Japanese Volunteer Translators Quit After Mozilla Begins Using Translation Bot

Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shared this report from Linuxiac:

The Japanese branch of Mozilla's Support Mozilla (SUMO) community — responsible for localizing and maintaining Japanese-language support documentation for Firefox and other Mozilla products (consisting of Japanese native speakers) — has officially disbanded after more than two decades of voluntary work...

SUMO, short for Support Mozilla, is the umbrella project for Mozilla's user support platform, support.mozilla.org, that brings together volunteers and contributors worldwide who translate, maintain, and update documentation, tutorials, and troubleshooting guides for Firefox, Thunderbird, and other Mozilla products... According to marsf, the long-time locale leader of the Japanese SUMO team, the decision to disband was triggered by the recent introduction of an automated translation system known as Sumobot. Deployed on October 22, the bot began editing and approving Japanese Knowledge Base articles without community oversight.


The article notes marsf's complaints in a post to the SUMO discussion forum, including the fact that the new automated system automatically approved machine-translated content with only a 72-hour window for human review. As a result, more than 300 Knowledge Base articles were overwritten on the production server, which marsf called 'mass destruction of our work.'

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