The leader of the Japanese community SUMO, responsible for user support and content creation on the support.mozilla.org website, has made a public announcement regarding the suspension of activities as a form of protest against the implementation of the automated translation system known as “sumobot”. This decision comes after the system was introduced by Mozilla on October 22 without consulting the community.
Approximately 300 articles authored by native Japanese speakers were replaced with machine-translated versions of English-language articles, resulting in a significant decline in quality that has been met with widespread criticism. The machine translation failed to adhere to established translation guidelines and did not consider the specific needs of Japanese users.
Alarmingly, the machine translation system was deployed directly on production servers without undergoing prior testing in a controlled environment. Furthermore, all machine-translated articles in the archive were automatically approved for publication without undergoing peer review. Additionally, changes to the original English articles would trigger an automatic translation update within 72 hours, effectively eliminating the possibility of manual edits.
These abrupt changes have been perceived as a major setback, undermining the hard work of the community over the years and deviating from Mozilla’s core mission. Consequently, the leader of the Japanese community SUMO has declared the cessation of participation in maintaining support.mozilla.org and has prohibited the use of previously completed translations for training Mozilla’s AI systems.