4 ms·

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 pho

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.

jogu 1y ago
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.
- crazygringo 1y ago
  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.
  - onetokeoverthe 1y ago
    [dead]
  - dingnuts 1y ago
    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
    - crazygringo 1y ago
      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.
      - shermantanktop 1y ago
        This follows an offense, and the insult is the implication that the offense is trivial.
      - ssivark 1y ago
        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.
      - Symbiote 1y ago
        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.
  - jogu 1y ago
    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.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - krick 1y ago
      (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)?
      - jogu 1y ago
        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.
  - jack1243star 1y ago
    > 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.
    - kentm 1y ago
      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.
      - usrnm 1y ago
        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
  - josefx 1y ago
    > 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.
kerakaali 1y ago
> 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.
- crazygringo 1y ago
  > 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.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - throw_a_grenade 1y ago
    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”.
    - crazygringo 1y ago
      The style of communication seems perfectly fine to me. It's acknowledging there's a problem, apologizing as much as they can before they have the real facts, and offering to communicate over the phone to figure out what's really going on. I honestly don't know what more you want from someone who is a customer service manager. Not the leader of the team who built the translation product.
hattmall 1y ago
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.
- jacquesm 1y ago
  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.
- crazygringo 1y ago
  > 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.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - ludwik 1y ago
rtpg 1y ago
>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.
- crazygringo 1y ago
  > - 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.
  - StarGrit 1y ago
    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.
roncesvalles 1y ago
"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.
- ChadNauseam 1y ago
  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.
  - jahsome 1y ago
    You're right. I misquoted, and that was an error on my part. While I regret the error, I don't feel the word "quick" really changes the sentiment too much. It certainly doesn't change my visceral response.
anal_reactor 1y ago
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".
tremon 1y ago
A person who has no awareness of the problem should not be the first responder in cases like this, that's just a recipe for further escalation.
jahsome 1y ago
> the fastest way for both parties is over the phone ASAP rather than through a bunch of emails I feel that's subjective. Personally, I both receive and distribute information much more efficiently via written text. Text also has the added bonus of being redistributable which is extremely valuable in collaborative scenarios.

jogu 1y ago

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.

crazygringo 1y ago
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.
- onetokeoverthe 1y ago
  [dead]
- dingnuts 1y ago
  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
  - crazygringo 1y ago
    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.
    - shermantanktop 1y ago
      This follows an offense, and the insult is the implication that the offense is trivial.
    - ssivark 1y ago
      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.
    - Symbiote 1y ago
      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.
- jogu 1y ago
  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.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - krick 1y ago
    (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)?
    - jogu 1y ago
      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.
- jack1243star 1y ago
  > 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.
  - kentm 1y ago
    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.
    - usrnm 1y ago
      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
- josefx 1y ago
  > 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.

kerakaali 1y ago

> 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.

crazygringo 1y ago
> 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.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- throw_a_grenade 1y ago
  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”.
  - crazygringo 1y ago
    The style of communication seems perfectly fine to me. It's acknowledging there's a problem, apologizing as much as they can before they have the real facts, and offering to communicate over the phone to figure out what's really going on. I honestly don't know what more you want from someone who is a customer service manager. Not the leader of the team who built the translation product.

hattmall 1y ago

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.

jacquesm 1y ago
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.
crazygringo 1y ago
> 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.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- ludwik 1y ago

rtpg 1y ago

>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.

crazygringo 1y ago
> - 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.
- StarGrit 1y ago
  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.

roncesvalles 1y ago

"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.

ChadNauseam 1y ago
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.
- jahsome 1y ago
  You're right. I misquoted, and that was an error on my part. While I regret the error, I don't feel the word "quick" really changes the sentiment too much. It certainly doesn't change my visceral response.

anal_reactor 1y ago

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".

tremon 1y ago

A person who has no awareness of the problem should not be the first responder in cases like this, that's just a recipe for further escalation.

jahsome 1y ago

> the fastest way for both parties is over the phone ASAP rather than through a bunch of emails I feel that's subjective. Personally, I both receive and distribute information much more efficiently via written text. Text also has the added bonus of being redistributable which is extremely valuable in collaborative scenarios.