[crazygringo]

How?

They don't know what exactly has gone wrong. All they can say sorry for is for how the person is feeling. Then they want to get on a call to learn more. Which is the start of helping.

The response is as sincere and helpful as it could be for an initial response from someone who wants to figure out what the problem is.

[skywhopper]

This isn’t out of the blue. The responder was the lead on rolling out this new translation workflow to the community. Check out the thread (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/forums/contributors/717387...) and you’ll see people immediately called out the exact potential problems the OP here is complaining about, nearly three months ago. This is no need for the responder to follow up to better understand the complaints. They know exactly what the issues are.

[GuinansEyebrows]

even if that were the case (others have explained why that’s not so), that would be an inappropriate time to apologize. you don’t apologize for how someone else feels. you apologize when you recognize that you did something harmful and when the harmed party is amenable to receiving it. otherwise, you’re really just being a jerk who’s only acknowledging that you don’t like how someone else feels.

[rileymat2]

But he lists the problems? Pretty unambiguously.

[crazygringo]

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?

[handoflixue]

> where are those guidelines?

It's entirely possible that such information is well-known to everyone involved in the translation community.

I would consider it outright insulting if someone who ostensibly "wants to help" doesn't know basic information like that - if the people making decisions about SumoBot are NOT aware of basic information like "where to find the local translation guidelines" then they are presumably not qualified to release a tool like SumoBot in the first place.

[kentm]

Yep agree with this. Nothing is more infuriating than someone Kramering into a space trying “to help” without spending any time or effort trying to understand that space.

They should have understood the guidelines before turning on their machine translation in a given locality.

[crazygringo]

It's also entirely possible that the Japanese translation team didn't put the guidelines in the right place for the bot to follow them. Or there's a bug. Since another commenter says it's following guidelines just fine.

> I would consider it outright insulting if someone who ostensibly "wants to help" doesn't know basic information like that

Well, the person who wants to help is a customer service manager in Indonesia. They presumably are not the leader of the machine translation product. They are trying to get more information so they can, you know, escalate to the right people.

So how is that "outright insulting"?

[kentm]

Turning off the machine translation and reverting all the changes it made seems pretty actionable to me. They can turn it back on when issues are addressed.

[benatkin]

Indeed. Turning it off would still satisfy marsf's requests:

- I prohibit to use all my translation as learning data for SUMO bot and AIs.

- I request to remove all my translation from learned data of SUMO AIs.

Before fixing it and re-enabling it in some capacity, they could work with marsf to find a solution.

[BrenBarn]

They are actionable by entirely canceling the machine translation operations in that community,