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.
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.