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End of Japanese community

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Re: End of Japanese community

#481

Post by skylurk »

nozilla wrote: post #252

> Hi Marsf, > 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. > My timezone is UTC+7, so it should be easier for us to set up time. Let me know how that sound! What a horribly condescending and patronising resp…

To me it comes across like a community outreach flavour of sealioning. I wonder if there's a different name for that?

Re: End of Japanese community

#482

Post by magpi3 »

kstenerud wrote: post #369

I know that everyone has already given their opinions about what kinds of people are involved and their motivations, but this is really about two fallible humans, one listing grievances and another asking to open a communication channel. That's it. Anything else you read into this is going to be fraught with your own coloring based on a hundred words written in text (a notoriously difficult medium to establish emotio…

It's someone asking to open up a communication channel after they (Mozilla) had already overwritten another person's work to the point that person is no longer willing to participate in the organization. What is there to talk about?

The volunteer was kind to list their grievances before bouncing. A lot of people would have just quietly quit.

Re: End of Japanese community

#483

Post by dcminter »

whstl wrote: post #431
apexalpha wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's great but we're not all native English speakers. And "I'm sorry for you" seems like a hollow phrase to a Dutch person but this is used all the time in English. It's like how you say "How are you" when you really don't care but it's just how you start a conversation.

Not saying you "have" to know or that the interpretation is even correct for this case, but, just to explain: The "I'm sorry you feel this way" is quite a recent phenomenon. It started showing up in public apologies by companies and celebrities, purely for PR. It's basically a deflective euphemism for "I'm sorry that you don't like whatever happened" without really admitting culpability, sidestepping all responsibili…

"I'm sorry you feel that way" is shaped like an apology, but is essentially blaming the other party's feelings as being the problem.

"I'm sorry I did that" is an actual apology.

To be clear, I'm agreeing with you. I think that the former version emerged as it's litigation proof. Corporate PR can say that without it being an admission of anything if whatever they fucked up results in a lawsuit.

It has spread to personal communications from corporate ones and it's now so prevalent that it is possible someone might use it and actually mean a real apology. But it's ... tainted.

Re: End of Japanese community

#484

Post by gwd »

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.

Yeah, I occasionally tell my Chinese friends that the grammar of English and Chinese is actually pretty similar. If they respond with surprise, I'd say, "Have you ever tried to learn Turkish?" Chinese doesn't have conjugation; but the basic sentence structure (subject-verb-object, preposition, etc) are similar. There are of course loads of differences; but nothing nearly so deeply structural as Turkish, where you indicate relationships between things by adding suffixes; or Japanese, which just has a completely different way of bringing up topics.

Re: End of Japanese community

#485

Post by crote »

Blikkentrekker wrote: post #262
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.

Which I feel honestly in part explains why so many prominent figures in Free software development seem to have some mental issues to be honest. They in a way remind me of that person who at one point was responsible for over half of all edits on the Scots Wikipedia. Even the paid professionals often started to work for free and then were hired by some company and the reality is that someone who is good at something a…

Some people just want to contribute to a common cause. Some people just want to spend five minutes of their time to fix that one annoying papercut which been bothering them for ages, others just enjoy working together with friendly people to achieve something tangible they can be proud of.

In my opinion one of the biggest benefits of Github to the open-source community is that contributing now has extremely low barriers. It is absolutely trivial to put an "edit this page" link in your documentation which lets a complete stranger fix a typo and open a pull request within seconds - and seeing your fix go live within a few hours is absolutely magical. That kind of trivial contribution is a gateway drug to becoming a valued community member, and it is absolutely essential to maintaining a healthy ecosystem around open-source projects.

Re: End of Japanese community

#486

Post by braiamp »

Ekaros wrote: post #470
kstenerud wrote: post #369

I know that everyone has already given their opinions about what kinds of people are involved and their motivations, but this is really about two fallible humans, one listing grievances and another asking to open a communication channel. That's it. Anything else you read into this is going to be fraught with your own coloring based on a hundred words written in text (a notoriously difficult medium to establish emotio…

Wasn't there already a perfectly fine and seemingly fully functional communication channel in place? The one they answered in. I see absolutely zero reason not communicate in it. On other hand, it seems that early reply had zero effort or attempt to communicate. That is to identify what had happened and gather information and example themselves. But the absolute tiniest bit of effort in I would expect.

Dude, if someone is saying "hey we will pack up, we have nothing to do here" out of the blue, I would like a more nuanced conversation that written text could not hope to convey. We are humans and while reading is perfectly capable of relying information, it's unable to rely intention accurately. There's ton of information that is conveyed by the inflection of voice, demeanor, body language, etc.

Re: End of Japanese community

#487

Post by crote »

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

Everyone speaking more than one language knows. Human translations for things like software are bad enough as-is, but automated translations are universally horrible.

I set all of my software to English despite it not being my native language, simply because a lot of concepts don't translate cleanly and end up with forced and cringeworthy phrasing. Combine that with the un-Google-ability of translated errors and issues, and going for an interface in the native English verson is a no-brainer.

And that's with translations done by actual humans! Sites like Youtube have tried "helpfully" pushing machine translations on me for a looong time, and it is painfully clear to anyone speaking both the source language and the target language that the translation is absolute garbage and essentially unusable.

In fact, I barely speak any German (got a year or two of it in high school, but my grades were fairly embarrassing), but I prefer struggling with the native version over a machine translation. Given my knowledge of German-adjacent languages I can mostly make out the meaning of the original, and there's always the dictionary for the handful of words I'm not familiar with.

Re: End of Japanese community

#488

Post by small_scombrus »

a13n wrote: post #224
small_scombrus wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

ehh this reads a bit like the hn comments complaining about sites that don’t work with js disabled like what percent of firefox users do you think actually care about this?

I'm sure it's a very small amount, but as well as making me personally happy*, (I feel) it would play into their image as the good guy.

"Do you want the most minimal stripped down version of FireFox? Well you can have it!"

*and after all, isn't that what's really important /s

Re: End of Japanese community

#489

Post by tclancy »

meindnoch wrote: post #288
nozilla wrote: post #252

> Hi Marsf, > 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. > My timezone is UTC+7, so it should be easier for us to set up time. Let me know how that sound! What a horribly condescending and patronising resp…

I don't understand people like this. No, I don't want to "hop on a call", I've already written down everything. Can you not read?

Because so much nuance can be lost in writing, especially if both parties are working in a second language. There is a lot of value in actually talking to someone, especially in a fraught situation like this. Hearing the other person express genuine concern can do a lot to overcome the anger. Otherwise we tend to build up stories in our head about what the other person “really means” and those stories tend to be wildly negative.

Re: End of Japanese community

#490

Post by braiamp »

Note, and this is very important: marsf posted this at 2am pacific time. Kiki responded at 6am (I don't know it's timezone, but presuming anywhere in the US, it is literally the earliest it could have responded). Then afterwards, marsf have posted a response publicly. So, we don't know what happened since then. There have been 1 day and a half-ish and coordinating between timezones is interesting, to say the least.
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