TL;DR: Mozilla is killing localization on Support Mozilla, overwriting articles written by humans with machine generated translations. Although Mozilla knows that their AI doesn’t localize or adhere to style guides, Mozilla is going live with it anyway. I thank locale leaders and localizers for their tireless efforts. Locale leaders seem to be obviated by AI, and Mozilla has nothing to say about it.
Why? They have free (as in free beer) volunteers. AI could do translation for pages nobody had time to translate yet but taking over the localization seems unnecessary.
Edit: Okay it is kinda like that, the bot automatically translates everything but volunteers can still contribute and provide better localization. It just seems to not work that well, overwriting things it should not when the actual work is just translating one additional sentence. Or simply not being that great at localization. In general AI translation is not a terrible idea but this seems clearly half baked and Mozilla has stopped responding to the complaints which isn’t helping either.
That’s not always great either though because if the AI miss-localizes things, end users in that language wont even know that their documentation is incorrect. Better to have incomplete than wrong documentation. At least then the end user will know they have to try to read a different language. It might be good to use AI to create an unpublished first draft that is then polished by a person before publishing, though it seems the AI is not good enough to be useful in that manner.
Not terrible idea? Did you heard about ai japanase localization disaster?
I mean yes, that is why I wrote the edit. It does seem like you could do this properly, by allowing AI to do rough translations of new articles and humans do proper localization afterwards. And prevent AI from overwriting localization of text that has not actually been altered in the original language.
The problem is that’s not what they’re doing, even after people who volunteered time to work on localisation have asked for the AI to not overwrite existing human-translated documents. That’s the bare minimum, but it seems like it’s too much for Mozilla