I'll admit that "good enough to get the point across" is often not good enough for support pages, especially for non-experts.

In Europe, with its zoo of languages, Google Translate and Deepl have become indispensable.

As a native speaker of English, if I'm talking to someone else who speaks English, then I expect a one-minute message will take one minute to transmit with 100% comprehension.

Relying on my Japanese, it will take two or three minutes and comprehension will drop to about 80%. Largely depends on how well we both understand the context around the topic.

If it's a three-way session with a human translator who doesn't know the topic of the conversation, then best case is 10 minutes and lucky to get 60%.

But when yo

Automatic translation tools only provide mediocre translations - and almost certainly will for the near future. I understand that this is often "good enough", but if you want to convey competence, you need good translations, not mediocre ones. This is probably especially true when writing technical documentation where precision is extremely important.

One problem is that most people on this forum are English-native speakers and English is the "default" language for most technical documentation - hence most p

> And whilst they're not as accurate as a human being even the free "consumer grade" ones like Google Translate are generally good enough to get the point across.

The whole "good enough" excuse is a balancing of quality vs. cost dynamic for companies. What is the angle here? The summary seems to suggest SUMO's translators are volunteers. Mozilla isn't saving money by lowering staffing as so many tech firms are fond of doing atm. They may be rolling out documentation translations faster, but was there some big issue with work being behind to begin with?

Quite stupid, or to be charitable, "unwise", given that this is far from the only blunder Mozilla has made in recent history.

I could understand if they had a massive backlog of things to be translated that was constantly growing because the volunteers couldn't keep up as having a mediocre machine translation is often better than none at all, but there's no reason to replace the completed human translations. This is even more stupid when one stops to consider that the were getting this for free.

most if not all browsers are buying into the ai craze, the most desperate ones do so desperately. once a pool of great and motivated engineers that did much good, mozilla is now a sinking ship sliding slowly into irrelevance to the cacophony of a discombobulated orchestra of c-suits feasting on the last remains until it's time to jump ship. i guess those remains come from ai related contracts atm.

It seems to be the way they went about it, as much as anything. The volunteers would probably have accepted first drafts created by AI, or suggestions for changes, but Mozilla just overwrote their work, bypassing them entirely.

Have you seen the shitfest that is their current browser. Ergonomics went out the window years ago so they have form in shooting themselves - and their users, what's left of them -in the foot.

> Absolutely bonkers decision.

Yep. This is not explainable below "complete incompetence" and "extreme arrogance" and, quite important for Japan, "extreme rudeness".

Mod parent funny, but I'd like to know the kanji reference for "Shrine-Fork". Perhaps someone's name? The closing bit about the fox perhaps suggests an inari shrine?

The new prime minister's name consists of two kanji. The first one usually means "tall" or "expensive" and the second is generally for a "market". But that's not how people think about names? When I asked a Japanese person if it was from a market for expensive stuff or perhaps for high quality merchandise the response was "The name means nothing

Robots do not consider such biological things as 'feelings'.

Funny thing is that these total cretins probably think they are doing a good job...