The Japanese branch of Mozilla’s Support Mozilla (SUMO) community—responsible for localizing and maintaining Japanese-language support documentation for Firefox and other Mozilla products (consisting of Japanese native speakers)—has officially disbanded after more than two decades of voluntary work.
The decision, announced yesterday, marks the end of one of Mozilla’s oldest and most dedicated localization groups.
SUMO, short for Support Mozilla, is the umbrella project for Mozilla’s user support platform, support.mozilla.org, that brings together volunteers and contributors worldwide who translate, maintain, and update documentation, tutorials, and troubleshooting guides for Firefox, Thunderbird, and other Mozilla products.
Each language community—such as Japanese, French, or Spanish—manages its own localized content to ensure users receive accurate and culturally appropriate information.
The Japanese SUMO community, which was active before support.mozilla.org even existed, was among the first to establish an organized effort for translating and maintaining Mozilla’s support materials. For many years, it played a vital role in helping Japanese-speaking users troubleshoot browser issues and understand new features. But no more.
According to marsf, the long-time locale leader of the Japanese SUMO team, the decision to disband was triggered by the recent introduction of an automated translation system known as Sumobot. Deployed on October 22, the bot began editing and approving Japanese Knowledge Base articles without community oversight.
In a message posted to the SUMO discussion forum, marsf explained that Sumobot’s behavior was unacceptable for several reasons:
- It disregarded Japanese translation guidelines, resulting in literal and sometimes inaccurate text.
- It overrode existing localizations, effectively erasing community-approved work.
- It automatically approved machine-translated content for all archived articles within 72 hours, removing the review window for human contributors.
- It operated without consultation, control, or communication with the Japanese community.
As a result, more than 300 Knowledge Base articles were overwritten on the production server—without testing or prior staging. Marsf described the incident as “mass destruction of our work and an explicit violation of the Mozilla mission, allowed officially.”
In his public statement, marsf declared his resignation from all SUMO activities, stating:
“I quit contributing to support.mozilla.org. I prohibit using all my translations as learning data for SUMO bot and AIs. I request the removal of my translations from SUMO’s AI datasets.”
He further noted that while individual Japanese contributors may choose to continue their work, the collective SUMO Japanese community, as an organized body, is now dissolved.
As of now, Mozilla has not issued an official statement regarding the Japanese team’s departure or the future of SUMO’s AI translation initiatives.
