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.

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[–] 37 points 11 months ago (5 children)

Why would they override articles that were already done? Makes no fucking sense!

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  • [–] 4 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    Try to make AI useful, of course.

    Mozilla is funded mostly by Google

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  • [–] 5 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    This doesn't have anything to do with Google. It's just Mozilla being overrun by hipsters.

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  • [–] 112 points 11 months ago (28 children)

    Anytime I see an anti-mozilla article, it’s abundantly clear that it’s an astroturfing campaign to make Firefox look bad. You NEVER see these articles about chrome, brave, opera, etc which are all much much worse.

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  • [–] 64 points 11 months ago

    I'd say that's because here on Lemmy, we already don't give a fuck about and wouldn't touch Chrome or Edge with a ten foot pole, but some of us trusted Mozzila, which is now starting to do dumb AI shit. And having your trust broken hurts.

    Astroturfing would not be recommending LibreWolf as an alternative.

    If you look into alternatives, Brave is one that's usually mentioned but there's always someone quickly posting all of the dumb shit they did.

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  • [–] 13 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    Put it this way, I don't trust a corpo browser and never have. 2008 or whenever it was that everyone switched to Chrome, I stayed with Firefox, which I'd been using for a few years already. I remember upgrading to Firefox 2.0.

    I'm interested when Firefox is pulling this shit and don't give a fuck otherwise, because I already assume the others do this.

    Idk if we'll ever get anything decent out of the Servo browser engine. That would be ideal IMO. Mozilla is starting to become part of the problem.

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  • [–] 34 points 11 months ago (9 children)

    The way they are forcing AI on everyone and into every aspect of their browser especially when a large part of the people who use Firefox hates that shit is going to end Firefox.

    The reason you don't hear it about all those other browsers is because people have always known they don't give a fuck what the end user wants.

    Firefox used to be different. But all good things deteriorate over time. Watching it happen in real time to a browser we all use and used to love is why you see it so much posted especially in places with like minded individuals like Lemmy.

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  • [–] 6 points 11 months ago (8 children)

    There’s AI in Firefox? I’m running it as new as I can in Arch and have never seen a hint of it.

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  • [–] 12 points 11 months ago* (2 children)

    Sidebar on the left has one of those star icons that opens an AI chatbot, or you can hit ctrl + alt + x

    They keep mentioning AI features, but I haven't really seen anything annoying yet.

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  • [–] 7 points 11 months ago (4 children)

    They've also put it into the right click menu. And I think they integrated into the "click and hold link preview" feature they just added. And, annoyingly, with all this added AI, they made no provisions for locally hosted AI.

    They also added AI translation in addition to their old translation system for webpages. I think the old one just used Google Translate, so the AI translation is a privacy win because it is done locally, but I may be wrong on how it used to work.

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    You actually can set up the sidebar to use a local LLM. In about:config the key is something like “browser.ml.chat.hideLocalhost”

    I have it setup to use my local Ollama instance and it works great.

    Unfortunately, I don’t see a way to specify an alternate external server, which would be nice.

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  • [–] 8 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    How nice of them to have easy options for paid third party services, and hide the local options under about:config where I'd have no idea it even exists without a kind stranger letting me know.

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  • [–] 4 points 11 months ago

    Thanks for the tip of checking about:config. You can specify an external server, it is also in the about:config. browser.ml.chat.provider. I'm not sure it's a feature I will ever use, but I tested it with my local Open WebUI and it seemed to work.

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  • [–] 13 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    If I had to post an article here for each time Chrome did something that worked against privacy, I would just repost Ggle's changelogs. And they would not change.

    If we criticise Mozilla harshly enough, there's a chance slightly higher than an snowball's chance in hell to make them change.

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  • [–] 0 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    What dumb reasoning. Posting anti Mozilla articles only serves to push all of Firefox users to other even less used browsers. See the whole terms of service thing where someone posted an article just like this that was factually incorrect. Many users didn’t bother to research it and stopped using Firefox. Ff didn’t grow, it shrunk and with it every single downstream browser also will suffer because they’re forked from FF

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  • [+] [S] 1 point 11 months ago (1 child)
  • [–] 0 points 11 months ago

    Yes, and I’m guessing what you wrote about was completely incorrect. Browsers must transfer the data, so any terms of service must cover those cases. Because people don’t understand stuff like this, posts exactly like yours get posted, people believe them, and then misinformation spreads like wildfire.

    Then people like me are still dealing with the misinformation months later because others didn’t take five minutes to think through what they were posting before they did so.

    I’m honestly incredibly sick of it, especially with Mozilla posts because it’s been misinformation numerous, numerous times. At this point if a post about Mozilla isn’t misinformation then I’m surprised.

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  • [–] 14 points 11 months ago

    What an odd comparison. What differentiates Mozilla from others is their close relationship with their community. Just read their manifest and you will see Immediately why they are getting flag for humiliating their own supporters.

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  • [–] 8 points 11 months ago

    Calling objections to what some unelected jerks in the foundation (which is a supposedly public organization) are doing is not "anti-Mozilla". And I would first suspect of astroturfing everyone pretending it is.

    Raising voices and putting pressure about things spoiling something is caring about it. And yes, people who care try to make real effect and not just safely complain to be ignored.

    Mozilla honestly has been becoming worse and worse since Australis.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago

    Its not astroturfing, it's that people have expectations of them beyond just being a browser that let's you access the web.

    Frankly its not that great of a browser (its serviceable. And I use it, or a derivative, pretty much exclusively); generally the reason you use it is because you care about abstract things like not supporting the chromium monopoly, or wanting to pick the project managed with the most care for how it will impact actual humans

    And Mozilla has been making kinda crummy choices with respects to those abstract values more and more regularly it feels like 😅

    Like I really wanna love and support Mozilla. I'm using their browser cause I think its the best choice by the metrics that are important to me. And more and more I just feel kinda exhausted and kinda frustrated with them 😅

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  • [–] -5 points 11 months ago* (2 children)

    Lol, bashing that shitty "org" is a civic duty. Fuck Mozilla.

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  • [–] 4 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    Take a look at servo (https://servo.org/). Not anywhere close to being a robust browser but still something to be excited about.

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  • [–] 17 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (4 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 11 months ago

    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.

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  • [–] 8 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    Not terrible idea? Did you heard about ai japanase localization disaster?

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  • [–] 4 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago

    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

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  • [–] 12 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    While what happened in Japan sucks and calls for an apology by Mozilla towards the team, the general idea of machine translation on demand is one of the few working examples of machine learning. I'd recommend professional systems instead of google translate, though.

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  • [–] 41 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (23 children)

    Why the fuck is lemmy so chuck full of anti Fiirefox and anti Mozilla propaganda?
    I even see comments about Firefox needing to be open source again!?!?
    It FUCKING IS open source, anybody can fork it if they want to, the only thing they can't do is use the Firefox logo and name.

    You are all a bunch of idiots!! (everybody who upvoted this trash blog)

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  • [–] 32 points 11 months ago (9 children)

    I still use Firefox every day, but I don't trust the corporate overlords to do what's right long term. They seem to be getting greedy instead of listening to the user base. They've started including AI bullshit features for the sake of it, like grouping tabs by content that nobody asked for and that barely works for me. I'm not anti-Mozilla, but I sure am weary of it and would welcome an alternative.

    I haven't come across any open source comments, but those seem pretty clueless.

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  • [–] 5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (7 children)

    I don’t trust the corporate overlords to do what’s right long term.

    You don't have to, if Mozilla really screwed the pooch with Firefox it would be forked. Debian used to do it with IceWeasel over a petty thing like the copyright of the Firefox logo, which 100% has always been justified, and is necessary to distinguish between an official Firefox and a fork.

    The AI bullshit features as you call them are completely non invasive, I always use the newest Firefox, and I never even noticed those features.

    Stop the bullshitting and complaining over things are completely irrelevant. and will never ever have any negative influence on anything you do with Firefox.
    I'm so sick of this lame community doing this over and over and over again, and it always turns out to be nothing.

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  • [–] 6 points 11 months ago (6 children)

    The AI bullshit features as you call them are completely non invasive,

    And yet I had to turn them off in about:config, not even in the regular settings. Why are the settings hidden? Why can't I turn them on if I want them? Why isn't opt-in and transparency their standard approach with such a controversial feature? Those are some serious dark patterns for a company advertising itself as user-friendly, that they had to backtrack on when they saw the community uproar.

    Now it's happening again, but on the developer side.

    Stop the bullshitting and complaining over things are completely irrelevant

    Irrelevant? I can't afford AI threads running in the background, hogging my memory and processing power away from my productivity apps for whatever bullshit they decide to add that barely relates to what I use a browser for. I don't live in a "first-world country" with standard hardware. That's the whole reason I use Firefox, for the respect for their users that I have grown accustomed to, which they now seem to want to ignore. It's a huge violation of trust that you're downplaying when they want to add things first and apologize later.

    The bottom line is that their approach has shifted recently, and I have every right to criticize them for it when they say one thing and do another.

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  • [–] 5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (5 children)

    standard approach with such a controversial feature

    The "controversial" features:

    1. Alt-text generation: Creates descriptions for images, which is particularly useful for making PDFs more accessible to screen readers.
    2. On-device translation: Translates web pages without sending your content to external servers, protecting your privacy.
    3. Smart tab groups: Analyzes open tabs to suggest names and group similar ones together to help with organization.
    4. Link previews: Generates key points from articles to give you a quick summary.

    These are all very modest in requirements even on an old phone. And the use is actually zero unless you use the function.
    AFAIK all further AI functionalities are all optional.

    Number one is particularly useful for blind people, a group that absolutely needs screen readers to work well.

    So again stop the bullshitting, just because you are bullshitting yourself too doesn't make it better.
    Either that or mention just one single specific function you "needed" to disable and why.
    IMO your misunderstood whining is annoying.

    Personally I use the translation function a lot, it is both very handy and very good, and I have used it for both Russian and Ukrainian and Chinese, and it works surprisingly well.
    But maybe you speak every language on the planet, or find it more convenient to use an online translator, leaving unnecessary extra digital trails and requiring extra bandwidth?
    How you don't find that feature useful is beyond me???

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  • [–] -2 points 11 months ago (4 children)

    I rarely ever use translation features. I never visit sites which are in a language I don't understand. 🤷‍♂️ So this would be nice if it were opt in, I guess.

    But I definitely have the processing power to run it. Buuut of course not everyone does.

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  • [–] 5 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    this would be nice if it were opt in, I guess.

    It doesn't do shit if you don't use it, why would you want opt in for that?
    The same goes for the other features.

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  • [–] -3 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    Because on every machine where I open Firefox for the first time, I have to tell it not to translate my language. It's a small dance I have to do every so often. Bit annoying, innit.

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  • [–] 5 points 11 months ago* (1 child)

    It doesn't translate anything automatically, you have to choose translation manually for a site in a foreign language. It ALWAYS shows the original first.
    So that's complete and utter made up bullshit.

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  • [–] 0 points 11 months ago*

    I know that, but I don't even want the suggestion, is what I mean. You know?

    Listen man, take it easy alright? I understand your stance, relax. Not trying to argue with your or get aggressive here. 🤝 We're cool. I'm on your side, I love Firefox.

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  • [–] 34 points 11 months ago (9 children)

    Is it anti Firefox progranda to literally criticize them for reopening human contributed content with lesser quality AI generated one?

    Your response to that criticism is to bring up another topic (Firefox being open source) and calling everyone idiots?

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago

    I have worked both as a professional translator in works not related to software and as a software developer, and also have participaded on open source public project translated by the community with weblate.

    There is NO WAY at all that the AI translations are worse. DeepL has been powering your human translators pretty much since it released, and LLMs are way better at translating than the average Joe.

    Most of those weblate managed translations I mentioned were absolute dogshit. Done by humans, done with passion and good intention (most of the time, some of the languages we did know less about had stuff that had nothing to do with the original texts).

    Like, people assume since they speak a language that they are able to translate that language and that is not true.

    Unless Mozilla had full time, proper translators working, the quality con only increase by using AI.

    And if they did, they can sack most of the team, leave one per language, and have them review the translations, and they would save massive amounts of money. And like it or not, open source needs money to run.

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  • [–] 7 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (7 children)

    Yes they are, because I bet this, as always, is a complete nothing burger, just like the previous 10 times the past year I've seen similar baseless attacks on Firefox.

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  • [–] [S] -4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (6 children)

    You can't tell if this one is baseless or not?

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  • [–] 6 points 11 months ago (5 children)

    Your source is a blog with a stupid anecdote from Japan as its main feature. Why should I take that seriously?

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  • [–] [S] 4 points 11 months ago* (4 children)

    Why did Mozilla staff take it seriously enough to immediately offer to get on a call with the writer of the stupid anecdote?

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  • [–] 5 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    Because Mozilla isn't the scumbag company the blog tries to paint them as.

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  • [–] [S] -3 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    So we should take it seriously.

    Thanks for clarifying!

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  • [–] 5 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    "I hear yoasif is always trying to fuck the neighbor's dog."

    "No, that's stupid, of course I'm not."

    "Oh so you're acknowledging it? Guess that means we should take the claim seriously!"

    🙄

    Ngl, I haven't read the article, I'm not defending or talking about Mozilla. But holy shit was that stupid logic.

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  • [–] [S] -4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

    The reason it works is because Mozilla staff isn't going to offer to call any random person with a "stupid anecdote".

    EDIT: FWIW, your logic is broken: while your imagined yoasif denies the claim, that differs from what Baffalox does in reality - they say "yes, but". Imagined yoasif just said "no."

    Wouldn't have been critical of the form of your logic, but I mean -- you said my logic was stupid. I'm not sure you understood my logic.

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  • [+] 21 points 11 months ago (2 children)
  • [–] -1 points 11 months ago

    I hate them both. Librewolf and Ungoogled Chromium are the true private and non-profit browsers. Firefox and Brave are full of bloat like Firefox's ads and tracking and Brave's Wallet, News, Talk, VPN etc

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    [–] 16 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    I wouldn't mind donating to have Firefox off of Mozilla's hands and back into the FOSS sphere where it belongs. Heck i'd even pay a subscription.

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  • [–] 8 points 11 months ago (6 children)

    Sooooo

    Chrome is out

    Firefox is put

    What is a professional Brower that can do all what the above two can do, but is open source and not riddled with adware or ad allow ware, spyware and other shit?

    Is there any browser left that we can still use for all sites?

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (2 children)

    You can try to help fund ladybird maybe? But it is still in development.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago

    i wish vivaldi would switch to gecko tbh (preferably pre quantum gecko)

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (1 child)

    No matter what you think of Eich. The Eich era of Firefox/Mozilla was their golden years. I miss them.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 11 months ago

    Eich was a failure. He sat on e10s for years while Chrome continued gaining marketshare. The path to monetization is something he says he wanted to do at Mozilla but did at Brave instead.

    At Brave, he started with a Gecko offshoot but couldn't make it work and retreated to Chromium.

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  • [+] -23 points 11 months ago (8 children)

    That's what you get with dozens of new executives and crazy pay packages for the top brass huh?

    I'm losing hope. I might just give in to chromium honestly.

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  • [–] 57 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    Looking at the situation and deciding that prefering Chrome would be better is exactly the bot position to take.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (1 child)

    Mozilla is turning into the same thing every other big corporations are, including Google. Inflated executive numbers and pay, cutting what made then unique (think of all the FOSS stuff they've killed along the way)...

    I'm not jumping to Vivaldi or whatever just yet, but ugh... Their latest push for AI is driving me very close...

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago

    Still doesn't make sense. One company is turning to AI so that drives you to other companies that already have AI and are precedentally worse?

    I'm not saying Mozilla is a saint. The sooner we can replace the executive branch, the better. But the even better comparative is if somehow we don't even need to get to that point in the first place, and not supporting Mozilla at the past edge of where they're at is defo not gonna lead to that.

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  • [–] 9 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    No, do not give into Chromium. Letting Google dominate web rendering standards is a bigger problem.

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago

    I agree, and I honestly don't want to go chromium... But Mozilla is making it harder and harder to even want to use their product.

    I'm not getting off Firefox/Floorp yet, but Mozilla needs to stop messing this up so royally at every turn...

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  • [–] -2 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    When the ladybird browser is just around the corner? Give it some time.

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  • [+] -40 points 11 months ago (8 children)

    In all objectivity, this seems like the most rational thing to do.

    Now that you can have good translation by AI, why would anyone want to waste their time on localization?

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  • [–] 18 points 11 months ago

    The main issue, and this is also mentioned in the blog post, is that the bot only does translation and not localisation.

    The first is just taking the words from one language and changing to another.

    The second is to actually make sure the text in the new language makes proper sense. Maybe the English article uses some analogy that does realy make sense in the new language. Localisation is to find some other suitable analogy to use instead, so that the point from the main article is kept, but it still makes sense.

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  • [–] 16 points 11 months ago*

    I do some volunteer work on localizing for Welsh and some Spanish. AI translations are hot garbage still even for the larger languages like Spanish. You can get a general idea of the intent most of the time, but that's about it. It's nowhere near good enough to replace humans with yet, definitely not good enough to overwrite what they've already translated.

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  • [–] 7 points 11 months ago

    As a translator, I have to say machine translations are really good if you just want to get the gist of things. If all you want is to understand 90% of what's written and you can live with the margin of error, then I'm not gonna try to convince you to hire me.

    But if you need to understand 99.9% then a human is required because a machine just will not understand the nuance or have a larger context unless instructed. Localizing is another issue too, you'll have to take into consideration the cultural nuance of the target language. Localizing software is even more niche because you're often limited in character count for the source language which machines often misunderstand, and the same limitation for the target language that a machine may not account for.

    tl;dr - hire me if you want good localization

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  • [–] 11 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    I've never seen any machine translation that I would consider anywhere near good.

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  • [–] -1 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    deepl.com (text translation) has been useful to me

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    It is good, specially on mid size text. But it is not good enough. When text is long or too short, it gets lost and makes tons of context mistakes. It also tends to be unnatural for the target language preferring original language phrasing.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

    I have to admit I've only ever used it to translate a paragraph or two at a time.... where I was just looking for the gist of a text.

    Not too surprising, considering that for centuries many people well-versed in two languages have made a very good living as translators ... and often having to get delicate nuances across (for poets as well as statesmen). It's as much art as science.

    overwriting articles written by humans with machine generated translations. I really don't understand that! But then, there are truckloads of worthwhile texts from throughout history that will never see translations otherwise ... so that's a worthy cause. Over time it may be improved, IF the algos are given feedback that allows them to learn from mistakes.

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