Mozilla's response should not be limited to clarifying these grievances. But it could have been all the staff member who responded could do.
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.
Saving zero dollars and making the product worse is not important, only that there doesn’t seem to be a browser monopoly is.
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.
Looking through that wiki there seems to be a lot of things that ML would get 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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
If the bot has the power to overrule the volunteer translation teams, the entire power structure is wrong from the get go.
Saying "the entire power structure is wrong from the get go" is a huge conclusion to draw here. People write internal tools and make mistakes. Mistakes can be fixed.
I have had to cooperate with coporate