Longtime Mozilla Support Japanese Community Shuts Down over AI Translation Usage (support.mozilla.org)

Longtime volunteers in Mozilla’s support network — most recently the Japanese localization team — have shut down their community in protest over the SumoBot machine-translation system. Contributors report SumoBot automatically translating and posting content (including archived KB articles) without adequate review, sometimes approving or updating texts immediately and at other times enforcing delayed approval windows (reported as a 72-hour policy). The bot also sometimes retranslates unchanged segments and creates diffs that overwrite volunteer edits, making it hard to train new contributors and understating local translation guidelines. Italian and Spanish locales that piloted the system flagged these intrusive behaviors and a lack of communication or opt-out controls. This is significant for the AI/ML community because it highlights a recurring trade-off: automation can scale content but may erode volunteer-driven quality control, onboarding and governance. Technically, the case underlines the need for human-in-the-loop workflows, per-locale opt-out or configurable translation policies, transparent approval/merge processes, and safeguards against automated retranslations that break diffs. The fallout shows that deployment details — timing of automatic approvals, edit provenance, and communication channels — matter as much as translation accuracy; without them, AI tooling can harm contributor retention and content quality rather than help.