allowed officially. Could this have been a mistake rather than a malicious act?

The third, more likely option is that it was a careless act. Clearly a mistake in any case.

What's the saying?

> Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

Re: End of Japanese community

#214

Post by thomassmith65 »

yigalirani wrote: post #209

If i was this guy, i would take all the translations and move them to his own independent site with proper promotion so that Japanese speaker can find it easily

I'd just begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure: https://ladybird.org/#gi

Re: End of Japanese community

#215

Post by rf15 »

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.

Shoot first, jump on a quick call later.

Re: End of Japanese community

#216

Post by lopis »

Stranger43 wrote: post #169

I think a fundamental lack of understanding/humility is the core of this conflict along with Mozilla's long and storied history of creating controversies/problems out of thin air. 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…

It's the mismstch of expectations that causes good communities to create drama. If this was Google, no one would care, as one expects Google to just do what is best for the business. But with companies like Mozilla we expect a bit better. But the truth is they are barely better and the leadership plays by the same rulebook.

Re: End of Japanese community

#217

Post by small_scombrus »

Stranger43 wrote: post #169

I think a fundamental lack of understanding/humility is the core of this conflict along with Mozilla's long and storied history of creating controversies/problems out of thin air. 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…

I'm always surprised that stuff like the AI integration isn't done as a pre-installed extension.

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

Re: End of Japanese community

#218

Post by mock-possum »

rendaw wrote: post #194
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.

It wasn't mentioned in other replies, but "jump on a quick call" also means very strongly "let's move to a place with no public record and private participation where nobody else can join in". 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.

Just record the needing, have an ai transcription service take notes. Then there’s a record.

Re: End of Japanese community

#219

Post by small_scombrus »

lopis wrote: post #216
Stranger43 wrote: post #169

I think a fundamental lack of understanding/humility is the core of this conflict along with Mozilla's long and storied history of creating controversies/problems out of thin air. 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…

It's the mismstch of expectations that causes good communities to create drama. If this was Google, no one would care, as one expects Google to just do what is best for the business. But with companies like Mozilla we expect a bit better. But the truth is they are barely better and the leadership plays by the same rulebook.

People did used to have decent expectations for Google back when they at least pretended to care about the "Do no evil" tagline

Re: End of Japanese community

#220

Post by Root_Denied »

numpad0 wrote: post #162
totetsu wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW I recently was watching something that i did not realise had been auto translated from Chinese to English. It was kind of a technical topic, but still it seemed perfectly natural. It struck me that .. as much as conflict hawks and clash of culture theorists might want to do their best to construct an enemy, if we get past the disorientation of language barriers, then mostly people are the same. If AI translation…

The Standard Chinese language was always known to be oddly syntactically close to US English. No one calls it an Indo-European language, but they sometimes feel closer together than English and French on surface levels. Japanese is not like that - even human translations between anything to/from Japanese sound translated.

There used to be a website called "Translation Party" where you would input a sentence in English and it would auto-translate it to Japanese and back to English over and over until it got to some equilibrium (where the translations were effectively the same) or hit it's upper bound of like 20 ish swings back and forth.

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.

Post reply on HN