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End of Japanese community

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Re: End of Japanese community

#191

Post by numpad0 »

jogu wrote: post #57
gyomu wrote: post #18

As 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.

Use `https://google .com/search?q=-tl%20%s` as your search engine in the browser. Adding "-tl" to search terms remove most translated results from Google Search results. For now anyways.

Re: End of Japanese community

#193

Post by avadodin »

gyomu wrote: post #42
daemoens wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any examples of American expressions young generations are using in French?

The ones that are easiest to point to are turns of phrase like “living your best life”, “that feeling when you…”, etc.

I don't think the LLMs are to blame here. Not yet, at least.

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.

Re: End of Japanese community

#194

Post by rendaw »

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.

Re: End of Japanese community

#195

Post by tehwebguy »

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?

It’s really not a word choice thing (though it’s definitely the favorite word choice of orgs who are committed to not doing anything about it).

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.

Re: End of Japanese community

#196

Post by Symbiote »

crazygringo wrote: post #74
dingnuts wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and actually understanding their contributors would require a lot more than a fucking "quick call" 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

What are you talking about? 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 wor…

It is absolutely insulting. The manager/administrator doesn't apologise, but instead is "sorry for how you and the Japanese community feel". They are dismissive of the concerns as just a "quick call" is proposed, in a short response to a detailed message.

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.

Re: End of Japanese community

#197

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

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.

Japanese can especially be tricky to machine-translate because often the subject is missing from a sentence, where it would be required in an equivalent English sentence. The machine translation tends to insert its best guess of a subject (usually "I" or "you"), which can often flip a sentence's meaning inside-out.

Re: End of Japanese community

#198

Post by tpxl »

krick wrote: post #96
jogu wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

(Unlike GP) I don't actually have a problem with your assumptions. They seem likely to me. But I still have a problem with the whole sentiment of, uh, people on your side of the discussion. 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 r…

> Would it be better than trying to set up a call and discuss things, try to find some compromise

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.

Re: End of Japanese community

#199

Post by tsimionescu »

crazygringo wrote: post #74
dingnuts wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and actually understanding their contributors would require a lot more than a fucking "quick call" 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

What are you talking about? 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 wor…

No, a quick call is not a courteous first step when someone tells you that you've destroyed 20 years of their work and they no longer want to have anything to do with you.

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.

Re: End of Japanese community

#200

Post by ludwik »

crazygringo wrote: post #98
hattmall wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 atten…

> 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. 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 t…

I think you misunderstood what people are taking issue with. You explain that this matter is complicated and non-trivial - and yes, that’s exactly the point!

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.

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