> 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 response. If I'd received this it would just further vindicate my decision to quit.
> I'm sorry for how you and the Japanese community feel about the MT workflow that we just recently introduced.
English is also not my mother tongue, but this translates to "I'm sorry you feel like that, but we don't care or change anything, can I call you to convince you into doing things our way while completely being off the record?" in my mind.
This is forceful and rude in my culture, but it's very rude and a no-no in Japanese culture AFAIK.
If the person wanted to help genuinely, I'd expect to read something like "I'm sorry you feel like this. I read your comments but I want to clarify some points so I can transfer these up the chain with utmost clarity. We might have made some mistakes and don't want to leave you out in the cold".
Every culture has a way of discussing and resolving disagreements. Some are noisier and some are calmer. Some cultures do this dance with "apparent" disrespect, with forceful exchanges, some with calmer and tidier demeanor.
Japanese are the latter. There's a polite dance of disagreement. Every side listens others with respect (with respect to the process even if they don't respect the others) and answer politely yet firmly.
This comment smells like there's already some disagreement under this, and none of them have been listened and they are steamrolled with the new workflow.
Implying "Hey you're overreacting, let us convince you" doesn't help on top of it.
Politely say "I don't care what you think but I won't change anything" is perfectly fine in Japanese culture. Taking an issue privately instead of showing disagreements in public is also perfectly fine for Japanese people.
The issue has nothing to do with Japanese culture, but with how you work with a community of volunteers over the web. "Let's jump on a call" is what you say to a coworker, not to a volunteer in an online community.
If this were some small bug report, even from someone pretty ticked off, I'd agree.
But this is a response to someone who has just announced that they are quitting an organization they had spent 20 years of their life volunteering for, because of the disrespect they have felt from the org. This is not a "hop on a call" moment. This is a "please accept to meet so I can apologize in person, and see if we can repair this" moment, preferably after acknowledging the disrespect.
It's a community matter posted in a public place, a non-statement with an immediate attempt to direct it to private conversation reads like trying to avoid attention to your mistakes (e.g. hypothetically you don't have to public admit you didn't do anything to check for guidelines to follow). More vibe-y, it all sounds very corporate, like any PR statement in response to criticism ever, or a manager writing to an employee in a big corp, not "humans working together in a community, and one of the humans is clearly pissed off right now".
Also while it's phrased as a question, it doesn't offer any alternative next step. So a better approach would be writing down the initial questions you have and then offer that you'd be open for a call if the OP prefers that. If they don't, they can immediately engage with your questions, and they are open to everybody else in the community. Whereas right now if they say "no, I don't want to call you" that's all you've given them.
(To be clear I can easily believe the writer of the response is not intending any of that and means well, but that's how it comes across)
Non-native here. People "hop on a call" to have a personal guide that helps in stepping through tasks of a proposed solution. Such a call is made to remove ambiguity and provide immediate feedback, to apply the solution as seamless as possible. Used in the context here (without a proposed solution) it just screams "let's avoid public outcry" with a touch of "why don't you overthink your annoyances with me".
"I'm sorry for how you feel" is widely accepted as a non-apology in English. Sincere apologies show awareness of how one's actions led to the situation that would require the apology.
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.
Given that the written complaint already had a list of ways Mozilla had stepped on the toes of those volunteers, expressing regret about their feelings without at least acknowledging that Mozilla's actions might have been rash is very condescending indeed. These volunteers are adding value to M's product for free and they are very angry and threatening to leave and this is your response? Basically saying "I'm sorry you're being such big babies, do you want some tissues?"...
Not a native speaker, but to me it reads as canned or AI generated response that acknowledges nothing in the post besides there being some kind of tiny disagreement. I don't see how "I'm sorry for how you feel about this" can be inteprented as anything other than "I'm not at fault, and I'm sorry I'll have to spend time pacifying you".
> As someone from the Netherlands I read absolutely 0 condescending or patronising behaviour in this.
To be fair, Dutch culture is known for its directness[0] and for not interpreting even the harshest criticism as offensive, so I'm not sure I would trust your judgment on this… :-D
I don't think there is something inherently patronizing about this. But this tone seems like the most generic possible American corporate faux-friendly tone.
In order to sound truly friendly, one has to break the script
I'm from the United States and I read the exact same thing that you did. Somebody really trying to help. Zero condescending or patronizing behavior. It seems like somebody doing their best to reach out and get in contact and yeah I agree completely that hell I could have written this myself. And probably have something like that before. I don't understand what culture would find that condescending at all.
I think there might be a disconnect on how people handle calls in the first place.
At this point getting on a call is seen as a major chore for a majority of people. It's an already tense situation, trying to defuse it by "hopping on a call" is just not great IMHO. They should at least acknowledge they're putting undue burden on the other side and are asking them to go the distance when they're already volunteering their time.
I'm saying that setting aside the opacity of moving from an public to a private setup.
This is a pointer to a somewhat US related POV, but this is nether a generational thing nor a limited phenomenon:
I'm from The Netherlands but have lived in the US for a while and unlike other country brethren responding in this thread, it did come across as condescending to me.
Trying to dissect why it comes across, I think it's just me kneejerking to the 'pattern' of specifically "I am sorry you feel that way". I think my kneejerk disdain of that turn of phrase is correct, though.
Being blunt here: Because that's a terrible apology! You are sorry that I feel this way? We're barely using the same dictionary here; how I feel about a thing is textbook 'stuff you cannot change or barely even fathom', so what is there to be sorry about? You might as well say "I'm sorry for the fact that 2 + 2 is 4". It's not apologetic in any way. It says sorry without taking even a millimeter of responsibility.
A minimal apology that is slightly less condescending might be "I am sorry how our choices led to you feeling this way" because at least now you're sorry about your choices instead of being sorry about how I feel.
I wouldn't want to be buoyed by false hope either, so taking as axiomatic that the moz team wants to hear how to improve matters but are not willing to completely 180º on their sumobot policies, something like: "I apologise for how we've kinda steamrolled y'all with rolling out sumobot. We were trying to improve the state of translations of our knowledge base articles and might have gone too far. We shouldn't have done it without keeping you out of the loop either. Is it possible to have a video call, apologise in person, and try to work out if there's a way sumobot can be helpful for all japanese language users of firefox in a way that works with your excellent work maintaining the KB so far?"
I get that it's just american corpospeak, "hop on a call". But the number of times something that's perfectly normal in dutch culture (a bit brash, but not at all intended to be rude) gets jumped on by americans as being ridiculously rude... well, trying to write a way to be culturally aware of the recipient has to be a two-way street, right?
I dont think this 'apology' is rude, not at all. But it's not apologetic. If you're peeved off at mozilla for foisting sumobot on you, you've already decided to cut ties, and then team mozilla tries to mend the relationship, this is a very poor attempt. In the context of an attempt to mend the relationship this is condescending. Or at least bad diplomacy.
I'm from the Netherlands as well and I wouldn't interpret this as condescending but as disingenuous corporate BS-speak where someone is doing damage control by showing "how much they value your opinion". And in the end not doing anything at all with your concerns.
I'd say otherwise - it's a reach out to have a relationship. It's hard to have human relationships only by writing. Of course the best way to build it is to meet in person, but if impossible - it's always good to have a video call.
If someone is frustrated, the following chats won't do much really. They have already built a wall, and we need to meet around it, not throw our letters over it.
Who wants "a relationship" here with some manager who has just delivered the standard corporate nonpology? The problems are listed in the first message, start by fixing them.
Your claim is based on the very strong assumption that if you have a phone or video call with a person that you already hate, things will get better.
My life experience does tell me that this is often not the case: if people are already frustrated and have built a wall, it is better to use something more impersonal, like such an online text discussion.
Then at least try to sound like a genuine human that cares and not a PR response when reaching out. Offer a "you can call me if you want" vs making the call the expectation (it's phrased as a question but there is no other path offered).
First of all, I'm shocked to learn about what happened. We at Mozilla had no idea that sumobot is wreaking such havoc on your work. Please accept my sincere apologies.
It would be a great pity to have all your precious work done, so we'll do our best to fix it. I would be very grateful if you could schedule a meeting with me so that I could understend the issues you described better so that they are fixed asap?
Once again, I'm very sorry for what happened and I hope in spite of that you can continue doing great work for the Japanese Mozilla community.
**
I'm not part of Mozilla or any of the communities and I understood the situation by reading the damn post, on the first time.
In the follow-up, any words concerning how the person feels, words on how to talk about this further, and wanting to truly understand what he just wrote in plain and simple terms simply reek strongly of "we really won't change anything, we've made our decision, we are disagree with you but we want you to agree with what we're already doing".
I can hear the exact same tone in exact similar situations with various customer service reps, HR, corporate smooth-talkers, public officials/politicians where the decision is already written in stone and they just pretend they're listening to the customers/employees/citizens affected to quiet down the criticism.
To add to this fire. I recently left my 'recently bought by private equity' workplace of 8 years to work somewhere else not-yet-ruined-by-PE (yet..)
A major part of my decision to quit was this communication pattern.
The whole organisation was very efficiently structured with two separate layers of managers - those who had actual decision power, and a separate layer whose task was to 'deal with us employees' but no decision power.
All communication flowing one way, the same way shit drips (the only resource following 'trickle-down' mechanics).
The only time I got into contact with the former level, was after I had put in my resignation; then they suddenly wanted a 1-1 to "see if there was anything they should learn from this" (presumably to sharpen/hone their skills in mistreating the employee level more efficiently in the future).
it's american english for "oh this must be hard for you. how can we help you to cope?" and no intent to change.
a better response would rather be:
"We're sorry, we were not aware. please can we meet and you help us understand? so we can fix this situation? We'd also like to share our intentions and we hope together we can improve the situation."
The person gives a clear, detailed answer in the post about their problems > "We want to make sure we trully understand what you're struggling with"
To me that's very condescending, like someone who reads but doesn't understand
Borderline AI response
And personally offering a call is like a sidestep "lets move this problem out of the public discourse" which is especially funny considering it's about a forum
> And personally offering a call is like a sidestep "lets move this problem out of the public discourse"
Maybe. But that’s also assuming the worst from the get go, and that’s no way to settle a dispute.
For all we know (which is very little, and thus should offer the benefit of the doubt), offering a call is an admission that text is an awful medium to resolve conflict: It’s time consuming for both parties and a poor conveyor of tone and nuance. Even writing this unimportant comment I had to stop and think and rewrite some parts to get it closer to the meaning I intend, but even so I fazer zero doubts someone will misunderstand it in the worst way imaginable.
Calls aren’t perfect either, but they allow you to understand in real time when a point is not getting through to the other person and calmly resolve each issue as it surfaces. It gets you on the same page faster.
After the call they can still decide to post their conclusions publicly if they so wish, but not every discussion needs to be public. It’s fine (and productive) for two people to discuss something in private and only have to worry about making themselves understood by the relevant party, not worry about having each word scrutinised by every internet rando.
This is the type of response you shouldn't make. Instead you should do your homework and then come back with the receipts.
E.g. figure out why this happened, express why it shouldn't have happened, why it should happen never again, how it is understandable how they feel, express that you cannot expect them to come back, make them an actual offer that would make them come back (e.g. by giving them a better place at the table or offering compensation), etc.
But "I am sorry you feel" is bordering on gaslighting. That is as if you are sorry your wife feels sad after you beat them. You should feel sorry and ashamed for doing the beating, not for how someone feels as a result of it.
The described things are clearly unacceptable and whether someone feels outrage or not doesn't make them more or less acceptable.
I can’t believe what I’m going to say now, but AIs are better at this. Granted, their apologies are good for shit since they have no agency and can’t really learn from their mistakes, but they at least leave no doubts at who is at fault and should be ashamed.
(Cue Gemini with its “I’m a disgrace” self-flagellation)
In addition to not responding to any of the specifics that the poster clearly put time into, there's also a huge mismatch in tone. In general, do not act very corporate when people are personally pissed off, this has a tendency to just annoy most people further.
Well. Too late. Now that they go you want to talk? If I was the one who finally had enough why the fuck would I want to talk to something I turned my back to?
There were very clear statements of what will happen and why. First acknowledge those, express you are sorry for what happened and hint some mea culpa and how you plan to solve it.
Only then if you feel the need to talk realize that you are the one begging them, not the other way around.
It is gaslighting even. It is extremely manipulative to be sorry about a thing someone else did, while in fact the the fuckup originated from you. Own it or offer to investigate/fix it.
A decent answer would have been worded among the lines of:
"I am personally deeply sorry to see you go [acknowledge you take their decision serious]. I don't know the details, but if what you describe is true (and I have no reason to doubt it), this is clearly unacceptable and should never have happened [acknowledge the issue is serious and confirm it wasn't intentional]. You feeling betrayed as a result of this is only natural and understandable, and it is Mozilla that should feel ashamed for it coming to this [validate feeling, admit guilt]. I will investigate why this happened and want to find ways to ensure something like this never happens again [show that you're willing to do something substential solbing the root of the problem]. Nobody should have their hard work just automatically replaced by AI, not you, nor anybody else [afirm you're on the same page as them by appeal to general principle]. I know you likely don't want to have anything to do with this now, but I would be deeply grateful if you had a moment to talk about this with me, personally, not as a member of Mozilla but as a member of the community [ask them about help, acknowledging you can't expect any, show that you care about this beyond any purely official duties]."
Of course that means some work, but this is how I would answer such a thing.
The OP/article is very clear and very direct on what the problems are. The response is so typical american conflict-shy “let’s talk so we can slowly dimish your critique, and also let’s do talking instead of writing so we cant really be held accountable for specifics”. And, to me it comes across as lazy: the op/article is very specific on the problems, just get to work already, no need to “further clarifications” (obviously disable that stupid bot for the japanese community; then get to work restoring original KBs from backups. Then reach out to talk about next steps)
It’s a tonedeaf response from the staff person. Zero respect for what’s clearly many, many hours of contribured work.
How would you form this response to make it less condensending and patronizing? I won't judge if it is patronizing or not because I'm not very good at this kind of thing but would like to understand the issue.
OP has given all that they need, English is probably not their first language, and the first response was to ask for even more unpaid time and labour (presumably in English) in a format that is likely much more difficult for them to summarise coherent thoughts succinctly in, while addressing zero of their issues. They’re asking for MORE effort of the volunteer to fix their bot’s fuckup.
I’m honestly struggling to think of a more insulting way to respond to this. At least “Fuck off” isn’t pretending to care, it’s fewer words to read and isn’t asking for an indeterminate amount of time from you.
a) don't apologize for the other persons feelings, but for your actions that lead to it
b) don't look like you are trying to take the conversation out of the community space it's happening in and/or hiding details by going to a private call (you can offer a call, but it shouldn't be the expectation)
c) Acknowledge the concrete complaints made. Are you truly "struggling to understand" what someone means when they complain that it didn't happen in a staging environment first?
d) a-c also lead to "don't sound like any cookie-cutter PR response to a complaint ever, people have learned those are not genuine". Especially if you are a project that makes a big deal out of its community interacting with said community.
e) ideally announce some concrete first step, e.g. pausing the bot
One point I'd like to add as someone who has worked in IT support for years:
Don't answer when you haven't done your homework. Either you check for yourself if what they claim has happened happened and acknowledge the fuckup or you just trust them as go on "if this is true and we have no reason not to trust you, it should never have happened".
But not understanding? The description of the incident was pretty clear. Maybe think about it and investigate till you understand what the problem is, and then answer.
Or answer being clear about that if you feel like you need to respond now. Acknowledge there is a problem, say you'll have to look into the details before you can say more, come back with specific questions if you need answers.
> Are you truly "struggling to understand" what someone means
You've turned this around into a very different quote, and shouldn't use quote marks for that. They wrote:
> We want to make sure we trully understand what you're struggling with.
I don't like their response and agree with a lot of people in the thread it looks like they are trying to do the call to take it private. But we don't have to make up stuff.
If the post gave any acknowledgement to the already stated complaints I'd agree with you, but it does not, and that does stand out and leads to my reading.
Yes, but what is there to understand? A bot erased the hard work of people. That is the point.
Sure there may be more fine detail to understand around the guidelines etc, but first you should acknowledge that (A) your bot fucked up big time, (B) everybody would be pissed if years of work would be overwritten in such disrespectful manner and (C) that this isn't how you want to treat your community.
If you don't manage that this person made the right call when they decided to leave.
Oops, sounds like we screwed up really badly. Sorry. :(
We'll turn off the sumobot, and put things back the way the SUMO Japanese community was used to operating.
Would you consider not quitting after we've put things back the way they were? :)
I don't get it. It's not the best possible phrasing, but people who find this sounds "horribly condescending" are excessively sensitive in my opinion. Like a grown man complaining about being "horribly hurt" when a careless passer-by bumped into him.
I'm sorry you don't get it and that you feel they're excessively sensitive. On the behalf of the HN community would you like to share with us more about how you feel about it so that we can better understand your position. I'm sure we can help you find the best possible phrasing to better express the excess of said sensitivity. We're sorry you've had to encounter such a wording and attitude on our forum.
Some grievances were vague. It doesn't follow our translation guidelines. What specific guidelines did it not follow? It doesn't respect current localization for Japanese users, so they were lost. What was not localized?
Mozilla's response should not be limited to clarifying these grievances. But it could have been all the staff member who responded could do.
Yes, that's why you engage with the people doing the work first and run it on a staging environment to see what would be overwritten. You test until it's working well enough to enhance the effort done by the translators.
Well, in this era Im not entirely sure the quality aspect is even considered. CEO wants AI? Then he will get it, so that the next earnings call can be bombastic!
Saving zero dollars and making the product worse is not important, only that there doesn’t seem to be a browser monopoly is.
What, you mean that US companies should ask their local branches before pushing changes in every countries? /s
This happens all the time, in every US company I know. It's as if the Americans where entirely oblivious to the fact that the rest of the world exists.
It might be more helpful to point out which guidelines it did follow. Humans are expected to read and obey these things - so presumably whoever deployed them will be aware and can demonstrate that they were followed.
Interestingly, it looks like some of the "bad examples" are precisely the kind of things ML would produce. Others are what non-native speakers would produce (starting with "あなたは" to translate a sentence starting by "you").
I'm sure some translators were using ML before it was integrated, and those guidelines are here in particular to tell them about those problems.
Also, ML is now really good to translate between European languages, but Japanese is very different in its structure so ML from English to Japanese is not as good. I'm sure some people who only know English/French/Spanish/German saw that ML is pretty good, and don't realize that for some other language it just doesn't work.
> Also, ML is now really good to translate between European languages
As somebody who has to regularly bear "German" machine-translated UIs and manuals that originate in English, I can only say: No, it's not. It's atrocious.
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.
I have your answer: you provide a tool for your translators, you don't unleash a bot that makes changes left and right and creates new pages.
Typically, when a new page is written in English, don't automatically generate a version in all languages. When a translator starts creating the page in their language, provide a button to pre-fill with ML translation if they want to.
And for users, you can display the English version with a message, "this is not translated in your language yet but you can read an ML version if you want".
I don't know why you're being downvoted, you're exactly right.
The person replying is probably not an expert in this. But they want to get more details so they can figure out how to get it to the right people with more information.
I wonder if you and the person who replied really understands how you feel when you have been part of something over 20 years and see it destroyed by tone deaf changes to text. I have no idea how Sumobot works, but it is easy to see how Mozilla or an organization with top down "ship-it-fast" incentives can trample a community led project. This is really not a question of AI, the same thing happens with professional translators.
> Same reason people here are taking "let's jump on a call" as some personal attack.
Some people just like drama.
No, some of us can see into the future, because it flows from the past. When management shits on 20 years of work and breaks everything after not listening to your warnings, they don't suddenly start listening and understanding out of nowhere.
The market fit of your words matter and the non apology "sorry you feel that way" doesn't help. It's one of those gnarly phrases that only get used if you feel the need to act but in reality don't want to. Maybe the person is sincere his words are tainted by the overuse in shady corp responses. If you are engaging with your community you need to know this otherwise you'll always look like a clown.
That's really a dumb complaint. Sure, nobody is happy with the situation, but what do you propose a better reaction should be? Ignore the guy? Immediately drop whatever they think is a good idea (even though it may be not — it's still a matter of perspective, and somebody surely thinks it was a good idea) because somebody was pissed off by it, hoping that maybe at least he may change his mind and continue business as usual after that?
Or maybe an offer to set up a call and talk about the problem and possible solutions in person is not such a bad move after all? Seriously, I don't see how you can be mad at the fact that a representative of an organization wants to discuss the actual problem with an actual member of the community for a change, instead of just writing the usual "sorry but not sorry" corporate bullshit message and call it a day. Maybe it won't solve anything and they won't find a common ground anyway, but still, I cannot imagine a more honest attempt at trying.
They had specific complaints. Either say, "we're willing to work to change the things that you're complaining about", or say, "sorry, we're not going to change those things". The wishy washy bullshit they did is effectively ignoring the guy. They're ignoring everything the person said. And it definitely comes across as "sorry not sorry" corporate bullshit.
Revert the changes and then hop on a call to figure out how to do it right next time.
"Explain what's wrong and how to fix it" is the wrong approach. if you need it explained to you what was broken, then you're not the expert here, just the local tinpot dictator.
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.
Conversely, it's a bit strange for a for-profit company like Mozilla Corporation to rely on volunteer labor through its non-profit parent Mozilla Foundation to perform customer support.
There was a period where every company was trying to "crowd source" free labor. It died off because people didn't like working for corporations for free.
I can see why they have it under Mozilla.org. And lots of companies have community support.
But I do think we should ask ourselves whether companies have some sort of moral obligation to continue relying on unpaid labor because it might make the unpaid laborers feel a sense of meaning. I'm very sympathetic to the need to have a sense of meaning. But I'm less sympathetic to for-profit companies relying on unpaid labor and especially to the idea that we should encourage more of it.
There was probably a more tactful way to shift labor from passionate volunteers to soulless AI.
I too would be upset if an organization threw out a decade of translation work without any warning or discussion, in favor of a robot pretending to understand my language and failing.
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 and willing to do it for free is either a very good Samaritan, or there is some other issue at stake and in the end prominent free software figures often have fairly heated public keyboard wars over things with each other and most of all seem strangely fiercely loyal tribalists who suffer from an extreme case of n.i.h.-syndrome.
> 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.
Everyone whose native language is not English knows. Seriously, people with this attitude should be forced to run their browser and mail client with a plugin to run everything through a couple of machine translation roundtrips. Give it two months, and I guarantee you'll understand.
My first language is German, but I've got most of my devices set to English. Because of that, Youtube started machine-translating German video titles and audio into English at random. The audio quality is just bad, everything sounds muffled. And the translations are often complete garbage. I absolutely detest this "feature".
I’m in the Netherlands and I get ads for Bol.com on YouTube now with narration that would be more appropriate to Fitter, Happier. I’m surprised advertisers are ok with it.
I have a feeling that advertisers have yet to catch up. In Germany, the supermarket chain Lidl recently started running a pretty heavy advertisement campaign on Youtube. Of course, Youtube auto-translated the advertisement into English. The effect is really, really uncanny. "LIDL IS WORTH IT! JA!"
the wild thing is you _know_ there are so many people at YouTube who speak multiple languages and have issues with this. What engineering team is only filled with single-language-speaking people, especially at a prestige-y place like Google?
Mozilla destroyed decades of work on a production server without even discussing it with the passionate volunteers that provided them free labor for decades. Didn’t even evaluate on a staging server to check for quality issues.
The AI isn’t the focus of the issue. The management decision to disregard and disrespect their own unpaid contributors and their organization’s history is a clear indication of Mozilla’s current and future priorities.
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 emotional communication over).
Regardless of how nice or not-nice the text may sound to the various cultures that have weighed in so far, the right thing to do is talk voice/video and hash out what the problems are, and work together to come up with a solution that will satisfy everyone.
Maybe "open a communication channel" is what Mozilla should have done BEFORE they turned on this thing.
From the article: "It has been working now without our acceptance, without controls, without communications".
This person has been doing volunteer work for a long time, attempting to create a helpful environment. Then suddenly, from above a machine is turned on that shits all over that effort. Makes one feel unwelcome, and unseen...
Community is also about communication. In fact, that's a primary aspect of a community.
Yeah, Mozilla introduced a bot that's stomping on things. Are they malicious? Twirling neatly waxed mustaches as they cackle gleefully as the little ants scurry about in a panic?
Or is this a case of humans doing what humans do: Screwing things up.
The first step is to open communications, and the most effective form of communication is face-to-face (the way we've evolved to do it).
Getting to the bottom of the issue in 1-1 communication with a representative of the community should be the common approach when complex problems arise, because then you can be sure that you're on the same wavelength before you do your mass communication with the rest of the community. Saves a TON of time and heartache and ill feelings.
I worked on adding TLS 1.1 and 1.2 support to firefox back in the day, and the whole process left me so disappointed I asked to be removed from the list of contributors. I wish mozilla all the best, but it's not an especially well run organization and this post gives another example of why.
I submitted 2 patches during an 2018 open night to bring in more volunteers in Berlin. The actual folk there were amazing, but the review process, tooling, and bureaucracy was so upsetting that I never bothered again. I'm not sure the fixes were approved, and it wouldn't be surprising if these open nights don't convince many to contribute.
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 the skepticism the consumers feel toward the tech sector by Mozilla using the exact same language and dark UI pattern to promote things like pocket that the user-base never asked for, and jump on to the lets enforce the use of AI everywhere that's driving discontent within the proprietary ecosystems, and this is yet another example of this class of behavior from the Mozilla leadership.
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.
But why does it have to be the case that the leadership of an opensource project have to emulate the desperation and authoritarianism of a potentially stagnant tech sector.
I don't think it's malevolence from the mozilla leadership team but more that if you hang around people who have bet their lifesaving on the success of cloud based LLMs, being cautious and making their use "optional" might begin to sound like a really controversial position even if that's actually what the users/community want from Mozilla.
Firefox market share have been declining and it's not easy to point to any obvious technical problem, so the reason for the decline is likely that the Mozilla corporation keep messing up the narrative by acting like just another Silicon Valley tech firm.
I think it's in the organization as well. They had really good outreach programs and educational content (though I think that's now gutted) that talked about tech ethics, but their product just follows the same bad behavior.
>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.
But of course, they need "competitive" salaries so they can hire "great talent" from the tech sector so that the company doesn't fall behind or something.
So, they had people working for free for years and didn't think to involve them in a process where they could have been stil "useful"?
But I think they already clarified how much they care about people doing translations since they defaulted to the robo-translation. Which to me is complete nonsense considering how superior the human translations must be. As a human with a brain, I would have just translated automatically the missing pages leaving to them the option of replacing/fixing them. Also they should have been thanked many times for all their hard work.
Ladybird and other browser alternatives cannot come fast enough. Every other week we've got a thread here about some stupid move Mozilla have made, I can't remember the last time I heard positive news about Mozilla.
10+ years in Japan. The message here is much deeper from my perspective. “Let’s jump on the call” is not the solution. The guy was stripped off of his face. I love Japan for being human. Small business bar or restaurant with 3 tables. Not everything should be streamlined for a quick call solution… the process was pushed on his head. Google nemawashi decision making process
I did as you suggested with respect to “nemawashi.” I read about that and “ringi,” and I’m glad I did. Even to get just the gist of what I’m sure is a thin interpretation: that nemawashi refers to a “laying-the-groundwork” process of circulating a proposal between peer-level counterparts, before formalizing it and proposing to act on it.
Much less crashing in with it in the form of a “SumoBot,” as Mozilla seems to have done to its non-English communities… (with the disclaimer that I have zero insight into Mozilla’s process here outside of this writer’s account).
It puts a name to a considerate consensus-based way to approach change, that seems humane (and effective) in any culture—leave it to the Japanese to have a specific term for it…
common sense... no real need for digging into japanese culture and so on. really no idea why Mozilla is so disrespectful to it's volunteers. well, that sweet 400m a year from Google... no need for volunteers anymore, eh
For sure. Common sense <> common, etc… although it does seem relevant that it was specifically a Japanese-language sub-community who were reacting here.
I have to say it feels like a really familiar, NGO-flavored disrespect, though: “we’re doing this favor for underrepresented language communities,” regardless of whether they want/need it or not.
“There’s only X number of you having to shoulder the load in XX sub-community, don’t you want us to impose a bunch of ‘help’?”
Well, no, if the choice is between a formidable volume of slop and a smaller but well-executed volume of volunteer labor-of-love…
(…I say as a person very much without all sides of the story, and shooting from the hip a bit. I don’t mean to impugn anybody’s intentions, and I imagine at the end of the day we’re all on the same side here.)
…and, for that matter, there was an earlier draft phase where the author was R’ing For your C. And you could have jumped in then and been more-or-less welcome.
Sounds like RFC ought to be the name of that draft phase, rather than a name encompassing all phases, especially not the final phase in which C's are no longer R'd.
"many of the early RFCs were actual Requests for Comments and were titled as such to avoid sounding too declarative and to encourage discussion.[8][9] The RFC leaves questions open and is written in a less formal style. This less formal style is now typical of Internet Draft documents, the precursor step before being approved as an RFC." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Request_for_Comments
I predict that these times of excessive trust in AI during decision making will be written in history books at some point of time. Providing that there will be books at all.
I already suspect that Duolingo destroyed real people's recording of Spanish conversations and replaced them with AI. For example I can quite often hear continental Spanish accent which has never been taught to me before (as I started with Duolingo as a freshman) - it used to be always American Spanish accent. Wrongly cut conversions is another matter.
I am not sure I am buying this. There is nothing human about japanese business procedures. Most japanese business procedures usually only serve micro managing purposes, and the nemawashi procedure is basically stripping people who were not consulted before, from giving their honest input and impact in the decision making. In my opinion it creates more problems than it solves
> Not everything should be streamlined for a quick call solution
If you have a better solution to correct an error or solve a problem than having a call/meeting and openly discuss situation and possible resolutions - I would love to know about that.
The response was condescending and very… American. The call ensures what, that you'll be more receiving to their grievances? That nothing is on the record? A lot of people don't want to jump in calls, ever. The initial response should've validated that the community feels slighted, that they should've brought them onboard for the decision making, etc.
Acknowledging the mistake immediately seems like a good start.
> The call ensures what, that you'll be more receiving to their grievances?
It ensures you truly understand what the crux of the grievance is and what they would like to happen to get it resolved, instead of being distracted by tangential points.
> That nothing is on the record?
If you’re already assuming malice before the resolution process even had a chance to begin, the conversation has little chance of being productive. Do you know this particular person? Have you interacted with them before?
> A lot of people don't want to jump in calls, ever.
Then say no! But being preemptively mad because someone asked is absurd and does nothing to fix the problem. The asker shouldn’t assume what the other person wants or doesn’t, they should ask. Which is what they did.
> Acknowledging the mistake immediately seems like a good start.
Yes, very much agreed. But you can’t take back what you did, only try to make amends. And that’s very difficult if the other party demands perfection while you’re still even trying to understand the situation.
Ok, how the perfect reaction would be if you were at charge?
I understand people have sympathy inclination to victims, so everyone would assume the victim is good and other side is bad. I have worked long enough with japanese people knowing they can throw unpredictable tantrums.
As a manager, what would be your best course of action to deal with similar situation?
Acknowledging the mistake immediately seems like a good start, as I've said.
Life doesn't always have to be from the perspective from “a manager”, these are community volunteers doing untold hours of unpaid work. Just be a person, whose acquaintance is upset you replaced their handmade postcard with an AI-generated one.
Acknowledging a mistake, no matter genuinely or not, doesn't solve the situation. It just makes victim feel good a bit.
Agree on manager view, I was rather putting situation in a wrong perspective. It doesn't change the questions though - what would you do to resolve the situation (not to make the other side feel good)?
long and slow consensus building that weighs existing stakeholder's opinions heavily vs doing "the right thing" from the outset. So you move slowly and end up having very annoying conversations and compromises instead of just pushing something through. And the formal process is just a formality anyways, so then anyone not in the informal chatter just gets to experience the capriciousness anyways
The sort of consensus building ultimately involves having to do stuff to make people's opinions feel taken care of, even if their concerns are outright wrong. And you end up having to make some awkward deals.
Like with all this "Japanese business culture" stuff though, I feel like it's pretty universal in some degrees or another everywhere. Who's out there just doing things without getting _any_ form of backchannel checking first? Who wants to be surprised at random announcements from people you're working with? Apart from Musk types.
But of course some people are very comfortable just ripping the band aid off and putting people in awkward spots, because "of course" they have the right opinion and plan already.
Why context matters in judging whether some practice is good or not.
IMHO the only correct way to measure the effectiveness of decision making is from the quality of executed outcomes. It is somewhat nonsensical to sever decisions from execution, and claim that decisions have been made rapidly if the decision doesn't lend itself to crisp execution. Without that, decisions are merely intentions.
Yeah sure, I feel like back channeling stuff is generally just the respectful thing to do, so I'm not on the side of the debate I'm expanding upon in most cases.
Just that lacking context one really can't make that many blanket statements.
Not only respectful. Also it ensures that all different aspects of a decision is considered before making the decision. If not aligned with all parties, we would miss important flaws in the plan. It is just a sensible thing to do.
> If not aligned with all parties, we would miss important flaws in the plan.
I think the difficult cases come when people's interests aren't aligned. If you're coordinating with a vendor to basically detangle yourself from their vendor-specific tooling to be able to move away from them, at some level it doesn't really make sense to read them in on that.
There are degrees to this, and I think you can argue both sides here (so ultimately it's a question of what you want to do), but parties are rarely neutral. So the tough discussions come from ones where one party is going to be losing out on something.
Who cares if they’re wrong? The point is respect for their opinions and feelings since you’ll have to work with them for twenty years. If you respect them, you get to do what you want to do and they won’t fuck with you or shoot down your proposal.
To be clear this is Japan we’re talking about with the twenty years part. The same thing applies in the US but on smaller timescales though. If people feel appreciated and respected and you have good relationships, they will basically back whatever you want.
To be clear I'm describing a point of view, but not always ascribing to it.
I tend to lean towards thinking backchanneling makes sense as a general vibe, if only because it's a way of doing things that lets people have dignity, and the costs _can be_ low.
I think this is a very naive take. Japanese people will blame you for any failure regardless if you respect them or not. And many times failures happen in japan exactly because people are sitting around doing nothing without acting even when it's urgent to make decision. Backstabbing and toxicity is the major feature of japanese business culture
Some people are very confident in their understanding of a problem! Others will discount the validity of the stakeholders involved having good judgement.
I think most people have at least one issue where they discount one of the stakeholder's judgement, it's all fairly contextual. But hey, if you're the CEO of some company you have the ability to act on that discounting.
Not OP but the phrase in Japanese also carries a negative connotation, that important issues are decided by a shadow process hidden below the surface, beforehand by those in the loop. Meetings are just for show.
Also, his demanding of not using his work for AI training is nonsense. Because entire articles, this one included is published under a Creative Commons license.
Didn't he agree on that?
Mozilla must reject his further contribution because he stated he don't understand the term of Creative Commons license. His wish granted I guess.
Creative Commons License was created without any AI in mind.
And
> Licensees may copy, distribute, display, perform and make derivative works and remixes based on it only if they GIVE THE AUTHOR or licensor THE CREDITS
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.
Exactly, never accept a switch to a private place when you're trying to gather attention on public matters. It could and it will be used against you later on.
I’m not sure those who speak like that are equipped to understand how offensive their words and tone can be.
It suggests a decision can be reversed with a quick call, which questions one’s choices or conviction. As if to suggest the choice was made without considerable thought and care. It’s such an unserious tone to a moment that’s very serious to the other.
I think it's because it's almost never accompanied by "we may have fucked up, please help us understand how to fix it now and in the future".
It's almost always (like this time) "I'm sorry you feel that way, please spend more of your free time<EOF>", and sometimes (like this time) "[we're doing it anyway but maybe we'll make some changes]".
It feels insulting because it is insulting. The decision has been made, they just want to not feel bad about you being insulted.
Changing the medium to a private conversation also means not committing to any decision publicly for as long as possible. It feels like damage control and protecting your own image (the person posting with respect to their company) as opposed to addressing the real issue promptly and transparently.
Another reason in context of public forums is that it's dismissive of any concerns or questions raised: If a call would be sufficient, that implies they think that nobody else cares.
At some point, "quick calls" are used for discussions that they don't want a trace of.
So, even in the best "sorry we screwed up" scenario, the quick call covers their butt and let them leeway to backtrack as needed. That's also part of why we viscerally react to opaque meetings IMHO.
> As if to suggest the choice was made without considerable thought and care.
I guess it acts as a mirror of sorts though, because that's precisely how this decision appears to have been made in the first place. But it's clear that whoever represents Mozilla there is already assuming the fault lies with the person that just got kicked.
I used the "lets jump on a quick call" tactic once at work. Other party rejected it; they said they've made their position clear and didn't need to say anything more.
I was impressed. They actually did make their position clear, and in public, whereas I was trying to smooth things over in private. Me trying to influence and cajole behind the scenes was insult to the risk they took by putting themselves out there.
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.
"We're sorry for how you feel" is enterprise for "we think you're whining".
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.
This is just a single initial reply from a "community support manager" in Indonesia. It's not from the Mozilla CEO or the leader of the project. They surely don't have the power to stop the bot. But what they can do is find it more over a call, and then who to escalate it to. Then maybe it does get turned off before it's fixed or changed.
You seem to be confusing someone in customer support with someone who holds power over entire projects. I don't understand how you think a customer support person should be able to just turn off software across the globe in response to a single short message on a forum with few details.
Huh, if you click through their link the person responding is also a "sumo administrator" and it's "sumobot" causing the issues. It seems entirely likely they are personally directly responsible for it.
Regardless they are representing the company. If they aren't the right person to respond - they should not have responded and kicked it up the chain/over the fence to the right person - instead of responding by offering to waste the complainants time on a call with someone you are asserting is not the right person to be handling this. Supposing you are correct about their position, it makes their response far worse, not better.
"SUMO" = SUpport.MOzilla.org. It's the name for the entire Mozilla support organization; everybody involved in the linked discussion is in this organization. It doesn't seem like this person is related to the bot. They are a "Locale Leader" for Indonesia, which is the same position this poster is resigning from (but for Japan). They seem to be peers.
So I'm a complete outsider, but they do not appear to be in the same position as the poster. They are marked as "Mozilla Staff" and "SUMO Administrator" (amongst many other things), neither of which the complainant is marked as.
It is true both they and the person they are responding to are marked as "SUMO Locale Leaders"... but it seems rather clear from the context that is not the role they are inhabiting in their (non) apology and request for a "quick call" with the complainant.
The language they use is certainly not the language a peer would be expected to use either.
Thanks for that info--I think you're right and I'm wrong. I didn't see the group memberships before but now I see that the replier is far more involved in SUMO. I had only seen that they were both locale leaders and that the replier was a staff member from the tag on the post.
CS comms are tricky, I agree! You have to reply to stuff, often before you have any form of full picture. Just think you gotta be careful then, and the message they posted was not good on that front.
I do get what you're saying, and it's not like I think the CSM should be fired for the message. I just think it's bad comms.
Here are some alternative choices:
- post nothing, figure out more internally (community support is also about vouching for people!)
- post something more personal like "Thank you for posting this. I'm looking into who is working on this bot to get this information in front of them". Perhaps not allowed by Mozilla's policies
- Do some DMing (again, more personal, allowing for something direct)
But to your point... it's one person's message, and on both sides these are likely people where English isn't their native language. I'm assuming that community support managers are paid roles at mozilla, but maybe not.
And like... yeah, at one point you go into whatever company chat and you start barking up the chain. That's the work
They are the person who announced the bot would be rolled out. If the person who announced the rollout isn't either the leader of the project or someone who can push for changes to it, then that's already totally against the community.
Second, this "community support forum" isn't just a corporate help desk. It's a forum for community supporters of Mozilla, an open source organisation for which community contributions are hugely important. Mozilla can't just fuck over parts of it's community and expect that to be business as usual.
It is well known passive aggressive corporate phrase to shut people up. Who it is used by is largely irrelevant, it almost always means the same thing.
I did previous work on a product where there was intended to be a message in many languages saying “call XXX for help in (language name)” but they’d obviously used “English” in the text to be translated as several of the translations into Asian languages literally said to call the number for help in English. I raised this and got nobody to care.
From my read, the software didn't go wrong. It did exactly what they intended it to -- machine translations replaced handwritten translations provided by community volunteers. Seems like a pretty big middle finger to those volunteers.
The lead realized that Mozilla doesn't care about their opinion (they did this without discussing with them) nor do they care about the work they were doing (by replacing their work with machine translations). A "quick call" doesn't solve this.
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 understand the issues in more detail.
> Generally speaking, orgs aren't trying to replace high-quality human translations with lower-quality machine translations.
How would you handle updates to an article? Would you blindly replace all existing translations or would you notify the maintainers and wait for them to get around to it?
I wouldn't be surprised if orgs blindly opted for the first, which also means that a single spelling correction would be enough to overwrite days of work.
Companies are absolutely falling over themselves to replace high quality human translations with lower quality machine translation. I’m not sure how a hacker news poster could miss this trend.
A hacker news poster is very likely to consume the original English text and never encounter anything else, regardless of whether it's human-translated or not. Just like the people who make these decisions in the first place
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 participating anymore.
(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 rolled this bullshit auto-translator out and pissed off a lot of people in the community, including a major contributor for the last 20 years? Surely they could just ignore him and go on with this auto-translation initiative (BTW, thay don't even have to worry about whatever he wants to "prohibit" to do with his translations, because he waived off his rights by posting them). Would it be better than trying to set up a call and discuss things, try to find some compromise, gather a number of recommendations she may then pass onto people working on the auto-translator initiative (because surely this Kiki person, whoever she is, is not the sole person responsible for this and cannot magically just fix the situation)?
I'm not sure if just this individual is upset, or if he's speaking on behalf of the entire community he's the leader of.
I think it's clear that Mozilla wants machine translation to take a bigger role in producing localized content, and this new process will be a large shift in the way things have been done. I think it's fair for Mozilla to do this, but I also think it's fair for the maintainer to be upset with this decision and no longer want to volunteer his time to clean up slop.
The initial response feels premature and tone deaf which is why people are irked by it.
Given that Mozilla "shot first" so to speak, the onus is on them to take action first e.g. disable the bot, revert changes to articles, etc. Only after doing this can discussion on a path forward happen.
There is no such person as "Mozilla". There is Kiki, a "Support Community Manager", probably a relatively low-level worker (but it doesn't matter much if she is actually has some weight in the organization). So, you are Kiki. You just saw that message. What do you do now? Just ignore it? Do not respond anything and immediately call the CEO and try to convince him/her that he/she must order to disable that auto-translation bot, without even trying to gather more information? No onuses and stuff, what are your actions, exactly?
Because a lot of people in this thread are whin… ahem, expressing their discontent with Mozilla, as we all usually do, but I've yet to see anybody to propose anything realistic at all, let alone better than ask an offended community member for a call and at least to try to talk it through and establish what could be some actionable steps to remedy the situation.
> 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.
> What in your opinion would be the right move now, after they rolled this bullshit auto-translator out and pissed off a lot of people in the community
In Japan? Sincere appology followed by resignation.
No, the Japanese absolutely do not set up a call to discuss things after you've scerwed and disrespected them. They respectfully give you the cold shoulder.
Mozilla should not be surprised if their market share dwindles in Japan after this.
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
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.
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.
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.
The way to show you care is by having a meeting of the minds before you shove your changes in their face. The fact that the deployment was done carelessly demonstrates disregard.
I doubt "take them out to dinner" is the right solution in this situation, but any attempt at redressal must understand the above point and acknowledge it publicly.
"Ask for forgiveness rather than permission" is far from universally true, and carries massive cultural baggage. You cannot operate within that framework and expect all humans to cooperate with you.
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.
Quite. "We may have made a mistake, would you be open to discuss this with us either through email or a call at your preference?" would work a lot better in this setting.
> 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 those guidelines? Is there a way to get it to follow them, like another commenter says works? Does the person need help following the process for that? Or is there a bug? Etc.
These are the things a call can clarify. It's the necessary first step, so why are people complaining?
> Calls require focused attention which if you are used to multi-tasking are a huge drain.
Solving important problems requires focused attention. Which is why you get on calls to solve them when they're urgent and important, and not something that can be multitasked.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
Even if not a high level, then s/he had to learn that style of communication from peers in the corp, and the tone is set by managers. It's entirely OK to blame someone who has title “Manager”.
> 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.
This is completely backwards. The CEO is not expected to manage intercultural communication. You know whose job that is? The community manager.
The community manager for Indonesia wouldn't be expected to manage communication with Japan, but managing local contributors is absolutely a job for the community manager and not the CEO.
"quick call?" in corporatespeak means "I believe our disagreement to be a minor misunderstanding that can be clarified in a few minutes of conversation"
In a company you should never ever "quick call" someone (especially on a group forum) who has presented a genuine list of grievances against whatever you're doing, unless you're subtly trying to pull rank to override those grievances.
The thing about English language is that, just like Japanese, it's highly contextual and has different constructs for expressing different level of respect. The problem is, English speakers are completely unaware of this, so either they get it right based on intuition, or they fuck up. In this case, the guy used "I'm your superior and you'll do what I say" mode, while the appropriate mode would've been "oh shit I'm sorry how do I fix this".
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?
My guess would be the anger comes from implication that is a possible solution at all. This type of “hop on a call” request is not usually actually designed to “truly understand what you're struggling with.” (words from the post)
Instead it is usually a PR tactic. The goal of the call requester is to get your acquiescence. Most people are less likely to be confrontational and stand up for themselves when presented with a human - voice, video, or in person. So, the context of a call makes it much more likely for marsf to backpedal from their strongly presented opinion without gaining anything.
This is a common sleazy sales tactic. The stereotypical overly aggressive car salesman would much rather speak to you in person than via email even though the same information can be conveyed. It is also used in PR and HR situations to grind out dissenters, so it comes off in this context as corporate and impersonal.
> The stereotypical overly aggressive car salesman would much rather speak to you in person than via email even though the same information can be conveyed.
There might be an element of personality there. I was texting with a real estate agent (for apartment rental, not purchase) in China once, when he decided that as long as we were talking he might as well call me. He didn't bother mentioning this to me beforehand.
Of course, all I could do was hang up on him. It's not like I could understand what he said. And I don't think that was especially difficult to foresee.
So he wasted some time and seriously annoyed me in the most predictable way possible. Why? Not for any reason specific to the situation. Maybe there's emphatic training somewhere that says "always call". Or maybe the type of people who become salesmen have a deep, deep instinct to call.
I've been a typical IT person for a very long time. In the last few years, I got into contact with salespeople, by being basically a sales engineer.
And I've learned that there is a reason to make a call besides the publicity aspect: A call (and I mean call with voice and possibly video) forces immediacy. It puts both parties on the spot. Or rather just the party being called, because hopefully the caller did prepare for the call. Also, this immediacy enables rash and uninformed decisions, whereas asynchronous communications enable more deliberation and research. In sales, you don't want deliberation. You want to get this over quick and easy. And if you've dealt with a long long email chain that goes back and forth quibbling over minutiae, a call can reduce this kind of indecisiveness and inhibition.
So I see this whole thing as insulting in even more ways: A "quick" call means that it is an unprepared one. Also emphasized by the lack of real topic or agenda beyond what the original post already stated. No way forward for the other party that is possible to prepare for. No prior chain of communications, so if the call is really the first reaction in the first short email, this means "you are unimportant, I don't want to waste time, let's get this over with".
Also, in many cultures (I've only had to deal with European ones, so no idea if this really applies to the rest of the world), setting a stage is important. There is a cultural meaning to CC-ing a manager, to inviting more people than necessary to a meeting, or to do things publically or in private. A bigger stage formalizes things, gives importance, emphasizes seriousness. A smaller, private stage can mean the opposite: you might want the other party so safe face, because what you are going to tell more informally them is that they fucked up. You might want to get them to agree to something they could not easily agree to in public. Announcing publically, that there should be a private meeting is the worst of all kinds: Basically, this signals to the public that this person fucked up and is getting scolded, more serious than a totally private scolding, less serious than a totally public one. Why else would you widely announce a private meeting invite?
I don't know if the resignation in the original article is really a final resignation or rather some kind of cultural signal. I've seen that kind of drama used as means to an end, just think of the stereotypical italian lovers' discussion where both are short of throwing each other off the balcony, just to get very friendly a minute later. But in any case, whether it is deliberate drama or a genuine resignation, the necessary reaction has to be similar: You need to treat it as if it were a real resignation publically and respond with all the usual platitudes that they are very valuable, you are so sorry to see them go and you'd do almost anything to keep them. Then you privately meet in private and find out which one it is, and maybe fix things. It is a dance, and you have to do the right steps. If you don't know the right ones, at least think hard (you have the time, it is email) on how not to step on any toes. The Mozilla people failed in that...
It was this exact part of the conversation that touched me negatively too. marsf expresses some very valid criticism that, instead of being publicly addressed, is being handled by "let's discuss it privately". This always means that they don't want to discuss, they just want to shut you down.
I don’t think so. Working in tech with many busy people, I say “hop on a call”, but only in “let’s sync live, it’ll be faster” situations.
This stuck out to me as rude. I would never say that to someone on my team who expressed serious concerns, far less than this person quitting after years of dedication.
I would offer an apology, explanation, and follow up questions to understand more in public, then say I’m happy to set up time to talk privately if they would like to or feel more comfortable.
In my experience, and in my feeling as someone reading such things, you need to tone-match. The resignation message was somewhat formal, structured and serious in tone. Replying in such an informal tone means that you are not taking things seriously, which is insulting. Even more so because that informal answer is public.
I'm tone-deaf by culture and by personality. I often make those kinds of mistakes. But a public resignation like this is a brightly flashing warning light saying: "this needs a serious formal answer".
'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.
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.
In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45831614 jack1243star pointed out the possibility that English might not be Kiki's first language and they perhaps even have used ChatGPT to make the comment sound more polite.
The right thing to do is undo what you did and then ask to talk about it. There is nothing the person can say to make up for the destructive effects they took.
> 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?
The only thing to ask for here are some clarifications and expanded explanations so that the original text does not get misunderstood. If the Mozilla representative does see such potential points he can perfectly ask for them publicly.
I mean, almost anything would be better. But here's my swing:
> I'm so sorry about this. We definitely screwed up here and want to
> fix things. We want to chat to you in a call if you're able?
> We will stop changing things, issue a moratorium on AI while we
> figure things out. You and communities like yours are central to
> our entire existence and purpose at Mozilla.
Asking someone to "hop on a call" is phrasing you use with someone you are close with, not someone whose work you've just destroyed and is no longer interested in a relationship with you.
The fact that the preceding apology was absolutely awful does not help. "I'm sorry for how you feel" is wrong, since nobody asked them to react to "feelings" but the clearly delineated problems with the automation that Mozilla rolled out.
Asking to discuss something like this over synchronous voice comms is basically asking to go off the record and handle things privately. Sometimes that's appropriate, but if that's what the correspondant wanted they would have asked for it.
These three things combine to tell anyone who is paying attention that this is damage control, not meaningful engagement, and it's offensive to act this way toward someone who has put this much time into your project.
There is nothing you can do, because you already traded away the community for your AI project and money. The same corpo goons who don't see anything past their slop projects are the one who use the "jump on a quick call" lingo
Yeah it’s a strange request. No acknowledgment or even indication that the other person understands the issues raised.
And they’re happy to eat up more of that person’s time, probably ask them to explain all over again. Also it seems they don’t think it is worth a long call… just a quick one.
In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45831614 jack1243star pointed out the possibility that English might not be Kiki's first language and they perhaps even have used ChatGPT to make the comment sound more polite.
Making a comment sound more polite should be done by addressing the other person correctly and respectfully, and making sure that you are actually responding to the issues that have been raised. When whatever you wrote is so completely offensive and disrespectful, asking ChatGPT to make it sound more polite will undoubtedly make it worse. Like writing "Sorry, not sorry", when the content of your message clearly conveys that you're "Not sorry". It only adds to the disdain of your original message, putting even more emphasis on the fact that you are wasting the recipients time and patience while refusing to show any remorse.
I think a phone call can be better for resolving a conflict because it allows a more rapid back and forth, you can adapt in real time to how the other person is responding. If someone gets upset about some word choice like here, you can quickly say "I'm sorry I didn't mean it like that" and get back to the actual topic over how the work should be organized instead of some superficial detail.
In the end it may boil down to some strong hatred for AI, this seems to be very common recently and "I prohibit to use all my translation as learning data for SUMO bot and AIs" certainly points that way. If that is the root cause then it may be impossible to resolve to the satisfaction of both sides.
Isn't it fascinating that despite `while true; do claude --yolo` over a weekend being all it takes to port some project across platforms, LLMs completely fall apart when it comes to speaking grammatical and natural Japanese?
Free tier Gemini CLI literally writes Android app for me by just endlessly wondering in English. AGI's here. And it struggles with Japanese. How!?
It doesn't mention mistranslating, so it's difficult to know the root of the problem is AI "struggling".
> It doesn't follow our translation guidelines.
> It doesn't respect current localization for Japanese users, so they were lost.
I believe this is the root of the problem. There are define processes and guidelines, and LLM isn't following it. Whether these guidelines were prompted or not is unclear but regardless it should've been verified by the community leaders before it's GA'ed
That's not the root of the problem. The root of the problem is that LLMs just can't constitute a punctually Japanese understanding of text like that guideline and speak in Japanese with native fluency no matter what. I just know this from knowing both sides of English-Japanese language pair. And I find that somewhat fascinating in a sense.
Wow. That's crazy. I would be very interested in a blog post on this subject if you ever wrote one. I wonder how this affects the perception of LLMs in Japan
To be fair, in my experience LLM-s struggle to some extent with nearly every language that isn't English. Compared to many others, English is a very simple language and it has the largest body of material to learn from to boot. The more nuanced a language, the more LLM-s spout garbage.
Yeah, the “I’m sorry you feel this way” response really irked me too. There are so many different ways to respond that would have been more appropriate and conveyed the same message.
> 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?
If this was a mistake, the proper response might have been "sorry, we applied automation in error, those changes have been rolled back while we fix the process that allowed it to happen". And not "call with us to talk about this further".
Then say so if someone complains about it? "Shoot, we accidentally ran it in the wrong mode, sorry about that, I'll look into someone fixing it ASAP" is a lot better than "We're sorry for how you feel".
The sentiment is more important. But I'm sorry for how you feel suggests to many people the sole problem was their feelings. I'm sorry for how these changes impacted you suggests the changes could have been wrong.
I don't think it's the specific phrasing. They could have said "I'll contact you by email to try and understand your concerns" and it's still dodging the explicit, concrete list of grievances.
However, "let's hop on a call" is just additionally dismissive.
Two things stand out, besides what has been already mentioned.
* The infantile corporate-cutesy wording "hop on a call" is not appropriate when talking to somebody who feels that you deeply wronged them. It has the same vibes as cheery "Remember: At Juicero, we are all one big family!" signatures on termination notices, and Corporate Memphis.
* In the first sentence, Kiki says "about the MT workflow that we just recently introduced". Why is this level of detail shoehorned in? Everyone in that conversation already knows what it is about. It's as if Kiki can't resist the temptation to inject an ad/brag about their recently introduced workflow for any drive-by readers. "I'm sorry you were dissatisfied with your Apple(R) iPlunger X(TM), which is now available at major retailers for only $599!"
They don't know what exactly has gone wrong. All they can say sorry for is for how the person is feeling. Then they want to get on a call to learn more. Which is the start of helping.
The response is as sincere and helpful as it could be for an initial response from someone who wants to figure out what the problem is.
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 those guidelines? Is there a way to get it to follow them, like another commenter says works? Does the person need help following the process for that? Or is there a bug? Etc.
These are the things a call can clarify. It's the necessary first step, so why are people complaining?
It's entirely possible that such information is well-known to everyone involved in the translation community.
I would consider it outright insulting if someone who ostensibly "wants to help" doesn't know basic information like that - if the people making decisions about SumoBot are NOT aware of basic information like "where to find the local translation guidelines" then they are presumably not qualified to release a tool like SumoBot in the first place.
Yep agree with this. Nothing is more infuriating than someone Kramering into a space trying “to help” without spending any time or effort trying to understand that space.
They should have understood the guidelines before turning on their machine translation in a given locality.
Turning off the machine translation and reverting all the changes it made seems pretty actionable to me. They can turn it back on when issues are addressed.
even if that were the case (others have explained why that’s not so), that would be an inappropriate time to apologize. you don’t apologize for how someone else feels. you apologize when you recognize that you did something harmful and when the harmed party is amenable to receiving it. otherwise, you’re really just being a jerk who’s only acknowledging that you don’t like how someone else feels.
I used to work with manager who told us to "have balls, deploy straight to prod" We spend a month cleaning this up. The other time when another manager demanded I "run this script" from the iphone he shoved in my face a whole warehouse went down in Ireland a month before Christmas and the Police were involved. There is an irrational push to deploy AI everywhere for no reason whatsoever. It, well the LLM part of it, is bad tech and all those "AI success stories" are pure hot air.
What is the logic behind adding machine translation for content that already had a seemingly robust, enthusiastic, and motivated (volunteer?) community maintaining the translations? The "saves money" rationale to deploy LLM/MT automation doesn't make sense when its volunteers are contributing because they want to. This is kind of community and participation destruction wrought by the introduction of LLMs/MT has a serious impact because it undermines the people who are actually willing to do the work. It was presumably costing nothing (or very little) to have the community maintain this content, but the change has cost a significant amount of goodwill. If the Japanese SUMO community wanted to use MT, it should be their sole decision, baring any issues with their stewardship in general. This is someone else saying "look, with this great new automation, you don't need to spend time anymore doing «thing you want to do»". Huh? How does that make any sense to force on anyone?
Mozilla has long suffered from FAANG-envy. If big tech is doing Social Network|Mobile OS|AI, then by golly, Mozilla reflexively has to spend Firefox money on a poorly executed, me-too copy that's discarded when the next fad comes around. The sad thing is the reasoning is usually sound, but the execution... Yeesh.
I bet it's nothing more than they prefer a machine they can just use and get no lip, rather than have to deal with humans they have to treat like humans and ask nicely and meet half way on countless issues and pretend to care about etc.
There's probably a bunch of untranslated or badly translated content worldwide, so this was rolled out to help with that, without realizing it would overwrite higher-quality translation.
It probably made a lot of sense in certain contexts, and certain side effects weren't predicted, or it just has bugs that need fixing.
Presumably nothing malicious or stupid. But just ironing out the kinks.
Mozilla has invested heavily in this technology, and whatever project manager is running it needs more checkboxes in the results column of their next request for a raise. In other words, "business alignment."
In particular, "the content is useful" is not a checkbox. "The content is produced by this technology" is, and overwriting hand-curated content is an obvious action.
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 language, except it feels kind of wrong and doesn’t really communicate in ways specific to the culture from which the language is.
You’re in France, you search for something, a thread pops up with everyone interacting in French - seems reasonable enough, but it just reads kind of weird? Then a message is entirely out of place, and you realize that you’re reading an English language thread translated to French.
Or your mom sends you a screenshot of a Facebook thread in her native language that has her worked up - and reading it, you realize it’s an LLM translation of something that should have no bearing on her.
Same with various support pages on websites - it all reads mostly fine until you hit a weird sentence where the LLM messed up and then you’re transported back to the reality that what you’re reading was not authored by anyone who can actually operate in that language/culture.
There’s a lot of nuance in language beyond the words - how you express disagreement in English is not how you express disagreement in Japanese, how you address the reader in French is not the same as in Korean, etc. Machine translation flattens all modes of expression into a weird culturally en-US biased soup (because that’s where the companies are headquartered and where the language models are trained).
I have no illusions that this trend will reverse - high quality translation work is skill and time consuming, and thanks to LLMs anyone on Earth can now localize anything they want in any language they want for ~free in ~0 time.
The weirdest part is seeing this bubble up to the real world. I’ve been hearing young people use turns of phrases/expressions that I recognize as distinctly American, except not in English.
The classic linguist response to this, which I subscribe to, is “no language is fixed, language is ever evolving in response to various external cultural pressures“. Which is true. But it doesn’t make our post-LLM language landscape any less weird.
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.
Bilingual English and Spanish here and I absolutely hate this.
I can read both just fine. Platforms defaulting to always showing one or things like youtube auto-translating titles all to English or all to Spanish is frustrating because I always have to do the math in my head as to "Why does this thing I'm reading sound weird as hell" and realize its because it was lost in translation.
Hell, I watch creators/consume content where the creator or writer themself speaks/writes interchangeably in both languages often within the same sentence because Spanglish is very common, and that just destroys most of these automated generators brains.
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.
I really hate it too especially when I want to search something specifically within the French context and I end up getting pages translated from Englsh to French and waste my time on irrelevant content.
I'm a native English speaker fluent in Japanese, recently moved to Japan this year. The one that really gets me lately is YouTube now automatically dubbing over content in Japanese that was originally in English. It's... so uncanny.
Yeah, that is a massive problem. This can't be disabled by the user, only be the channel owner. It's awful. The only solution is switching the YouTube UI language to English, to get the original English audio track. But then, presumably, all other languages would get machine translated into English. There is nothing one can do.
Reminds me of the first time I heard youtube's forced AI translation to my native language. It's just wrong, the same male voice is used for everything, the delivery is grating, the intonation is off, the translation is very MTL in the bad sense.
And it cannot be disabled on mobile. The numbers must go up, I guess, but in my case it greatly reduced my usage of the app.
The global trend might not reverse, but surely the people in those cultures are going to push back on low quality content and "the market will sort it out", right? For example, Mistral is has a clear interest in being the "most native-French-speaking LLM", and with that expertise they could also grow to other languages where English-native LLMs are poorly received.
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 can help with that its a benefit.
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.
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.
Culture is just as much a part of language as the language itself.
There is an air of arrogance in proclaiming that it is merely language barriers that are an issue. But of course it's a convenient argument for big tech forcing MTL on all of us.
But it ultimately marginalizes smaller communities and kills languages. Cultural genocide if you will.
The dangerous thing is that the current state of MTL is serviceable and even usable, but a bilingual speaker will immediately know something is off.
I have noticed this both for French and German, two languages with lots of training material. I imagine it's much much worse for smaller languages and/or communities.
As more and more content on the web is automatically translated, we will all start to talk like translated-from-English LLMs, and that is a future I'm not looking forward to.
Yeah it's really jarring to be reading a text in not-english that seems somewhat normal and then to trip over some extremely American reference that makes it obvious it was auto translated. I just want things to have explicit language toggles or maybe allow me to hover over some text to see the translation. Google even allows you to set multiple languages and they still insist on auto translation between 2 languages I have told them I know.
> The weirdest part is seeing this bubble up to the real world. I’ve been hearing young people use turns of phrases/expressions that I recognize as distinctly American, except not in English.
Calquing has been a common thing since long before AI translators, and it's not notable that it now happens for modern memes. It happens whenever a language is notable and nearby; English has a lot of calques from Greek/Latin/German/French as a result.
Ironically, "calque" is a loanword, but "loanword" is a calque.
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.
> This is caused by people active in English-speaking communities translating memes literally and spreading them in their native language communities as-is.
You're right that memes are getting translated literally and spreading, but in terms of pure volume, LLMs doing the translation dwarf humans doing the translation.
Building a bot that picks whatever posts are trending on Reddit/imgur/etc, automatically translates them, and then posts them in target languages on social networks is an easy way to accumulate likes+followers; then those high reach accounts get used to push whatever makes money.
Not really. I have observed the same thing in Russian, and no, it's not for expressions that are translated literally.
Having said that, SOTA models got much better at this kinda stuff. They're quite able to write in a way that is indistinguishable from a native speaker, colloquialisms and all, with the right prompting.
But SOTA models are also expensive. Most automated translations are done with something way cheaper and worse.
You’re in France, you search for something, a thread pops up with everyone interacting in French - seems reasonable enough, but it just reads kind of weird? Then a message is entirely out of place, and you realize that you’re reading an English language thread translated to French.
There should be a word for this. Most of these translations feel so weird.
I understand the matter in theory, but I don't understand the matter in practice. Clicking through on the user, I couldn't identify any machine-translated overwrites of his work. What is an example of this? And if the community that manages the site objects, why not apply a batch temporary revert, and then re-run once/if everything is solved.
This is a trivial operation for me to do on MediaWiki with a bot, so it must be straightforward to do here too. I think "Ask forgiveness, not permission" is fine in order to move things forward, but you do have "ask forgiveness".
> 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.
Talk about being tone deaf. This was so incredibly rude. No consult, no request whether they wanted this or not. Mozilla keeps finding new ways to shoot itself in the foot, these are probably some of the most loyal people that you could wish for, that's a precious resource if there ever was one. And to add insult to injury they want to them 'hop on a call' and to 'trully[sic] understand what you're struggling with' even though they just spelled it out as clear as day.
Imagine having human volunteers do the work for you, than paying an AI to overwrite their work without communicating this with them (no validation of any sort it seems).
And once they quit you corporate-speak to them "let's hop on a call to understand your frustrations!" in response to a post where they outline precisely their frustrations.
I call this the AI theater. If a company can (still) look good AND decrease dealing with pesky flesh and bone humans, that's not collateral, that's a win. On the surface you act caring, concerned, rendering investors and HR both happy while you decrease "human complexity" - then you are winning the AI game. Mozilla always wanted to join the big boys, but while yearning for their soft power status the yearn bore the fruits of a rotten soul they will also have to embrace. There is no light without shadows and AI's shadows are drawn long and deep.
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've been studying Japanese for 15+ years and have really come to loathe machine translations from English. While generally the meaning gets across, they're very unnatural and often use words in contexts that sound weird or are just flat out wrong.
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.
You mean the two+ decades of labour of love was always done to be a nameless contribution to the AI machine? Somehow I think he would have picked another hobby if he had known that back then.
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.
> 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
Not that I entirely disagree with the conclusion here, but…
It feels like that same sentiment can be used to justify all sorts of shitty translation output, like a dialog saying cutesy “let’s get you signed in”, or having dialogs with “got it” on the button label. Sure, it’s so “human” and has “heart”, but also enrages me to my very core and makes me want to find whoever wrote it and punch them in the face as hard as I can.
I would like much less “human” in my software translations, to be honest. Give me dry, clear, unambiguous descriptions of what’s happening please. If an LLM can do that and strike a consistent tone, I don’t really care much at all about the human element going into it.
Mozilla is more and more disappointing. Always talking about making an internet for everyone, community, bla bla. But then they don't even talk to their own community contributors before changing their workflow. And when someone speaks up, they get the most corporate reply possible.
mozilla never had a sound business model to sustain its operation anyways, everything they do is just a stunt to make a living out of people's belief and naivety on how it operates.
it's a grift of an organization and it reflects in the simplest ways like this.
Shocking that Mozilla would roll out a bot - in production - without coordinating with the team that's been doing the work for years so far. Very bad look.
It looks like companies are doubling down on shitty AI bots to cut their costs even though it is backfiring terribly, like in Facebook case where they spent billions on their AI and all it did - just banned millions of their core userbase (and still banning). Looks like we will see more companies imploding because they relay to much on subpar AI.
A similar thing is going on at Amazon. Their AI is rewriting perfectly good product descriptions provided by manufacturers and I noticed that I stopped buying there, because I cannot find out what it is that I am buying or how much of it I am buying. I started shopping at sites that sell same products, but do not change manufacturers' descriptions. I have a feeling that post AI bubble we'll be doing a lot of manual cleanup of information "improved" by AI.
> I prohibit to use all my translation as learning data for SUMO bot and AIs.
> I request to remove all my translation from learned data of SUMO AIs.
It's Mozilla's data...
> explicit violation to the Mozilla mission
I'm not sure what this is referring to. I don't see any explicit violation of Mozilla.org's mission. If anything it seems consistent with that mission to provide universal translation with quick turnaround.
It's funny how Japanese contributors often go nuclear whenever things don't go their way instead of communicating etc. Bugs happen. this is tech. open communication is always the way to go before escalation. we see the same phenomenon in git, ruby etc etc etc.
Ironically, Japanese work culture encourages over-communication. It seems that open-source is considered a counter-culture that they want to escape japanese work culture from.
>In October 22, the sumobot was introduced to Japanese KB articles. I cannot accept its behavior and no words. [...] It has been working now without our acceptance, without controls, without communications.
How exactly did you manage to place the blame for no communication on Japanese contributors here given the actual complaint in question?
So, this contributor revealed he doesn't understand the license his work is published under. As such, Mozilla must refuse his contribution because he don't understand the idea behind Creative Commons license. His wish granted I guess.
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 sumobot summarily deleted years of it for no good reason at a whim.
Good for him. He should probably consider suing them for destruction of his work.
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.
> Once your work is published under Creative Commons license, it is irreversible.
I am not sure how it is under Japanese law, but in some countries a creator cannot be stripped of his rights by agreeing to a license. Even without that there is often a way to rescind any gift given in good faith if the receipients behavior warrants it.
I would be curious if that is how Japanese courts would view it. They may not consider that a valid way. Or they might. But different jurisdictions vary.
You need to think hard and understand that it is irreversible before you publish your content under certain licenses.
My problem with this type of gate keeping is that machine learning does open up translations that are accurate to the masses. It is quaint having a real human do your translations though. Kind of like having a real human drive your car or do your housework. Not everyone can afford that luxury. But, on the other hand, having a singular organization own the training data and the model and not publishing the model itself is where the gatekeeping continues.
There are some discussion if the whole concept of "license" fits under Japanese law. I think it's understood as "a contract to allow the usage of otherwise restricted work by copyright etc under conditions"
But I'm not a lawyer so I don't know and in real business, they casually use the word "license" in Japan. But in my opinion, everything is contract under Japanese law.
Yeah - I know in US law some terms are simply unenforceable and void. Much of the FOSS movement is designed around US contract law. There are issues with some US licenses being enforceable under other legal regimes - I was chatting a decade or so ago with a Russian who understood the...GPL(? I don't remember exactly) to be invalid in Russia and so it had to be bundled in some fashion to be usable.
Or to put another way, a license (a contract) is a tuple (terms, jurisdiction), and the juridical evaluation process will take both into account.
I don't think it's at all clear that some foss licenses (MIT for instance) are irrevocable. Not in the US, and certainly not in any possible relevant country... It's not clear that they are revocable either. As I understand the law it at least in part rests on the question of whether there was consideration in exchange for the license, which might even make it a case by case analysis.
CC licenses (and some other foss licenses, e.g. Apache 2.0) are explicitly irrevocable... which is probably enough for US law though I still wonder to some degree if there isn't some country that would take issue with that term... especially a country which recognizes "Moral rights".
Some other FOSS licenses (GPL for instance) contain explicit terms allowing revocation under certain circumstances (but otherwise claim to be irrevocable).
Whether the license is revokable or not is irrelevant when the action isn't permitted by the license anyway.
In particular, the primary purpose of AI as we know it is to strip off attribution, which is explicitly forbidden by basically every license in existence.
True, license is probably irrelevant here because they aren't even intending to comply with the terms of it.
To nitpick "explicitly forbidden" isn't quite right. Licenses basically only grant more permissions, they can't remove them. It's explicitly excluded from the rights granted by the license, but it's not explicitly forbidden because it is the law that might or might not forbid the activity, not the license.
> 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 response. If I'd received this it would just further vindicate my decision to quit.
As someone from the Netherlands I read absolutely 0 condescending or patronising behaviour in this.
It just looks like someone trying to get in contact and help out. I could've written this myself, genuinely trying to help.
> I'm sorry for how you and the Japanese community feel about the MT workflow that we just recently introduced.
English is also not my mother tongue, but this translates to "I'm sorry you feel like that, but we don't care or change anything, can I call you to convince you into doing things our way while completely being off the record?" in my mind.
This is forceful and rude in my culture, but it's very rude and a no-no in Japanese culture AFAIK.
If the person wanted to help genuinely, I'd expect to read something like "I'm sorry you feel like this. I read your comments but I want to clarify some points so I can transfer these up the chain with utmost clarity. We might have made some mistakes and don't want to leave you out in the cold".
"We want to make sure we trully (SIC) understand what you're struggling with."
I'm afraid you skipped this part though
> We want to make sure we trully understand what you're struggling with.
I mean, that question is already well answered within the first (opening) comment of marsf, so that part smells "tl;dr. Can I call you".
This sentence makes it even worse. All the pain points are openly written there.
> but it's very rude and a no-no in Japanese culture
What, specifically, about that phrasing is "very rude" and a "no-no" in Japanese culture?
I am genuinely curious.
Every culture has a way of discussing and resolving disagreements. Some are noisier and some are calmer. Some cultures do this dance with "apparent" disrespect, with forceful exchanges, some with calmer and tidier demeanor.
Japanese are the latter. There's a polite dance of disagreement. Every side listens others with respect (with respect to the process even if they don't respect the others) and answer politely yet firmly.
This comment smells like there's already some disagreement under this, and none of them have been listened and they are steamrolled with the new workflow.
Implying "Hey you're overreacting, let us convince you" doesn't help on top of it.
Politely say "I don't care what you think but I won't change anything" is perfectly fine in Japanese culture. Taking an issue privately instead of showing disagreements in public is also perfectly fine for Japanese people.
The issue has nothing to do with Japanese culture, but with how you work with a community of volunteers over the web. "Let's jump on a call" is what you say to a coworker, not to a volunteer in an online community.
If this were some small bug report, even from someone pretty ticked off, I'd agree.
But this is a response to someone who has just announced that they are quitting an organization they had spent 20 years of their life volunteering for, because of the disrespect they have felt from the org. This is not a "hop on a call" moment. This is a "please accept to meet so I can apologize in person, and see if we can repair this" moment, preferably after acknowledging the disrespect.
I don't know the original author but as a non-native speaker I guess I miss the cultural connotation surrounding "hop on a call".
Doesn't seem weird to me, seems apt to ask to escalate the method of communication when a serious issue like this arises.
Would you consider it more respectful to deal with this issue just by posting in the thread?
It's a community matter posted in a public place, a non-statement with an immediate attempt to direct it to private conversation reads like trying to avoid attention to your mistakes (e.g. hypothetically you don't have to public admit you didn't do anything to check for guidelines to follow). More vibe-y, it all sounds very corporate, like any PR statement in response to criticism ever, or a manager writing to an employee in a big corp, not "humans working together in a community, and one of the humans is clearly pissed off right now".
Also while it's phrased as a question, it doesn't offer any alternative next step. So a better approach would be writing down the initial questions you have and then offer that you'd be open for a call if the OP prefers that. If they don't, they can immediately engage with your questions, and they are open to everybody else in the community. Whereas right now if they say "no, I don't want to call you" that's all you've given them.
(To be clear I can easily believe the writer of the response is not intending any of that and means well, but that's how it comes across)
I am from the UK, and I also think this is true. Hop on a call and the wording sounds like they do not want to fix the issue
It comes across very condecending. Maybe it is a US problem
Non-native here. People "hop on a call" to have a personal guide that helps in stepping through tasks of a proposed solution. Such a call is made to remove ambiguity and provide immediate feedback, to apply the solution as seamless as possible. Used in the context here (without a proposed solution) it just screams "let's avoid public outcry" with a touch of "why don't you overthink your annoyances with me".
"I'm sorry for how you feel" is widely accepted as a non-apology in English. Sincere apologies show awareness of how one's actions led to the situation that would require the apology.
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.
Given that the written complaint already had a list of ways Mozilla had stepped on the toes of those volunteers, expressing regret about their feelings without at least acknowledging that Mozilla's actions might have been rash is very condescending indeed. These volunteers are adding value to M's product for free and they are very angry and threatening to leave and this is your response? Basically saying "I'm sorry you're being such big babies, do you want some tissues?"...
Not a native speaker, but to me it reads as canned or AI generated response that acknowledges nothing in the post besides there being some kind of tiny disagreement. I don't see how "I'm sorry for how you feel about this" can be inteprented as anything other than "I'm not at fault, and I'm sorry I'll have to spend time pacifying you".
Feels extremely disrespectful.
> As someone from the Netherlands I read absolutely 0 condescending or patronising behaviour in this.
To be fair, Dutch culture is known for its directness[0] and for not interpreting even the harshest criticism as offensive, so I'm not sure I would trust your judgment on this… :-D
That being said, as a fellow European, I concur.
[0]: There was a great video on this a while back, which I don't seem to be able to find right now. https://www.tiktok.com/@letsdoubledutch/video/73822692756517... seems close enough, though.
I don't think there is something inherently patronizing about this. But this tone seems like the most generic possible American corporate faux-friendly tone.
In order to sound truly friendly, one has to break the script
I'm from the United States and I read the exact same thing that you did. Somebody really trying to help. Zero condescending or patronizing behavior. It seems like somebody doing their best to reach out and get in contact and yeah I agree completely that hell I could have written this myself. And probably have something like that before. I don't understand what culture would find that condescending at all.
I think there might be a disconnect on how people handle calls in the first place.
At this point getting on a call is seen as a major chore for a majority of people. It's an already tense situation, trying to defuse it by "hopping on a call" is just not great IMHO. They should at least acknowledge they're putting undue burden on the other side and are asking them to go the distance when they're already volunteering their time.
I'm saying that setting aside the opacity of moving from an public to a private setup.
This is a pointer to a somewhat US related POV, but this is nether a generational thing nor a limited phenomenon:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crgklk3p70yo
I'm from The Netherlands but have lived in the US for a while and unlike other country brethren responding in this thread, it did come across as condescending to me.
Trying to dissect why it comes across, I think it's just me kneejerking to the 'pattern' of specifically "I am sorry you feel that way". I think my kneejerk disdain of that turn of phrase is correct, though.
Being blunt here: Because that's a terrible apology! You are sorry that I feel this way? We're barely using the same dictionary here; how I feel about a thing is textbook 'stuff you cannot change or barely even fathom', so what is there to be sorry about? You might as well say "I'm sorry for the fact that 2 + 2 is 4". It's not apologetic in any way. It says sorry without taking even a millimeter of responsibility.
A minimal apology that is slightly less condescending might be "I am sorry how our choices led to you feeling this way" because at least now you're sorry about your choices instead of being sorry about how I feel.
I wouldn't want to be buoyed by false hope either, so taking as axiomatic that the moz team wants to hear how to improve matters but are not willing to completely 180º on their sumobot policies, something like: "I apologise for how we've kinda steamrolled y'all with rolling out sumobot. We were trying to improve the state of translations of our knowledge base articles and might have gone too far. We shouldn't have done it without keeping you out of the loop either. Is it possible to have a video call, apologise in person, and try to work out if there's a way sumobot can be helpful for all japanese language users of firefox in a way that works with your excellent work maintaining the KB so far?"
I get that it's just american corpospeak, "hop on a call". But the number of times something that's perfectly normal in dutch culture (a bit brash, but not at all intended to be rude) gets jumped on by americans as being ridiculously rude... well, trying to write a way to be culturally aware of the recipient has to be a two-way street, right?
I dont think this 'apology' is rude, not at all. But it's not apologetic. If you're peeved off at mozilla for foisting sumobot on you, you've already decided to cut ties, and then team mozilla tries to mend the relationship, this is a very poor attempt. In the context of an attempt to mend the relationship this is condescending. Or at least bad diplomacy.
I'm from the Netherlands as well and I wouldn't interpret this as condescending but as disingenuous corporate BS-speak where someone is doing damage control by showing "how much they value your opinion". And in the end not doing anything at all with your concerns.
As somebody from Spain, I concur.
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?
It's a combination of inability to read anything longer than a tweet and not wanting to put anything on record.
I'd say otherwise - it's a reach out to have a relationship. It's hard to have human relationships only by writing. Of course the best way to build it is to meet in person, but if impossible - it's always good to have a video call.
If someone is frustrated, the following chats won't do much really. They have already built a wall, and we need to meet around it, not throw our letters over it.
Who wants "a relationship" here with some manager who has just delivered the standard corporate nonpology? The problems are listed in the first message, start by fixing them.
Your claim is based on the very strong assumption that if you have a phone or video call with a person that you already hate, things will get better.
My life experience does tell me that this is often not the case: if people are already frustrated and have built a wall, it is better to use something more impersonal, like such an online text discussion.
True but organizations are not uniform, one person decided to take a destructive action and another one might want to fix it.
But I agree, if after receiving such a message someone is saying "let's hop on a call", there's little chance of things going right on the call.
Then at least try to sound like a genuine human that cares and not a PR response when reaching out. Offer a "you can call me if you want" vs making the call the expectation (it's phrased as a question but there is no other path offered).
How about:
**
First of all, I'm shocked to learn about what happened. We at Mozilla had no idea that sumobot is wreaking such havoc on your work. Please accept my sincere apologies.
It would be a great pity to have all your precious work done, so we'll do our best to fix it. I would be very grateful if you could schedule a meeting with me so that I could understend the issues you described better so that they are fixed asap?
Once again, I'm very sorry for what happened and I hope in spite of that you can continue doing great work for the Japanese Mozilla community. **
> not wanting to put anything on record
It is clearly this. Management hates written communication.
"We tried but this unpaid volunteer didn't cooperate by continuing to work for free"
Why is it condescending and patronzing? I read it as a person trying to understand the situation.
I'm not part of Mozilla or any of the communities and I understood the situation by reading the damn post, on the first time.
In the follow-up, any words concerning how the person feels, words on how to talk about this further, and wanting to truly understand what he just wrote in plain and simple terms simply reek strongly of "we really won't change anything, we've made our decision, we are disagree with you but we want you to agree with what we're already doing".
I can hear the exact same tone in exact similar situations with various customer service reps, HR, corporate smooth-talkers, public officials/politicians where the decision is already written in stone and they just pretend they're listening to the customers/employees/citizens affected to quiet down the criticism.
To add to this fire. I recently left my 'recently bought by private equity' workplace of 8 years to work somewhere else not-yet-ruined-by-PE (yet..) A major part of my decision to quit was this communication pattern.
The whole organisation was very efficiently structured with two separate layers of managers - those who had actual decision power, and a separate layer whose task was to 'deal with us employees' but no decision power. All communication flowing one way, the same way shit drips (the only resource following 'trickle-down' mechanics). The only time I got into contact with the former level, was after I had put in my resignation; then they suddenly wanted a 1-1 to "see if there was anything they should learn from this" (presumably to sharpen/hone their skills in mistreating the employee level more efficiently in the future).
yup.
it's american english for "oh this must be hard for you. how can we help you to cope?" and no intent to change.
a better response would rather be:
"We're sorry, we were not aware. please can we meet and you help us understand? so we can fix this situation? We'd also like to share our intentions and we hope together we can improve the situation."
telling
The person gives a clear, detailed answer in the post about their problems > "We want to make sure we trully understand what you're struggling with"
To me that's very condescending, like someone who reads but doesn't understand
Borderline AI response
And personally offering a call is like a sidestep "lets move this problem out of the public discourse" which is especially funny considering it's about a forum
> And personally offering a call is like a sidestep "lets move this problem out of the public discourse"
Maybe. But that’s also assuming the worst from the get go, and that’s no way to settle a dispute.
For all we know (which is very little, and thus should offer the benefit of the doubt), offering a call is an admission that text is an awful medium to resolve conflict: It’s time consuming for both parties and a poor conveyor of tone and nuance. Even writing this unimportant comment I had to stop and think and rewrite some parts to get it closer to the meaning I intend, but even so I fazer zero doubts someone will misunderstand it in the worst way imaginable.
Calls aren’t perfect either, but they allow you to understand in real time when a point is not getting through to the other person and calmly resolve each issue as it surfaces. It gets you on the same page faster.
After the call they can still decide to post their conclusions publicly if they so wish, but not every discussion needs to be public. It’s fine (and productive) for two people to discuss something in private and only have to worry about making themselves understood by the relevant party, not worry about having each word scrutinised by every internet rando.
This is the type of response you shouldn't make. Instead you should do your homework and then come back with the receipts.
E.g. figure out why this happened, express why it shouldn't have happened, why it should happen never again, how it is understandable how they feel, express that you cannot expect them to come back, make them an actual offer that would make them come back (e.g. by giving them a better place at the table or offering compensation), etc.
But "I am sorry you feel" is bordering on gaslighting. That is as if you are sorry your wife feels sad after you beat them. You should feel sorry and ashamed for doing the beating, not for how someone feels as a result of it.
The described things are clearly unacceptable and whether someone feels outrage or not doesn't make them more or less acceptable.
> Borderline AI response
I can’t believe what I’m going to say now, but AIs are better at this. Granted, their apologies are good for shit since they have no agency and can’t really learn from their mistakes, but they at least leave no doubts at who is at fault and should be ashamed.
(Cue Gemini with its “I’m a disgrace” self-flagellation)
Basically, this response doesn't acknowledge any of the concerns marsf mentioned.
> I'm sorry for how you and the Japanese community feel [...]
He's not talking about what he feels - but a very real change, detrimental change of workflow. Simply not addressed.
In addition to not responding to any of the specifics that the poster clearly put time into, there's also a huge mismatch in tone. In general, do not act very corporate when people are personally pissed off, this has a tendency to just annoy most people further.
It’s the boilerplate every junior account manager uses when they don’t actually have a solution.
Well. Too late. Now that they go you want to talk? If I was the one who finally had enough why the fuck would I want to talk to something I turned my back to?
There were very clear statements of what will happen and why. First acknowledge those, express you are sorry for what happened and hint some mea culpa and how you plan to solve it.
Only then if you feel the need to talk realize that you are the one begging them, not the other way around.
It's always the, "I'm sorry for how you feel," that strikes me as belittling and disingenuous.
It is gaslighting even. It is extremely manipulative to be sorry about a thing someone else did, while in fact the the fuckup originated from you. Own it or offer to investigate/fix it.
A decent answer would have been worded among the lines of:
"I am personally deeply sorry to see you go [acknowledge you take their decision serious]. I don't know the details, but if what you describe is true (and I have no reason to doubt it), this is clearly unacceptable and should never have happened [acknowledge the issue is serious and confirm it wasn't intentional]. You feeling betrayed as a result of this is only natural and understandable, and it is Mozilla that should feel ashamed for it coming to this [validate feeling, admit guilt]. I will investigate why this happened and want to find ways to ensure something like this never happens again [show that you're willing to do something substential solbing the root of the problem]. Nobody should have their hard work just automatically replaced by AI, not you, nor anybody else [afirm you're on the same page as them by appeal to general principle]. I know you likely don't want to have anything to do with this now, but I would be deeply grateful if you had a moment to talk about this with me, personally, not as a member of Mozilla but as a member of the community [ask them about help, acknowledging you can't expect any, show that you care about this beyond any purely official duties]."
Of course that means some work, but this is how I would answer such a thing.
The OP/article is very clear and very direct on what the problems are. The response is so typical american conflict-shy “let’s talk so we can slowly dimish your critique, and also let’s do talking instead of writing so we cant really be held accountable for specifics”. And, to me it comes across as lazy: the op/article is very specific on the problems, just get to work already, no need to “further clarifications” (obviously disable that stupid bot for the japanese community; then get to work restoring original KBs from backups. Then reach out to talk about next steps)
It’s a tonedeaf response from the staff person. Zero respect for what’s clearly many, many hours of contribured work.
Same.
How would you form this response to make it less condensending and patronizing? I won't judge if it is patronizing or not because I'm not very good at this kind of thing but would like to understand the issue.
OP has given all that they need, English is probably not their first language, and the first response was to ask for even more unpaid time and labour (presumably in English) in a format that is likely much more difficult for them to summarise coherent thoughts succinctly in, while addressing zero of their issues. They’re asking for MORE effort of the volunteer to fix their bot’s fuckup.
I’m honestly struggling to think of a more insulting way to respond to this. At least “Fuck off” isn’t pretending to care, it’s fewer words to read and isn’t asking for an indeterminate amount of time from you.
a) don't apologize for the other persons feelings, but for your actions that lead to it
b) don't look like you are trying to take the conversation out of the community space it's happening in and/or hiding details by going to a private call (you can offer a call, but it shouldn't be the expectation)
c) Acknowledge the concrete complaints made. Are you truly "struggling to understand" what someone means when they complain that it didn't happen in a staging environment first?
d) a-c also lead to "don't sound like any cookie-cutter PR response to a complaint ever, people have learned those are not genuine". Especially if you are a project that makes a big deal out of its community interacting with said community.
e) ideally announce some concrete first step, e.g. pausing the bot
One point I'd like to add as someone who has worked in IT support for years:
Don't answer when you haven't done your homework. Either you check for yourself if what they claim has happened happened and acknowledge the fuckup or you just trust them as go on "if this is true and we have no reason not to trust you, it should never have happened".
But not understanding? The description of the incident was pretty clear. Maybe think about it and investigate till you understand what the problem is, and then answer.
Or answer being clear about that if you feel like you need to respond now. Acknowledge there is a problem, say you'll have to look into the details before you can say more, come back with specific questions if you need answers.
> Are you truly "struggling to understand" what someone means
You've turned this around into a very different quote, and shouldn't use quote marks for that. They wrote:
> We want to make sure we trully understand what you're struggling with.
I don't like their response and agree with a lot of people in the thread it looks like they are trying to do the call to take it private. But we don't have to make up stuff.
If the post gave any acknowledgement to the already stated complaints I'd agree with you, but it does not, and that does stand out and leads to my reading.
Yes, but what is there to understand? A bot erased the hard work of people. That is the point.
Sure there may be more fine detail to understand around the guidelines etc, but first you should acknowledge that (A) your bot fucked up big time, (B) everybody would be pissed if years of work would be overwritten in such disrespectful manner and (C) that this isn't how you want to treat your community.
If you don't manage that this person made the right call when they decided to leave.
Maybe something like:
You wouldn't form this response. 'We didn't understand it was this bad, so we've shut down SUMO bot for the Japanese Wiki'.
I just read someone asking someone else for a phone call.
Speaking a second language live is much harder than taking your time and writing something.
That's not necessary true. Regardless the response is totally trash and the timezone (US west coast) likely doesn't help, either
Also I'd expect if a person volunteers as translator they'd be pretty decent at speaking.
> Also I'd expect if a person volunteers as translator they'd be pretty decent at speaking.
Translators (of texts) are not interpreters.
To learn nuances, spoken language is quite important.
I am not a translator and English is not my 1st language (technically) - I'd have no issues 'hopping' on a call.
> To learn nuances, spoken language is quite important.
In my experience, it's quite the opposite: written language carries a lot more nuances than the (often more shallow) spoken language.
Further down someone mention a bug that surfaced prior, and I take this as an attempt to understand the bug further.
> I'm sorry
good start
> for how you feel
oh.
> hop on a call
...oh.
I don't get it. It's not the best possible phrasing, but people who find this sounds "horribly condescending" are excessively sensitive in my opinion. Like a grown man complaining about being "horribly hurt" when a careless passer-by bumped into him.
I'm sorry you don't get it and that you feel they're excessively sensitive. On the behalf of the HN community would you like to share with us more about how you feel about it so that we can better understand your position. I'm sure we can help you find the best possible phrasing to better express the excess of said sensitivity. We're sorry you've had to encounter such a wording and attitude on our forum.
I'm sorry you feel that way.
> What a horribly condescending and patronising response
What sort of special snowflake are you? You’re offended by nothing. Get a grip and toughen up.
This is rich
> We want to make sure we trully understand what you're struggling with.
The post literally starts with a list of grievances. Maybe ask the AI for an executive summary and the key points.
In the replying posts, there is mention of a discovered bug that could have resulted in most of the reported problems.
It is normal to want to discuss in order to check if that was the bug, in which case fixing the bug would have solved the issues.
Some grievances were vague. It doesn't follow our translation guidelines. What specific guidelines did it not follow? It doesn't respect current localization for Japanese users, so they were lost. What was not localized?
Mozilla's response should not be limited to clarifying these grievances. But it could have been all the staff member who responded could do.
Those would be the guidelines that all translation contributors are expected to follow, which are given to all prospective translators.
It sounds like Mozilla just turned on the machine without consulting the human translators to see if the machine actually worked in a useful manner.
> It sounds like Mozilla just turned on the machine without consulting the human translators to see if the machine actually worked in a useful manner.
Yes. And someone should make a real apology. But learning what the machine did wrong is part of fixing a machine.
Yes, that's why you engage with the people doing the work first and run it on a staging environment to see what would be overwritten. You test until it's working well enough to enhance the effort done by the translators.
Well, in this era Im not entirely sure the quality aspect is even considered. CEO wants AI? Then he will get it, so that the next earnings call can be bombastic!
Saving zero dollars and making the product worse is not important, only that there doesn’t seem to be a browser monopoly is.
And the fact that they didn't strongly suggests that they knew.
And someone should make a real apology. Which I said.
An apology? Mozilla is incapable of taking responsibility. What they will do is blaming someone else, probably the translators.
What, you mean that US companies should ask their local branches before pushing changes in every countries? /s
This happens all the time, in every US company I know. It's as if the Americans where entirely oblivious to the fact that the rest of the world exists.
Specifically which guidelines? Not a URL. Not hand wavey “oh you know the guidelines”. A text list of the guidelines that are not followed.
It might be more helpful to point out which guidelines it did follow. Humans are expected to read and obey these things - so presumably whoever deployed them will be aware and can demonstrate that they were followed.
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.
Interestingly, it looks like some of the "bad examples" are precisely the kind of things ML would produce. Others are what non-native speakers would produce (starting with "あなたは" to translate a sentence starting by "you").
I'm sure some translators were using ML before it was integrated, and those guidelines are here in particular to tell them about those problems.
Also, ML is now really good to translate between European languages, but Japanese is very different in its structure so ML from English to Japanese is not as good. I'm sure some people who only know English/French/Spanish/German saw that ML is pretty good, and don't realize that for some other language it just doesn't work.
> Also, ML is now really good to translate between European languages
As somebody who has to regularly bear "German" machine-translated UIs and manuals that originate in English, I can only say: No, it's not. It's atrocious.
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.
This is Mozilla as usual, arrogant and tone deaf.
lmao. This is a "research team and five years" task with current state of LLM.
Yes, but now that's the answer to questions like "how do we deploy AI without pissing off our communities?"
I have your answer: you provide a tool for your translators, you don't unleash a bot that makes changes left and right and creates new pages.
Typically, when a new page is written in English, don't automatically generate a version in all languages. When a translator starts creating the page in their language, provide a button to pre-fill with ML translation if they want to.
And for users, you can display the English version with a message, "this is not translated in your language yet but you can read an ML version if you want".
For reference: https://xkcd.com/1425/
I don't know why you're being downvoted, you're exactly right.
The person replying is probably not an expert in this. But they want to get more details so they can figure out how to get it to the right people with more information.
This is how it's supposed to work.
Same reason people here are taking "let's jump on a call" as some personal attack.
Some people just like drama.
Especially when AI is involved, the anti-AI team feels like they need to step up to the plate.
Tools should work for their users. In this case, the bot should work (and be controlled by) the localization teams for each language.
If the bot has the power to overrule the volunteer translation teams, the entire power structure is wrong from the get go.
I wonder if you and the person who replied really understands how you feel when you have been part of something over 20 years and see it destroyed by tone deaf changes to text. I have no idea how Sumobot works, but it is easy to see how Mozilla or an organization with top down "ship-it-fast" incentives can trample a community led project. This is really not a question of AI, the same thing happens with professional translators.
I have had to cooperate with coporate
> Same reason people here are taking "let's jump on a call" as some personal attack. Some people just like drama.
No, some of us can see into the future, because it flows from the past. When management shits on 20 years of work and breaks everything after not listening to your warnings, they don't suddenly start listening and understanding out of nowhere.
The market fit of your words matter and the non apology "sorry you feel that way" doesn't help. It's one of those gnarly phrases that only get used if you feel the need to act but in reality don't want to. Maybe the person is sincere his words are tainted by the overuse in shady corp responses. If you are engaging with your community you need to know this otherwise you'll always look like a clown.
That's really a dumb complaint. Sure, nobody is happy with the situation, but what do you propose a better reaction should be? Ignore the guy? Immediately drop whatever they think is a good idea (even though it may be not — it's still a matter of perspective, and somebody surely thinks it was a good idea) because somebody was pissed off by it, hoping that maybe at least he may change his mind and continue business as usual after that?
Or maybe an offer to set up a call and talk about the problem and possible solutions in person is not such a bad move after all? Seriously, I don't see how you can be mad at the fact that a representative of an organization wants to discuss the actual problem with an actual member of the community for a change, instead of just writing the usual "sorry but not sorry" corporate bullshit message and call it a day. Maybe it won't solve anything and they won't find a common ground anyway, but still, I cannot imagine a more honest attempt at trying.
One of the primary complaints was that an unmonitored bot has the power to override years of work done by volunteer translation teams.
First you have to stop the destruction. Then you can talk about how to make the bot work for humans, instead of against them.
They had specific complaints. Either say, "we're willing to work to change the things that you're complaining about", or say, "sorry, we're not going to change those things". The wishy washy bullshit they did is effectively ignoring the guy. They're ignoring everything the person said. And it definitely comes across as "sorry not sorry" corporate bullshit.
Revert the changes and then hop on a call to figure out how to do it right next time.
"Explain what's wrong and how to fix it" is the wrong approach. if you need it explained to you what was broken, then you're not the expert here, just the local tinpot dictator.
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.
Exactly right!
With the AI juggernaut picking up steam, i expect this is going to happen sooner rather than later.
That said, Mozilla clearly handled this the wrong way; they should have informed the volunteers before throwing the switch.
Conversely, it's a bit strange for a for-profit company like Mozilla Corporation to rely on volunteer labor through its non-profit parent Mozilla Foundation to perform customer support.
There was a period where every company was trying to "crowd source" free labor. It died off because people didn't like working for corporations for free.
I can see why they have it under Mozilla.org. And lots of companies have community support.
But I do think we should ask ourselves whether companies have some sort of moral obligation to continue relying on unpaid labor because it might make the unpaid laborers feel a sense of meaning. I'm very sympathetic to the need to have a sense of meaning. But I'm less sympathetic to for-profit companies relying on unpaid labor and especially to the idea that we should encourage more of it.
There was probably a more tactful way to shift labor from passionate volunteers to soulless AI.
I too would be upset if an organization threw out a decade of translation work without any warning or discussion, in favor of a robot pretending to understand my language and failing.
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 and willing to do it for free is either a very good Samaritan, or there is some other issue at stake and in the end prominent free software figures often have fairly heated public keyboard wars over things with each other and most of all seem strangely fiercely loyal tribalists who suffer from an extreme case of n.i.h.-syndrome.
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 company to keep you paying in good will.
> 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.
Who knows?
Everyone whose native language is not English knows. Seriously, people with this attitude should be forced to run their browser and mail client with a plugin to run everything through a couple of machine translation roundtrips. Give it two months, and I guarantee you'll understand.
My first language is German, but I've got most of my devices set to English. Because of that, Youtube started machine-translating German video titles and audio into English at random. The audio quality is just bad, everything sounds muffled. And the translations are often complete garbage. I absolutely detest this "feature".
I’m in the Netherlands and I get ads for Bol.com on YouTube now with narration that would be more appropriate to Fitter, Happier. I’m surprised advertisers are ok with it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tepztGLNYcE
I have a feeling that advertisers have yet to catch up. In Germany, the supermarket chain Lidl recently started running a pretty heavy advertisement campaign on Youtube. Of course, Youtube auto-translated the advertisement into English. The effect is really, really uncanny. "LIDL IS WORTH IT! JA!"
If I were Lidl, I'd shut that down immediately.
this is hilarious, thanks
the wild thing is you _know_ there are so many people at YouTube who speak multiple languages and have issues with this. What engineering team is only filled with single-language-speaking people, especially at a prestige-y place like Google?
> 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.
> Mozilla is painted bad here, but who knows if the automated translations do not help more people than it hurts the translators.
Mozilla should have discussed this with the translators in advance at least.
> What if the reduced financial pressure allows Mozilla to focus more on privacy and less on ads.
My impression was marsf was a volunteer.
Pretty black and white to me.
Mozilla destroyed decades of work on a production server without even discussing it with the passionate volunteers that provided them free labor for decades. Didn’t even evaluate on a staging server to check for quality issues.
The AI isn’t the focus of the issue. The management decision to disregard and disrespect their own unpaid contributors and their organization’s history is a clear indication of Mozilla’s current and future priorities.
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 emotional communication over).
Regardless of how nice or not-nice the text may sound to the various cultures that have weighed in so far, the right thing to do is talk voice/video and hash out what the problems are, and work together to come up with a solution that will satisfy everyone.
That's what communication is about.
Maybe "open a communication channel" is what Mozilla should have done BEFORE they turned on this thing.
From the article: "It has been working now without our acceptance, without controls, without communications".
This person has been doing volunteer work for a long time, attempting to create a helpful environment. Then suddenly, from above a machine is turned on that shits all over that effort. Makes one feel unwelcome, and unseen...
This isn't about communication though, it's about community. Mozilla just introduced a bot to overtake community efforts.
> another asking to open a communication channel.
The other person is asking to open a private communication channel. OT, but where is this reductionism-to-rationalize-trend coming from lately?
Community is also about communication. In fact, that's a primary aspect of a community.
Yeah, Mozilla introduced a bot that's stomping on things. Are they malicious? Twirling neatly waxed mustaches as they cackle gleefully as the little ants scurry about in a panic?
Or is this a case of humans doing what humans do: Screwing things up.
The first step is to open communications, and the most effective form of communication is face-to-face (the way we've evolved to do it).
Getting to the bottom of the issue in 1-1 communication with a representative of the community should be the common approach when complex problems arise, because then you can be sure that you're on the same wavelength before you do your mass communication with the rest of the community. Saves a TON of time and heartache and ill feelings.
> where is this reductionism-to-rationalize-trend coming from
Unironically, AI trends.
I worked on adding TLS 1.1 and 1.2 support to firefox back in the day, and the whole process left me so disappointed I asked to be removed from the list of contributors. I wish mozilla all the best, but it's not an especially well run organization and this post gives another example of why.
I submitted 2 patches during an 2018 open night to bring in more volunteers in Berlin. The actual folk there were amazing, but the review process, tooling, and bureaucracy was so upsetting that I never bothered again. I'm not sure the fixes were approved, and it wouldn't be surprising if these open nights don't convince many to contribute.
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 the skepticism the consumers feel toward the tech sector by Mozilla using the exact same language and dark UI pattern to promote things like pocket that the user-base never asked for, and jump on to the lets enforce the use of AI everywhere that's driving discontent within the proprietary ecosystems, and this is yet another example of this class of behavior from the Mozilla leadership.
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
Indeed but it feels like a lifetime ago. I miss those days where I would look up to google and their products, as something new, cool and "not-evil".
It's pretty clear they've been full evil for a while. It's documented at least back to 2011 but the rest of us didn't clue in for a while after.
But why does it have to be the case that the leadership of an opensource project have to emulate the desperation and authoritarianism of a potentially stagnant tech sector.
I don't think it's malevolence from the mozilla leadership team but more that if you hang around people who have bet their lifesaving on the success of cloud based LLMs, being cautious and making their use "optional" might begin to sound like a really controversial position even if that's actually what the users/community want from Mozilla.
Firefox market share have been declining and it's not easy to point to any obvious technical problem, so the reason for the decline is likely that the Mozilla corporation keep messing up the narrative by acting like just another Silicon Valley tech firm.
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?
Given the abysmal market share of Firefox today I think a large percentage of the remaining users do actually care.
I think it's in the organization as well. They had really good outreach programs and educational content (though I think that's now gutted) that talked about tech ethics, but their product just follows the same bad behavior.
>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.
But of course, they need "competitive" salaries so they can hire "great talent" from the tech sector so that the company doesn't fall behind or something.
> Firefox is a good browser
Increasingly it isn’t. It’s crashing 2 or 3 times a day for me now, and video conferencing is barely usable.
Hasn't crashed for me once and I use it daily.
Been crashing for me and friends for about a week now, mostly on youtube
So, they had people working for free for years and didn't think to involve them in a process where they could have been stil "useful"?
But I think they already clarified how much they care about people doing translations since they defaulted to the robo-translation. Which to me is complete nonsense considering how superior the human translations must be. As a human with a brain, I would have just translated automatically the missing pages leaving to them the option of replacing/fixing them. Also they should have been thanked many times for all their hard work.
Ladybird and other browser alternatives cannot come fast enough. Every other week we've got a thread here about some stupid move Mozilla have made, I can't remember the last time I heard positive news about Mozilla.
It's bad when the only positive thing one can say about them is that they're not Google/Microsoft.
10+ years in Japan. The message here is much deeper from my perspective. “Let’s jump on the call” is not the solution. The guy was stripped off of his face. I love Japan for being human. Small business bar or restaurant with 3 tables. Not everything should be streamlined for a quick call solution… the process was pushed on his head. Google nemawashi decision making process
I did as you suggested with respect to “nemawashi.” I read about that and “ringi,” and I’m glad I did. Even to get just the gist of what I’m sure is a thin interpretation: that nemawashi refers to a “laying-the-groundwork” process of circulating a proposal between peer-level counterparts, before formalizing it and proposing to act on it.
Much less crashing in with it in the form of a “SumoBot,” as Mozilla seems to have done to its non-English communities… (with the disclaimer that I have zero insight into Mozilla’s process here outside of this writer’s account).
It puts a name to a considerate consensus-based way to approach change, that seems humane (and effective) in any culture—leave it to the Japanese to have a specific term for it…
common sense... no real need for digging into japanese culture and so on. really no idea why Mozilla is so disrespectful to it's volunteers. well, that sweet 400m a year from Google... no need for volunteers anymore, eh
For sure. Common sense <> common, etc… although it does seem relevant that it was specifically a Japanese-language sub-community who were reacting here.
I have to say it feels like a really familiar, NGO-flavored disrespect, though: “we’re doing this favor for underrepresented language communities,” regardless of whether they want/need it or not.
“There’s only X number of you having to shoulder the load in XX sub-community, don’t you want us to impose a bunch of ‘help’?”
Well, no, if the choice is between a formidable volume of slop and a smaller but well-executed volume of volunteer labor-of-love…
(…I say as a person very much without all sides of the story, and shooting from the hip a bit. I don’t mean to impugn anybody’s intentions, and I imagine at the end of the day we’re all on the same side here.)
Enlightened despotism, all over again.
That reminds me of internet RFC’s… like by the time they are formally published, no the author is not interested in your “comment”.
…and, for that matter, there was an earlier draft phase where the author was R’ing For your C. And you could have jumped in then and been more-or-less welcome.
Sounds like RFC ought to be the name of that draft phase, rather than a name encompassing all phases, especially not the final phase in which C's are no longer R'd.
Times changed. Historical names did not.
"many of the early RFCs were actual Requests for Comments and were titled as such to avoid sounding too declarative and to encourage discussion.[8][9] The RFC leaves questions open and is written in a less formal style. This less formal style is now typical of Internet Draft documents, the precursor step before being approved as an RFC." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Request_for_Comments
I've written a few RFCs.
For any RFC, there will be a "comment" after publication from someone who did not take earlier comments seriously enough to read them.
Exactly the attitude described by GP comment
Mind boggling
We Americans call this garnering buy-in.
I predict that these times of excessive trust in AI during decision making will be written in history books at some point of time. Providing that there will be books at all.
I already suspect that Duolingo destroyed real people's recording of Spanish conversations and replaced them with AI. For example I can quite often hear continental Spanish accent which has never been taught to me before (as I started with Duolingo as a freshman) - it used to be always American Spanish accent. Wrongly cut conversions is another matter.
I am not sure I am buying this. There is nothing human about japanese business procedures. Most japanese business procedures usually only serve micro managing purposes, and the nemawashi procedure is basically stripping people who were not consulted before, from giving their honest input and impact in the decision making. In my opinion it creates more problems than it solves
> Not everything should be streamlined for a quick call solution
If you have a better solution to correct an error or solve a problem than having a call/meeting and openly discuss situation and possible resolutions - I would love to know about that.
The response was condescending and very… American. The call ensures what, that you'll be more receiving to their grievances? That nothing is on the record? A lot of people don't want to jump in calls, ever. The initial response should've validated that the community feels slighted, that they should've brought them onboard for the decision making, etc.
Acknowledging the mistake immediately seems like a good start.
> The call ensures what, that you'll be more receiving to their grievances?
It ensures you truly understand what the crux of the grievance is and what they would like to happen to get it resolved, instead of being distracted by tangential points.
> That nothing is on the record?
If you’re already assuming malice before the resolution process even had a chance to begin, the conversation has little chance of being productive. Do you know this particular person? Have you interacted with them before?
> A lot of people don't want to jump in calls, ever.
Then say no! But being preemptively mad because someone asked is absurd and does nothing to fix the problem. The asker shouldn’t assume what the other person wants or doesn’t, they should ask. Which is what they did.
> Acknowledging the mistake immediately seems like a good start.
Yes, very much agreed. But you can’t take back what you did, only try to make amends. And that’s very difficult if the other party demands perfection while you’re still even trying to understand the situation.
Ok, how the perfect reaction would be if you were at charge?
I understand people have sympathy inclination to victims, so everyone would assume the victim is good and other side is bad. I have worked long enough with japanese people knowing they can throw unpredictable tantrums.
As a manager, what would be your best course of action to deal with similar situation?
Acknowledging the mistake immediately seems like a good start, as I've said.
Life doesn't always have to be from the perspective from “a manager”, these are community volunteers doing untold hours of unpaid work. Just be a person, whose acquaintance is upset you replaced their handmade postcard with an AI-generated one.
Acknowledging a mistake, no matter genuinely or not, doesn't solve the situation. It just makes victim feel good a bit.
Agree on manager view, I was rather putting situation in a wrong perspective. It doesn't change the questions though - what would you do to resolve the situation (not to make the other side feel good)?
> nemawashi
Long time in Japan too, I would not consider newamashi as being Japan's strengths.
I can imagine what you mean, but since I am not in Japan, it would be interesting why you feel that way.
long and slow consensus building that weighs existing stakeholder's opinions heavily vs doing "the right thing" from the outset. So you move slowly and end up having very annoying conversations and compromises instead of just pushing something through. And the formal process is just a formality anyways, so then anyone not in the informal chatter just gets to experience the capriciousness anyways
The sort of consensus building ultimately involves having to do stuff to make people's opinions feel taken care of, even if their concerns are outright wrong. And you end up having to make some awkward deals.
Like with all this "Japanese business culture" stuff though, I feel like it's pretty universal in some degrees or another everywhere. Who's out there just doing things without getting _any_ form of backchannel checking first? Who wants to be surprised at random announcements from people you're working with? Apart from Musk types.
But of course some people are very comfortable just ripping the band aid off and putting people in awkward spots, because "of course" they have the right opinion and plan already.
Why context matters in judging whether some practice is good or not.
Peter Drucker has an interesting analysis of the "American" -vs- "Japanese" styles of decision-making + alignment, presenting a complementary perspective: https://www.joaomordomo.com/files/books/ebooks/Peter%20Druck...
IMHO the only correct way to measure the effectiveness of decision making is from the quality of executed outcomes. It is somewhat nonsensical to sever decisions from execution, and claim that decisions have been made rapidly if the decision doesn't lend itself to crisp execution. Without that, decisions are merely intentions.
Move fast and break stuff didn't work out much better though.
Yeah sure, I feel like back channeling stuff is generally just the respectful thing to do, so I'm not on the side of the debate I'm expanding upon in most cases.
Just that lacking context one really can't make that many blanket statements.
Not only respectful. Also it ensures that all different aspects of a decision is considered before making the decision. If not aligned with all parties, we would miss important flaws in the plan. It is just a sensible thing to do.
> If not aligned with all parties, we would miss important flaws in the plan.
I think the difficult cases come when people's interests aren't aligned. If you're coordinating with a vendor to basically detangle yourself from their vendor-specific tooling to be able to move away from them, at some level it doesn't really make sense to read them in on that.
There are degrees to this, and I think you can argue both sides here (so ultimately it's a question of what you want to do), but parties are rarely neutral. So the tough discussions come from ones where one party is going to be losing out on something.
You have more than 2 choices
Who cares if they’re wrong? The point is respect for their opinions and feelings since you’ll have to work with them for twenty years. If you respect them, you get to do what you want to do and they won’t fuck with you or shoot down your proposal.
To be clear this is Japan we’re talking about with the twenty years part. The same thing applies in the US but on smaller timescales though. If people feel appreciated and respected and you have good relationships, they will basically back whatever you want.
To be clear I'm describing a point of view, but not always ascribing to it.
I tend to lean towards thinking backchanneling makes sense as a general vibe, if only because it's a way of doing things that lets people have dignity, and the costs _can be_ low.
I think this is a very naive take. Japanese people will blame you for any failure regardless if you respect them or not. And many times failures happen in japan exactly because people are sitting around doing nothing without acting even when it's urgent to make decision. Backstabbing and toxicity is the major feature of japanese business culture
> long and slow consensus building that weighs existing stakeholder's opinions heavily vs doing "the right thing" from the outset.
How do you know what "the right thing" is at the outset without talking to the stakeholders?
I'm dealing with someone's "the right thing" that is actually wrong and dumb. They didn't ask us before rolling out the new "standard."
Some people are very confident in their understanding of a problem! Others will discount the validity of the stakeholders involved having good judgement.
I think most people have at least one issue where they discount one of the stakeholder's judgement, it's all fairly contextual. But hey, if you're the CEO of some company you have the ability to act on that discounting.
Not OP but the phrase in Japanese also carries a negative connotation, that important issues are decided by a shadow process hidden below the surface, beforehand by those in the loop. Meetings are just for show.
Exactly, this is just a 面子(face) problem.
Also, his demanding of not using his work for AI training is nonsense. Because entire articles, this one included is published under a Creative Commons license.
Didn't he agree on that?
Mozilla must reject his further contribution because he stated he don't understand the term of Creative Commons license. His wish granted I guess.
Creative Commons License was created without any AI in mind.
And
> Licensees may copy, distribute, display, perform and make derivative works and remixes based on it only if they GIVE THE AUTHOR or licensor THE CREDITS
Is the AI published under the same CC license, with attribution?
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.
Exactly, never accept a switch to a private place when you're trying to gather attention on public matters. It could and it will be used against you later on.
Also a call is a place where we'll try and grind you down until you agree with us.
Just record the needing, have an ai transcription service take notes. Then there’s a record.
I’m not sure those who speak like that are equipped to understand how offensive their words and tone can be.
It suggests a decision can be reversed with a quick call, which questions one’s choices or conviction. As if to suggest the choice was made without considerable thought and care. It’s such an unserious tone to a moment that’s very serious to the other.
I think it's because it's almost never accompanied by "we may have fucked up, please help us understand how to fix it now and in the future".
It's almost always (like this time) "I'm sorry you feel that way, please spend more of your free time<EOF>", and sometimes (like this time) "[we're doing it anyway but maybe we'll make some changes]".
It feels insulting because it is insulting. The decision has been made, they just want to not feel bad about you being insulted.
Changing the medium to a private conversation also means not committing to any decision publicly for as long as possible. It feels like damage control and protecting your own image (the person posting with respect to their company) as opposed to addressing the real issue promptly and transparently.
Another reason in context of public forums is that it's dismissive of any concerns or questions raised: If a call would be sufficient, that implies they think that nobody else cares.
At some point, "quick calls" are used for discussions that they don't want a trace of.
So, even in the best "sorry we screwed up" scenario, the quick call covers their butt and let them leeway to backtrack as needed. That's also part of why we viscerally react to opaque meetings IMHO.
oh yes, completely agreed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45831721
> As if to suggest the choice was made without considerable thought and care.
I guess it acts as a mirror of sorts though, because that's precisely how this decision appears to have been made in the first place. But it's clear that whoever represents Mozilla there is already assuming the fault lies with the person that just got kicked.
The first sentence of the top reply ("quick call") was already cunty:
> I'm sorry for how you and the Japanese community feel ...
That may seem like an apology, but it's more a dismissing their issue as "that's a you problem".
To give them the benefit of doubt, English may not be their first language, so they might not be aware of the implication this comment gives.
It would be such irony if they asked GPT to reword it to a more polite tone though...
I used the "lets jump on a quick call" tactic once at work. Other party rejected it; they said they've made their position clear and didn't need to say anything more.
I was impressed. They actually did make their position clear, and in public, whereas I was trying to smooth things over in private. Me trying to influence and cajole behind the scenes was insult to the risk they took by putting themselves out there.
A good lesson in respect.
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.
> - No apology
- No "we stopped the bot for now"
"We're sorry for how you feel" is enterprise for "we think you're whining".
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.
This is just a single initial reply from a "community support manager" in Indonesia. It's not from the Mozilla CEO or the leader of the project. They surely don't have the power to stop the bot. But what they can do is find it more over a call, and then who to escalate it to. Then maybe it does get turned off before it's fixed or changed.
You seem to be confusing someone in customer support with someone who holds power over entire projects. I don't understand how you think a customer support person should be able to just turn off software across the globe in response to a single short message on a forum with few details.
Huh, if you click through their link the person responding is also a "sumo administrator" and it's "sumobot" causing the issues. It seems entirely likely they are personally directly responsible for it.
Regardless they are representing the company. If they aren't the right person to respond - they should not have responded and kicked it up the chain/over the fence to the right person - instead of responding by offering to waste the complainants time on a call with someone you are asserting is not the right person to be handling this. Supposing you are correct about their position, it makes their response far worse, not better.
"SUMO" = SUpport.MOzilla.org. It's the name for the entire Mozilla support organization; everybody involved in the linked discussion is in this organization. It doesn't seem like this person is related to the bot. They are a "Locale Leader" for Indonesia, which is the same position this poster is resigning from (but for Japan). They seem to be peers.
So I'm a complete outsider, but they do not appear to be in the same position as the poster. They are marked as "Mozilla Staff" and "SUMO Administrator" (amongst many other things), neither of which the complainant is marked as.
It is true both they and the person they are responding to are marked as "SUMO Locale Leaders"... but it seems rather clear from the context that is not the role they are inhabiting in their (non) apology and request for a "quick call" with the complainant.
The language they use is certainly not the language a peer would be expected to use either.
Thanks for that info--I think you're right and I'm wrong. I didn't see the group memberships before but now I see that the replier is far more involved in SUMO. I had only seen that they were both locale leaders and that the replier was a staff member from the tag on the post.
CS comms are tricky, I agree! You have to reply to stuff, often before you have any form of full picture. Just think you gotta be careful then, and the message they posted was not good on that front.
I do get what you're saying, and it's not like I think the CSM should be fired for the message. I just think it's bad comms.
Here are some alternative choices:
- post nothing, figure out more internally (community support is also about vouching for people!)
- post something more personal like "Thank you for posting this. I'm looking into who is working on this bot to get this information in front of them". Perhaps not allowed by Mozilla's policies
- Do some DMing (again, more personal, allowing for something direct)
But to your point... it's one person's message, and on both sides these are likely people where English isn't their native language. I'm assuming that community support managers are paid roles at mozilla, but maybe not.
And like... yeah, at one point you go into whatever company chat and you start barking up the chain. That's the work
They are the person who announced the bot would be rolled out. If the person who announced the rollout isn't either the leader of the project or someone who can push for changes to it, then that's already totally against the community.
Second, this "community support forum" isn't just a corporate help desk. It's a forum for community supporters of Mozilla, an open source organisation for which community contributions are hugely important. Mozilla can't just fuck over parts of it's community and expect that to be business as usual.
It is well known passive aggressive corporate phrase to shut people up. Who it is used by is largely irrelevant, it almost always means the same thing.
I did previous work on a product where there was intended to be a message in many languages saying “call XXX for help in (language name)” but they’d obviously used “English” in the text to be translated as several of the translations into Asian languages literally said to call the number for help in English. I raised this and got nobody to care.
From my read, the software didn't go wrong. It did exactly what they intended it to -- machine translations replaced handwritten translations provided by community volunteers. Seems like a pretty big middle finger to those volunteers.
The lead realized that Mozilla doesn't care about their opinion (they did this without discussing with them) nor do they care about the work they were doing (by replacing their work with machine translations). A "quick call" doesn't solve this.
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 understand the issues in more detail.
> Generally speaking, orgs aren't trying to replace high-quality human translations with lower-quality machine translations.
How would you handle updates to an article? Would you blindly replace all existing translations or would you notify the maintainers and wait for them to get around to it?
I wouldn't be surprised if orgs blindly opted for the first, which also means that a single spelling correction would be enough to overwrite days of work.
> Generally speaking, orgs aren't trying to replace high-quality human translations with lower-quality machine translations.
Seems that this is exactly what Mozilla did? And Microsoft, and Reddit, etc.
Correct.
Companies are absolutely falling over themselves to replace high quality human translations with lower quality machine translation. I’m not sure how a hacker news poster could miss this trend.
A hacker news poster is very likely to consume the original English text and never encounter anything else, regardless of whether it's human-translated or not. Just like the people who make these decisions in the first place
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 participating anymore.
(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 rolled this bullshit auto-translator out and pissed off a lot of people in the community, including a major contributor for the last 20 years? Surely they could just ignore him and go on with this auto-translation initiative (BTW, thay don't even have to worry about whatever he wants to "prohibit" to do with his translations, because he waived off his rights by posting them). Would it be better than trying to set up a call and discuss things, try to find some compromise, gather a number of recommendations she may then pass onto people working on the auto-translator initiative (because surely this Kiki person, whoever she is, is not the sole person responsible for this and cannot magically just fix the situation)?
I'm not sure if just this individual is upset, or if he's speaking on behalf of the entire community he's the leader of.
I think it's clear that Mozilla wants machine translation to take a bigger role in producing localized content, and this new process will be a large shift in the way things have been done. I think it's fair for Mozilla to do this, but I also think it's fair for the maintainer to be upset with this decision and no longer want to volunteer his time to clean up slop.
The initial response feels premature and tone deaf which is why people are irked by it.
Given that Mozilla "shot first" so to speak, the onus is on them to take action first e.g. disable the bot, revert changes to articles, etc. Only after doing this can discussion on a path forward happen.
There is no such person as "Mozilla". There is Kiki, a "Support Community Manager", probably a relatively low-level worker (but it doesn't matter much if she is actually has some weight in the organization). So, you are Kiki. You just saw that message. What do you do now? Just ignore it? Do not respond anything and immediately call the CEO and try to convince him/her that he/she must order to disable that auto-translation bot, without even trying to gather more information? No onuses and stuff, what are your actions, exactly?
Because a lot of people in this thread are whin… ahem, expressing their discontent with Mozilla, as we all usually do, but I've yet to see anybody to propose anything realistic at all, let alone better than ask an offended community member for a call and at least to try to talk it through and establish what could be some actionable steps to remedy the situation.
Kiki's profile says "Mozilla Staff", "Staff" and "SUMO Administrators".
> 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.
> What in your opinion would be the right move now, after they rolled this bullshit auto-translator out and pissed off a lot of people in the community
In Japan? Sincere appology followed by resignation.
No, the Japanese absolutely do not set up a call to discuss things after you've scerwed and disrespected them. They respectfully give you the cold shoulder.
Mozilla should not be surprised if their market share dwindles in Japan after this.
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 world in which this is insulting.
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.
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.
The way to show you care is by having a meeting of the minds before you shove your changes in their face. The fact that the deployment was done carelessly demonstrates disregard.
I doubt "take them out to dinner" is the right solution in this situation, but any attempt at redressal must understand the above point and acknowledge it publicly.
"Ask for forgiveness rather than permission" is far from universally true, and carries massive cultural baggage. You cannot operate within that framework and expect all humans to cooperate with you.
This follows an offense, and the insult is the implication that the offense is trivial.
[dead]
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.
Quite. "We may have made a mistake, would you be open to discuss this with us either through email or a call at your preference?" would work a lot better in this setting.
> 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 those guidelines? Is there a way to get it to follow them, like another commenter says works? Does the person need help following the process for that? Or is there a bug? Etc.
These are the things a call can clarify. It's the necessary first step, so why are people complaining?
> Calls require focused attention which if you are used to multi-tasking are a huge drain.
Solving important problems requires focused attention. Which is why you get on calls to solve them when they're urgent and important, and not something that can be multitasked.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
Even if not a high level, then s/he had to learn that style of communication from peers in the corp, and the tone is set by managers. It's entirely OK to blame someone who has title “Manager”.
> 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.
This is completely backwards. The CEO is not expected to manage intercultural communication. You know whose job that is? The community manager.
The community manager for Indonesia wouldn't be expected to manage communication with Japan, but managing local contributors is absolutely a job for the community manager and not the CEO.
"quick call?" in corporatespeak means "I believe our disagreement to be a minor misunderstanding that can be clarified in a few minutes of conversation"
In a company you should never ever "quick call" someone (especially on a group forum) who has presented a genuine list of grievances against whatever you're doing, unless you're subtly trying to pull rank to override those grievances.
He didn't say "quick call". Here is what he said:
> 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.
The thing about English language is that, just like Japanese, it's highly contextual and has different constructs for expressing different level of respect. The problem is, English speakers are completely unaware of this, so either they get it right based on intuition, or they fuck up. In this case, the guy used "I'm your superior and you'll do what I say" mode, while the appropriate mode would've been "oh shit I'm sorry how do I fix this".
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?
My guess would be the anger comes from implication that is a possible solution at all. This type of “hop on a call” request is not usually actually designed to “truly understand what you're struggling with.” (words from the post)
Instead it is usually a PR tactic. The goal of the call requester is to get your acquiescence. Most people are less likely to be confrontational and stand up for themselves when presented with a human - voice, video, or in person. So, the context of a call makes it much more likely for marsf to backpedal from their strongly presented opinion without gaining anything.
This is a common sleazy sales tactic. The stereotypical overly aggressive car salesman would much rather speak to you in person than via email even though the same information can be conveyed. It is also used in PR and HR situations to grind out dissenters, so it comes off in this context as corporate and impersonal.
It's also often a way to avoid saying things in public, in writing, that normal people would be upset about.
If they truly think they're in the right, they can discuss it in public, like the poster already did.
> The stereotypical overly aggressive car salesman would much rather speak to you in person than via email even though the same information can be conveyed.
There might be an element of personality there. I was texting with a real estate agent (for apartment rental, not purchase) in China once, when he decided that as long as we were talking he might as well call me. He didn't bother mentioning this to me beforehand.
Of course, all I could do was hang up on him. It's not like I could understand what he said. And I don't think that was especially difficult to foresee.
So he wasted some time and seriously annoyed me in the most predictable way possible. Why? Not for any reason specific to the situation. Maybe there's emphatic training somewhere that says "always call". Or maybe the type of people who become salesmen have a deep, deep instinct to call.
I've been a typical IT person for a very long time. In the last few years, I got into contact with salespeople, by being basically a sales engineer.
And I've learned that there is a reason to make a call besides the publicity aspect: A call (and I mean call with voice and possibly video) forces immediacy. It puts both parties on the spot. Or rather just the party being called, because hopefully the caller did prepare for the call. Also, this immediacy enables rash and uninformed decisions, whereas asynchronous communications enable more deliberation and research. In sales, you don't want deliberation. You want to get this over quick and easy. And if you've dealt with a long long email chain that goes back and forth quibbling over minutiae, a call can reduce this kind of indecisiveness and inhibition.
So I see this whole thing as insulting in even more ways: A "quick" call means that it is an unprepared one. Also emphasized by the lack of real topic or agenda beyond what the original post already stated. No way forward for the other party that is possible to prepare for. No prior chain of communications, so if the call is really the first reaction in the first short email, this means "you are unimportant, I don't want to waste time, let's get this over with".
Also, in many cultures (I've only had to deal with European ones, so no idea if this really applies to the rest of the world), setting a stage is important. There is a cultural meaning to CC-ing a manager, to inviting more people than necessary to a meeting, or to do things publically or in private. A bigger stage formalizes things, gives importance, emphasizes seriousness. A smaller, private stage can mean the opposite: you might want the other party so safe face, because what you are going to tell more informally them is that they fucked up. You might want to get them to agree to something they could not easily agree to in public. Announcing publically, that there should be a private meeting is the worst of all kinds: Basically, this signals to the public that this person fucked up and is getting scolded, more serious than a totally private scolding, less serious than a totally public one. Why else would you widely announce a private meeting invite?
I don't know if the resignation in the original article is really a final resignation or rather some kind of cultural signal. I've seen that kind of drama used as means to an end, just think of the stereotypical italian lovers' discussion where both are short of throwing each other off the balcony, just to get very friendly a minute later. But in any case, whether it is deliberate drama or a genuine resignation, the necessary reaction has to be similar: You need to treat it as if it were a real resignation publically and respond with all the usual platitudes that they are very valuable, you are so sorry to see them go and you'd do almost anything to keep them. Then you privately meet in private and find out which one it is, and maybe fix things. It is a dance, and you have to do the right steps. If you don't know the right ones, at least think hard (you have the time, it is email) on how not to step on any toes. The Mozilla people failed in that...
Are we reading too much into one sentence? HN comments dese days
No, we aren't.
It was this exact part of the conversation that touched me negatively too. marsf expresses some very valid criticism that, instead of being publicly addressed, is being handled by "let's discuss it privately". This always means that they don't want to discuss, they just want to shut you down.
I don’t think so. Working in tech with many busy people, I say “hop on a call”, but only in “let’s sync live, it’ll be faster” situations.
This stuck out to me as rude. I would never say that to someone on my team who expressed serious concerns, far less than this person quitting after years of dedication.
I would offer an apology, explanation, and follow up questions to understand more in public, then say I’m happy to set up time to talk privately if they would like to or feel more comfortable.
> This stuck out to me as rude.
Very much so, and I'm German ;)
In my experience, and in my feeling as someone reading such things, you need to tone-match. The resignation message was somewhat formal, structured and serious in tone. Replying in such an informal tone means that you are not taking things seriously, which is insulting. Even more so because that informal answer is public.
I'm tone-deaf by culture and by personality. I often make those kinds of mistakes. But a public resignation like this is a brightly flashing warning light saying: "this needs a serious formal answer".
I mean, its right and also not the only sentence too.
'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.
'I'm sorry for how you feel' is in the same class as 'I'm sorry if my words hurt you'. They are both classes of non-apologies.
'I'm sorry that our actions caused such distress' come a bit closer to being a true apology.
Importantly, 'if' was changed to 'that'.
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.
"I'm sorry for how you feel about it" isn't exactly an empathetic opening stance
In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45831614 jack1243star pointed out the possibility that English might not be Kiki's first language and they perhaps even have used ChatGPT to make the comment sound more polite.
It is a passive aggressive dismissal.
The right thing to do is undo what you did and then ask to talk about it. There is nothing the person can say to make up for the destructive effects they took.
> 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?
The only thing to ask for here are some clarifications and expanded explanations so that the original text does not get misunderstood. If the Mozilla representative does see such potential points he can perfectly ask for them publicly.
I mean, almost anything would be better. But here's my swing:
Asking someone to "hop on a call" is phrasing you use with someone you are close with, not someone whose work you've just destroyed and is no longer interested in a relationship with you.
The fact that the preceding apology was absolutely awful does not help. "I'm sorry for how you feel" is wrong, since nobody asked them to react to "feelings" but the clearly delineated problems with the automation that Mozilla rolled out.
Asking to discuss something like this over synchronous voice comms is basically asking to go off the record and handle things privately. Sometimes that's appropriate, but if that's what the correspondant wanted they would have asked for it.
These three things combine to tell anyone who is paying attention that this is damage control, not meaningful engagement, and it's offensive to act this way toward someone who has put this much time into your project.
There is nothing you can do, because you already traded away the community for your AI project and money. The same corpo goons who don't see anything past their slop projects are the one who use the "jump on a quick call" lingo
After you fuck up and before you ask to discuss the matter, you APOLOGIZE!
It's actually the "We want to make sure we trully understand what you're struggling with" which ignores the whole original post that did it for me.
Agree. "what you're struggling with" did it for me.
Yeah it’s a strange request. No acknowledgment or even indication that the other person understands the issues raised.
And they’re happy to eat up more of that person’s time, probably ask them to explain all over again. Also it seems they don’t think it is worth a long call… just a quick one.
Shoot first, jump on a quick call later.
I also agree. For me it was “sorry for how you and the Japanese community feel…”
“Sorry for your feelings” comes off as dismissive and avoiding taking ownership for the lost work and years of volunteer contributions.
In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45831614 jack1243star pointed out the possibility that English might not be Kiki's first language and they perhaps even have used ChatGPT to make the comment sound more polite.
Making a comment sound more polite should be done by addressing the other person correctly and respectfully, and making sure that you are actually responding to the issues that have been raised. When whatever you wrote is so completely offensive and disrespectful, asking ChatGPT to make it sound more polite will undoubtedly make it worse. Like writing "Sorry, not sorry", when the content of your message clearly conveys that you're "Not sorry". It only adds to the disdain of your original message, putting even more emphasis on the fact that you are wasting the recipients time and patience while refusing to show any remorse.
I think a phone call can be better for resolving a conflict because it allows a more rapid back and forth, you can adapt in real time to how the other person is responding. If someone gets upset about some word choice like here, you can quickly say "I'm sorry I didn't mean it like that" and get back to the actual topic over how the work should be organized instead of some superficial detail.
In the end it may boil down to some strong hatred for AI, this seems to be very common recently and "I prohibit to use all my translation as learning data for SUMO bot and AIs" certainly points that way. If that is the root cause then it may be impossible to resolve to the satisfaction of both sides.
Can anybody provide some context for this?
I can’t parse what’s going on from the post or the comments here, and there’s no navigation on that page to anywhere but “support “
It sounds like something is happening. What is it?
Machine translated KB articles are destroying the japanese translations made by humans (and probably other languages too)
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/forums/contributors/717387...
Isn't it fascinating that despite `while true; do claude --yolo` over a weekend being all it takes to port some project across platforms, LLMs completely fall apart when it comes to speaking grammatical and natural Japanese?
Free tier Gemini CLI literally writes Android app for me by just endlessly wondering in English. AGI's here. And it struggles with Japanese. How!?
The simple truth is that LLMs are still bullshitting their way through life.
In some fields and languages, this is easier, but as soon as you need the LLM to follow rigorous instructions, it'll fail.
> struggles with Japanese
It doesn't mention mistranslating, so it's difficult to know the root of the problem is AI "struggling".
> It doesn't follow our translation guidelines. > It doesn't respect current localization for Japanese users, so they were lost.
I believe this is the root of the problem. There are define processes and guidelines, and LLM isn't following it. Whether these guidelines were prompted or not is unclear but regardless it should've been verified by the community leaders before it's GA'ed
That's not the root of the problem. The root of the problem is that LLMs just can't constitute a punctually Japanese understanding of text like that guideline and speak in Japanese with native fluency no matter what. I just know this from knowing both sides of English-Japanese language pair. And I find that somewhat fascinating in a sense.
Wow. That's crazy. I would be very interested in a blog post on this subject if you ever wrote one. I wonder how this affects the perception of LLMs in Japan
To be fair, in my experience LLM-s struggle to some extent with nearly every language that isn't English. Compared to many others, English is a very simple language and it has the largest body of material to learn from to boot. The more nuanced a language, the more LLM-s spout garbage.
They do pretty good Russian, even to the point of very elaborate speech styles etc.
I'm sorry for how you feel about us kicking you in the balls.
Would you like to hop on a quick call to chat about this further?
Just a quick lil call.
Quick lil ol' callerino.
Hoppity hip hop.
Yeah, the “I’m sorry you feel this way” response really irked me too. There are so many different ways to respond that would have been more appropriate and conveyed the same message.
"We want to better understand the issues your balls are going through right now."
"..and how we can help you engage further with our automated ball kicking machine we used on you without consent.."
> 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?
If this was a mistake, the proper response might have been "sorry, we applied automation in error, those changes have been rolled back while we fix the process that allowed it to happen". And not "call with us to talk about this further".
At the very least, ‘we will discuss how this could of been handled differently’, not I’m sorry you feel this way.
Then say so if someone complains about it? "Shoot, we accidentally ran it in the wrong mode, sorry about that, I'll look into someone fixing it ASAP" is a lot better than "We're sorry for how you feel".
Mozilla has offered to call the OP, too. I’m curious on the outcome.
They said sorry for how you feel about it which is insincere and unhelpful.
My partner has been picking me up on the specifics of wording.
Is there a slightly different phrasing that would make this better, or is it the sentiment that's crap?
"I'm sorry for how these changes impacted you"? Personally just the sentiment feels insincere to me haha.
Don’t use passive voice in an apology. “We’re sorry that we made the change without consulting your team or considering your circumstances.”
The change did not fall out of thin air. It was something they did. If they do not own it explicitly then it’s insincere full stop.
The sentiment is more important. But I'm sorry for how you feel suggests to many people the sole problem was their feelings. I'm sorry for how these changes impacted you suggests the changes could have been wrong.
I don't think it's the specific phrasing. They could have said "I'll contact you by email to try and understand your concerns" and it's still dodging the explicit, concrete list of grievances.
However, "let's hop on a call" is just additionally dismissive.
Two things stand out, besides what has been already mentioned.
* The infantile corporate-cutesy wording "hop on a call" is not appropriate when talking to somebody who feels that you deeply wronged them. It has the same vibes as cheery "Remember: At Juicero, we are all one big family!" signatures on termination notices, and Corporate Memphis.
* In the first sentence, Kiki says "about the MT workflow that we just recently introduced". Why is this level of detail shoehorned in? Everyone in that conversation already knows what it is about. It's as if Kiki can't resist the temptation to inject an ad/brag about their recently introduced workflow for any drive-by readers. "I'm sorry you were dissatisfied with your Apple(R) iPlunger X(TM), which is now available at major retailers for only $599!"
The response was likely also written by AI so there is no point analyzing it. It just ads insult to injury.
How?
They don't know what exactly has gone wrong. All they can say sorry for is for how the person is feeling. Then they want to get on a call to learn more. Which is the start of helping.
The response is as sincere and helpful as it could be for an initial response from someone who wants to figure out what the problem is.
But he lists the problems? Pretty unambiguously.
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 those guidelines? Is there a way to get it to follow them, like another commenter says works? Does the person need help following the process for that? Or is there a bug? Etc.
These are the things a call can clarify. It's the necessary first step, so why are people complaining?
> where are those guidelines?
It's entirely possible that such information is well-known to everyone involved in the translation community.
I would consider it outright insulting if someone who ostensibly "wants to help" doesn't know basic information like that - if the people making decisions about SumoBot are NOT aware of basic information like "where to find the local translation guidelines" then they are presumably not qualified to release a tool like SumoBot in the first place.
Yep agree with this. Nothing is more infuriating than someone Kramering into a space trying “to help” without spending any time or effort trying to understand that space.
They should have understood the guidelines before turning on their machine translation in a given locality.
Turning off the machine translation and reverting all the changes it made seems pretty actionable to me. They can turn it back on when issues are addressed.
Indeed. Turning it off would still satisfy marsf's requests:
- I prohibit to use all my translation as learning data for SUMO bot and AIs.
- I request to remove all my translation from learned data of SUMO AIs.
Before fixing it and re-enabling it in some capacity, they could work with marsf to find a solution.
They are actionable by entirely canceling the machine translation operations in that community,
even if that were the case (others have explained why that’s not so), that would be an inappropriate time to apologize. you don’t apologize for how someone else feels. you apologize when you recognize that you did something harmful and when the harmed party is amenable to receiving it. otherwise, you’re really just being a jerk who’s only acknowledging that you don’t like how someone else feels.
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.
At some point the rate of stupidity becomes suspicious again.
It’s sad to see a community built with love for 20 years end like this. AI should help people, not replace the heart behind their work.
Doing this in production directly without even trying it on staging feels very wrong.
I used to work with manager who told us to "have balls, deploy straight to prod" We spend a month cleaning this up. The other time when another manager demanded I "run this script" from the iphone he shoved in my face a whole warehouse went down in Ireland a month before Christmas and the Police were involved. There is an irrational push to deploy AI everywhere for no reason whatsoever. It, well the LLM part of it, is bad tech and all those "AI success stories" are pure hot air.
What is the logic behind adding machine translation for content that already had a seemingly robust, enthusiastic, and motivated (volunteer?) community maintaining the translations? The "saves money" rationale to deploy LLM/MT automation doesn't make sense when its volunteers are contributing because they want to. This is kind of community and participation destruction wrought by the introduction of LLMs/MT has a serious impact because it undermines the people who are actually willing to do the work. It was presumably costing nothing (or very little) to have the community maintain this content, but the change has cost a significant amount of goodwill. If the Japanese SUMO community wanted to use MT, it should be their sole decision, baring any issues with their stewardship in general. This is someone else saying "look, with this great new automation, you don't need to spend time anymore doing «thing you want to do»". Huh? How does that make any sense to force on anyone?
Mozilla has long suffered from FAANG-envy. If big tech is doing Social Network|Mobile OS|AI, then by golly, Mozilla reflexively has to spend Firefox money on a poorly executed, me-too copy that's discarded when the next fad comes around. The sad thing is the reasoning is usually sound, but the execution... Yeesh.
I bet it's nothing more than they prefer a machine they can just use and get no lip, rather than have to deal with humans they have to treat like humans and ask nicely and meet half way on countless issues and pretend to care about etc.
Mozilla is desperately trying to LARP as a tech giant.
There's probably a bunch of untranslated or badly translated content worldwide, so this was rolled out to help with that, without realizing it would overwrite higher-quality translation.
It probably made a lot of sense in certain contexts, and certain side effects weren't predicted, or it just has bugs that need fixing.
Presumably nothing malicious or stupid. But just ironing out the kinks.
Mozilla has invested heavily in this technology, and whatever project manager is running it needs more checkboxes in the results column of their next request for a raise. In other words, "business alignment."
In particular, "the content is useful" is not a checkbox. "The content is produced by this technology" is, and overwriting hand-curated content is an obvious action.
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 language, except it feels kind of wrong and doesn’t really communicate in ways specific to the culture from which the language is.
You’re in France, you search for something, a thread pops up with everyone interacting in French - seems reasonable enough, but it just reads kind of weird? Then a message is entirely out of place, and you realize that you’re reading an English language thread translated to French.
Or your mom sends you a screenshot of a Facebook thread in her native language that has her worked up - and reading it, you realize it’s an LLM translation of something that should have no bearing on her.
Same with various support pages on websites - it all reads mostly fine until you hit a weird sentence where the LLM messed up and then you’re transported back to the reality that what you’re reading was not authored by anyone who can actually operate in that language/culture.
There’s a lot of nuance in language beyond the words - how you express disagreement in English is not how you express disagreement in Japanese, how you address the reader in French is not the same as in Korean, etc. Machine translation flattens all modes of expression into a weird culturally en-US biased soup (because that’s where the companies are headquartered and where the language models are trained).
I have no illusions that this trend will reverse - high quality translation work is skill and time consuming, and thanks to LLMs anyone on Earth can now localize anything they want in any language they want for ~free in ~0 time.
The weirdest part is seeing this bubble up to the real world. I’ve been hearing young people use turns of phrases/expressions that I recognize as distinctly American, except not in English.
The classic linguist response to this, which I subscribe to, is “no language is fixed, language is ever evolving in response to various external cultural pressures“. Which is true. But it doesn’t make our post-LLM language landscape any less weird.
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.
Bilingual English and Spanish here and I absolutely hate this.
I can read both just fine. Platforms defaulting to always showing one or things like youtube auto-translating titles all to English or all to Spanish is frustrating because I always have to do the math in my head as to "Why does this thing I'm reading sound weird as hell" and realize its because it was lost in translation.
Hell, I watch creators/consume content where the creator or writer themself speaks/writes interchangeably in both languages often within the same sentence because Spanglish is very common, and that just destroys most of these automated generators brains.
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.
I really hate it too especially when I want to search something specifically within the French context and I end up getting pages translated from Englsh to French and waste my time on irrelevant content.
I'm a native English speaker fluent in Japanese, recently moved to Japan this year. The one that really gets me lately is YouTube now automatically dubbing over content in Japanese that was originally in English. It's... so uncanny.
It's a problem for everyone who speaks >1 language (the majority of the world?) since you can't turn it off.
I'm in a similar situation. I really wish there was a way to stop YouTube from suggesting me auto-dubbed videos.
It is awful. Its also not so transparent that its being done which feels unethical.
ThereShouldBeTheQuoteAudioTrackQuoteOptionUnderGearIconMenuAtTheRightBottomCornerOfVideoUserInterfaceAmongWhichEnglishIsOfCourseNearTheBottomOfTheListButNotQuiteTheLastItem
but it only applies to that specific video, and yeah, it makes no sense that this passed sniff tests for Google.
Yeah, that is a massive problem. This can't be disabled by the user, only be the channel owner. It's awful. The only solution is switching the YouTube UI language to English, to get the original English audio track. But then, presumably, all other languages would get machine translated into English. There is nothing one can do.
Reminds me of the first time I heard youtube's forced AI translation to my native language. It's just wrong, the same male voice is used for everything, the delivery is grating, the intonation is off, the translation is very MTL in the bad sense.
And it cannot be disabled on mobile. The numbers must go up, I guess, but in my case it greatly reduced my usage of the app.
The global trend might not reverse, but surely the people in those cultures are going to push back on low quality content and "the market will sort it out", right? For example, Mistral is has a clear interest in being the "most native-French-speaking LLM", and with that expertise they could also grow to other languages where English-native LLMs are poorly received.
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 can help with that its a benefit.
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.
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.
Culture is just as much a part of language as the language itself.
There is an air of arrogance in proclaiming that it is merely language barriers that are an issue. But of course it's a convenient argument for big tech forcing MTL on all of us.
But it ultimately marginalizes smaller communities and kills languages. Cultural genocide if you will.
The dangerous thing is that the current state of MTL is serviceable and even usable, but a bilingual speaker will immediately know something is off.
I have noticed this both for French and German, two languages with lots of training material. I imagine it's much much worse for smaller languages and/or communities.
As more and more content on the web is automatically translated, we will all start to talk like translated-from-English LLMs, and that is a future I'm not looking forward to.
Yeah it's really jarring to be reading a text in not-english that seems somewhat normal and then to trip over some extremely American reference that makes it obvious it was auto translated. I just want things to have explicit language toggles or maybe allow me to hover over some text to see the translation. Google even allows you to set multiple languages and they still insist on auto translation between 2 languages I have told them I know.
> The weirdest part is seeing this bubble up to the real world. I’ve been hearing young people use turns of phrases/expressions that I recognize as distinctly American, except not in English.
Calquing has been a common thing since long before AI translators, and it's not notable that it now happens for modern memes. It happens whenever a language is notable and nearby; English has a lot of calques from Greek/Latin/German/French as a result.
Ironically, "calque" is a loanword, but "loanword" is a calque.
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.
> This is caused by people active in English-speaking communities translating memes literally and spreading them in their native language communities as-is.
You're right that memes are getting translated literally and spreading, but in terms of pure volume, LLMs doing the translation dwarf humans doing the translation.
Building a bot that picks whatever posts are trending on Reddit/imgur/etc, automatically translates them, and then posts them in target languages on social networks is an easy way to accumulate likes+followers; then those high reach accounts get used to push whatever makes money.
Not really. I have observed the same thing in Russian, and no, it's not for expressions that are translated literally.
Having said that, SOTA models got much better at this kinda stuff. They're quite able to write in a way that is indistinguishable from a native speaker, colloquialisms and all, with the right prompting.
But SOTA models are also expensive. Most automated translations are done with something way cheaper and worse.
How do the models do if you ask them to translate to X language and adapt the text to suit cultural norms and idioms?
I understand the matter in theory, but I don't understand the matter in practice. Clicking through on the user, I couldn't identify any machine-translated overwrites of his work. What is an example of this? And if the community that manages the site objects, why not apply a batch temporary revert, and then re-run once/if everything is solved.
This is a trivial operation for me to do on MediaWiki with a bot, so it must be straightforward to do here too. I think "Ask forgiveness, not permission" is fine in order to move things forward, but you do have "ask forgiveness".
> 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.
Talk about being tone deaf. This was so incredibly rude. No consult, no request whether they wanted this or not. Mozilla keeps finding new ways to shoot itself in the foot, these are probably some of the most loyal people that you could wish for, that's a precious resource if there ever was one. And to add insult to injury they want to them 'hop on a call' and to 'trully[sic] understand what you're struggling with' even though they just spelled it out as clear as day.
sounds like it's almost an AI response? I can't believe a person responds that way
AI wouldnt misspell “truly”. It’s a human.
A few years in corporate managerial role will turn you into a bot.
Not even necessarily managerial. Any large bureaucracy tends to force this kind of speech on the people who constitute it.
Imagine having human volunteers do the work for you, than paying an AI to overwrite their work without communicating this with them (no validation of any sort it seems). And once they quit you corporate-speak to them "let's hop on a call to understand your frustrations!" in response to a post where they outline precisely their frustrations.
Disgusting behavior.
To top it off, it's corpospeak from what ultimately is an org that exists becuase of an open source project.
I call this the AI theater. If a company can (still) look good AND decrease dealing with pesky flesh and bone humans, that's not collateral, that's a win. On the surface you act caring, concerned, rendering investors and HR both happy while you decrease "human complexity" - then you are winning the AI game. Mozilla always wanted to join the big boys, but while yearning for their soft power status the yearn bore the fruits of a rotten soul they will also have to embrace. There is no light without shadows and AI's shadows are drawn long and deep.
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
Firefox is itself someone deciding to make their own fork of mozilla. Maybe we need to do it again every ten years.
I'm happy that somebody is trying to create a new browser -- even though some people say it's impossible nowadays.
But FUTO sponsoring that project gives bad vibes.
Why? You’re referring to tue club that makes Immich, right? What’s so bad about them?
that's still promoting mozilla/firefox in a way, something they clearly don't want to do anymore
KB = Knowledge Base
MT = Machine Translation
In this context.
I've been studying Japanese for 15+ years and have really come to loathe machine translations from English. While generally the meaning gets across, they're very unnatural and often use words in contexts that sound weird or are just flat out wrong.
Often doesn't go great the other way either.
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.
> this large dataset we prepared
You mean the two+ decades of labour of love was always done to be a nameless contribution to the AI machine? Somehow I think he would have picked another hobby if he had known that back then.
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.
> 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
Not that I entirely disagree with the conclusion here, but…
It feels like that same sentiment can be used to justify all sorts of shitty translation output, like a dialog saying cutesy “let’s get you signed in”, or having dialogs with “got it” on the button label. Sure, it’s so “human” and has “heart”, but also enrages me to my very core and makes me want to find whoever wrote it and punch them in the face as hard as I can.
I would like much less “human” in my software translations, to be honest. Give me dry, clear, unambiguous descriptions of what’s happening please. If an LLM can do that and strike a consistent tone, I don’t really care much at all about the human element going into it.
What actually happened? What's his complaint?
How did you read the post and miss the complaint?
Mozilla is more and more disappointing. Always talking about making an internet for everyone, community, bla bla. But then they don't even talk to their own community contributors before changing their workflow. And when someone speaks up, they get the most corporate reply possible.
The same feeling non-native English speakers have battling native English speaker bias
The level of arrogance it took to do this is quite simply stunning.
mozilla never had a sound business model to sustain its operation anyways, everything they do is just a stunt to make a living out of people's belief and naivety on how it operates.
it's a grift of an organization and it reflects in the simplest ways like this.
I am browsing the website on Firefox and Reader Mode does not work. Peak irony.
Shocking that Mozilla would roll out a bot - in production - without coordinating with the team that's been doing the work for years so far. Very bad look.
It looks like companies are doubling down on shitty AI bots to cut their costs even though it is backfiring terribly, like in Facebook case where they spent billions on their AI and all it did - just banned millions of their core userbase (and still banning). Looks like we will see more companies imploding because they relay to much on subpar AI.
A similar thing is going on at Amazon. Their AI is rewriting perfectly good product descriptions provided by manufacturers and I noticed that I stopped buying there, because I cannot find out what it is that I am buying or how much of it I am buying. I started shopping at sites that sell same products, but do not change manufacturers' descriptions. I have a feeling that post AI bubble we'll be doing a lot of manual cleanup of information "improved" by AI.
> I prohibit to use all my translation as learning data for SUMO bot and AIs.
> I request to remove all my translation from learned data of SUMO AIs.
It's Mozilla's data...
> explicit violation to the Mozilla mission
I'm not sure what this is referring to. I don't see any explicit violation of Mozilla.org's mission. If anything it seems consistent with that mission to provide universal translation with quick turnaround.
Am I taking crazy pills or is this entire thread full of some insane reaches
Going by title, I thought this is about low birth rate and accumulation of old people in Japan. Is that silly me or click-bait title.
It originally had better title mentioning AI and all but someone edited it
It's funny how Japanese contributors often go nuclear whenever things don't go their way instead of communicating etc. Bugs happen. this is tech. open communication is always the way to go before escalation. we see the same phenomenon in git, ruby etc etc etc.
Ironically, Japanese work culture encourages over-communication. It seems that open-source is considered a counter-culture that they want to escape japanese work culture from.
>In October 22, the sumobot was introduced to Japanese KB articles. I cannot accept its behavior and no words. [...] It has been working now without our acceptance, without controls, without communications.
How exactly did you manage to place the blame for no communication on Japanese contributors here given the actual complaint in question?
Yes, lets dismiss Japanese culture..
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 license his work is published under. As such, Mozilla must refuse his contribution because he don't understand the idea behind Creative Commons license. His wish granted I guess.
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 sumobot summarily deleted years of it for no good reason at a whim.
Good for him. He should probably consider suing them for destruction of his work.
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.
> Once your work is published under Creative Commons license, it is irreversible.
I am not sure how it is under Japanese law, but in some countries a creator cannot be stripped of his rights by agreeing to a license. Even without that there is often a way to rescind any gift given in good faith if the receipients behavior warrants it.
I would be curious if that is how Japanese courts would view it. They may not consider that a valid way. Or they might. But different jurisdictions vary.
You need to think hard and understand that it is irreversible before you publish your content under certain licenses.
My problem with this type of gate keeping is that machine learning does open up translations that are accurate to the masses. It is quaint having a real human do your translations though. Kind of like having a real human drive your car or do your housework. Not everyone can afford that luxury. But, on the other hand, having a singular organization own the training data and the model and not publishing the model itself is where the gatekeeping continues.
There are some discussion if the whole concept of "license" fits under Japanese law. I think it's understood as "a contract to allow the usage of otherwise restricted work by copyright etc under conditions"
But I'm not a lawyer so I don't know and in real business, they casually use the word "license" in Japan. But in my opinion, everything is contract under Japanese law.
Yeah - I know in US law some terms are simply unenforceable and void. Much of the FOSS movement is designed around US contract law. There are issues with some US licenses being enforceable under other legal regimes - I was chatting a decade or so ago with a Russian who understood the...GPL(? I don't remember exactly) to be invalid in Russia and so it had to be bundled in some fashion to be usable.
Or to put another way, a license (a contract) is a tuple (terms, jurisdiction), and the juridical evaluation process will take both into account.
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this is not how CC / FOSS licenses work. if this is how FOSS worked not a soul would use it
I don't think it's at all clear that some foss licenses (MIT for instance) are irrevocable. Not in the US, and certainly not in any possible relevant country... It's not clear that they are revocable either. As I understand the law it at least in part rests on the question of whether there was consideration in exchange for the license, which might even make it a case by case analysis.
CC licenses (and some other foss licenses, e.g. Apache 2.0) are explicitly irrevocable... which is probably enough for US law though I still wonder to some degree if there isn't some country that would take issue with that term... especially a country which recognizes "Moral rights".
Some other FOSS licenses (GPL for instance) contain explicit terms allowing revocation under certain circumstances (but otherwise claim to be irrevocable).
Whether the license is revokable or not is irrelevant when the action isn't permitted by the license anyway.
In particular, the primary purpose of AI as we know it is to strip off attribution, which is explicitly forbidden by basically every license in existence.
True, license is probably irrelevant here because they aren't even intending to comply with the terms of it.
To nitpick "explicitly forbidden" isn't quite right. Licenses basically only grant more permissions, they can't remove them. It's explicitly excluded from the rights granted by the license, but it's not explicitly forbidden because it is the law that might or might not forbid the activity, not the license.
It's a disappointing that after decades of free software movement, people can't understand this basic fact about license and the concept of "free".
And the fact 20+ years Mozilla contributor didn't understand it too. You can't restrict the usage to things you don't like it under CC.