Nov 07, 2025 11:27:00

The Japanese community that translated Mozilla's support pages into Japanese disbanded after Mozilla began overwriting the pages with machine translation bots.

Mozilla, the developer of Firefox, has

its support pages translated into languages around the world by volunteers, including Japanese. However, on October 22, 2025, a machine translation bot created by Mozilla was found to be overwriting articles without permission. In response, the Japanese community that had been translating the pages into Japanese declared its dissolution.

End of Japanese community | SUMO community discussions | Forums | Mozilla Support
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/forums/contributors/717446

The changelog for Mozilla's support page is below. It shows that a bot called 'SuMo Bot' updated a large number of articles on October 22, 2025. Each update also includes a comment saying, 'This was automatically approved because it had not been reviewed within 72 hours.' SuMo Bot updated hundreds of articles a day, making it virtually impossible for the Japanese community to review all of the changes within 72 hours.

In response to this situation, on October 25, 2025,

marsf , who had served as the Japanese locale leader, shared his intention to stop contributing to the support page and disband the community on the Japanese community's Slack. Then, on November 4, 2025, he posted a disbandment notice titled 'End of Japanese community' on the official forum of the support page. In his disbandment notice, marsf listed the following issues:

・SuMo Bot does not follow translation guidelines
・SuMo Bot translation does not respect localization for Japanese users
Changes made by SuMo Bot are approved within 72 hours, making it impossible to cultivate new human contributors.
・SuMo Bot is operating without the approval, control, or communication of the Japanese community.
- More than 300 articles have been overwritten by SuMo Bot

Marsf also requests that his translations be prohibited from being used as training data for SuMo Bot or any AI.

It's unclear how the quality of Mozilla's support pages will change in the future, but Microsoft's Japanese documentation, which makes extensive use of machine translation, is noticeably low quality, with 'help' translated as 'help me,' incorrect commands written, and even sentences that are completely incomprehensible.