To quote Gandalf in Lord of the Rings, The courtesy of your hall is somewhat lessened of late, Theoden King…
Let’s try something different. Let’s try actual COMMUNICATION. Like telling us what you’re doing with your bot, rather than MORE SHOCK AND AWE.If you mean to make our “labors” easier, prove it.
The bot is NOT making our work easier on the historical dramas and it really has messed up two languages at Condor…(and made MY JOB HARDER trying to figure out what happened and work with people to deal with it out of nowhere? and made a third MODERATOR FRANTICALLY drop ALL OTHER THINGS TO SUB CONDOR in their language before YOU BOT IT! And I can’t say I disagree with the decision to do that either. NOT…based on a lack of something BASIC HERE.
And most of all…what this lacks? Yeah here it is, people. Few truly say it better…take it, Aretha!
The only thing I truly don’t like on this site is when somebody closes a discussion thread where plenty of users still have a lot to say. A door slamming in your face.
I wish some people would understand that half of the purpose of Discussions at Viki is to vent out and move on. Not to deliberately bash or destroy the reputation of the site.
And the psychology behind such an act is counterproductive for Viki. Every time a thread like that one closes, I start to be SUUUUUPER suspicious. Like, what are you trying to hide, really?
Amen. I saw what you did there, Grayhame. And I saw what that … bot did. You’re so right.
That’s really bad, the way they did it, the way they communicated it, and the results. It was bad, really bad, but I literally blew the lid when I read that last message in the previous thread, and when they shut it down.
Honestly, I am really thinking of giving it all up, although my native languages are not affected. Yet.
The worst kind of task I can do here is actually editing nonsensical stuff. Even illiterate or ignorant humans are bad enough, and I avoid them as much as I can. That’s why I only team up with people who either know what they are doing, or are open to suggestions and eager to learn.
And one thing’s for sure. I’m not going to clean up after a … machine.
I was really mad to hear of all the old historical dramas that got affected. Man, that’s just plain evil.
Somehow, because of this, it would feel good to leave all the illiterates who want to sub (and there are so many here) to teach that machine. Like this, those among us who actually get paid as translators elsewhere (I don’t mean paid subbing), are teaching a machine to leave us without work… Or at least to give ideas to all the said illiterates and ignorant hotheads who think they can do the actual work - to dump our prices. I don’t think so.
The way Viki always handles these things is so frustrating. It is not the first time they just send a general message to everyone without more information.
And even with all the big talk about how they welcome feedback, I never really seen them taking notes from our comments. I mean even the last message in the now closed thread suggest they did not care to read the discussion. “We’d also like to assure you that vikibot will not be applied to current on-air titles.” --> This was not really an issue, most comments were talking about already completed titles that have an active team still doing the subtitles.
If they wanted to test the system, they should have choosen titles with Viki as CM or that are really inactive for a long time, with both the CM and the team not being active anymore. At least then no one could have complained, when the title is choosen as a guinea pig.
But overall there are so many things wrong with Viki’s statement. They want to help the volunteers and the viewers, but instead of only filling in the empty subtitles they delete actual good work? Doesn’t seem legit.
It would be easy to make a duplication of a channel or to take over a really orphaned one. What is so hard to contact a CM? I mean communicate with one, not only drop some words into their inbox.
It is one thing to repeatedly tell contributors how valued they are, when actions give a different experience.
I am fully aware that Viki wants to keep such discussions under the veil of secrecy, but I don’t think it is the wisest way to take.
It’s quite obvious that if you block an active discussion in Viki, it may simply pop up in another platform which is not Viki-controlled. And then the snowball is really out of control.
Since, as known by any viewer of Historical Chinese dramas which bots find hard to handle: The mandate of heaven requires smart maintenance, or it tends to shift.
I rarely respond to Viki brutal moves on us volunteers, but this time the ship was shaken too strong.
I got a response. My list is 5 of my dramas. 3 English is complete. 2 it’s in progress. So this is not being limited to completed English either.
In some dramas, it’s aimed at fully-subbed OL eps…in others, unreleased eps. Still others…well…the worst is the 20 eps each at Condor. the 13 at Swordsman in the Wilderness. And hearing of what happened at Great Queen SD too.
I am waiting for the answers to the many questions I have after reviewing the list and what has occurred so far. When I know more, I will immediately work with my Teams and we will find our way out of this.
**The list I have is not complete, because I just found more botted episodes. I have requested they unbot what they have botted - they are all difficult to sub and the botting is not helping us, it’s hindering us. **
**I have yet to get a response and sent a supplemental request with additional episodes discovered botted not on the list they gave me and other information. ** Heck, I’m so desperate to hear any good news on this, I actually submitted a TICKET to the Help Desk… (SIGH)
It would really help if this was answered quickly and with good information to move forward, hopefully unbot things that should never have been treated this way - and restore calm to the chaos that is now happening here.
It’s a machine translator, a sort of a program that will translate from one language to another in this case https://www.cnet.com/how-to/what-is-a-bot/ @adrianmorales when you have a bot translation it might not be quite accurate since the machine/program won’t always know specific idioms or expressions in one language you can not translate word by word, for example like google translator does. Also in English you have only “technically” the formal “you” for singular and plural, as you are from Europe you probably are familiar between formal and informal addressing, the bot won’t likely know which is what unless he translates from a formal and informal addressing…
Thank you for explaining it to me! Yes, here we can’t address people as “you” unless they are close friends or family. I’ve noticed it’s the same in Asia.
I’m still puzzled, though, since I don’t understand the bot’s purpose. Is Viki trying to replace the human translators with a bot? Like how the caption bot works on YouTube?
Today I had my first experience of the bot. It went and not only translated what was missing, but also EDITED over somebody else’s translation. Sometimes correcting well, sometimes not.
For instance, putting the same sentence, only without a final period.
When translating on its own, the bot makes mistakes too. The main one is not putting a period at the end of the sentence.
Another one which is quite common is, after the first sub finishes with a comma, writing the with a capital letter, whereas lowercase should be used. I mean, such things should be basic, right?
In the following screenshot, we have
sub 1: A woman named Park Heyong Ja
sub 2: was here, right?
And sub 2 is translated as starting with a capital letter instead of a lowercase.
You know, I thought that the bot just filled in missing subs. Not that it corrected existing ones. This takes it to a wholly new level of frustrating. And there were many corrections like that. When the Spanish Mod will get there she will be pulling out her hair.
Actually, I can tell you it DID OVERWRITE EXISTING AND CORRECT SUBS in ONE drama, in ONE episode - with mostly incorrect subs. In some cases, it had the nerve to overwrite the correct sub …by a human…and use the same sub shamelessly!. However, the Moderator and I restored them, ONE SUB AT A TIME FOR HOURS… And we let the subbers know it had happened AND that we had repaired it.
Sigh. I have NO idea who resurrected this topic. The vikibot landed in exactly one major outbreak and to my knowledge, has not been returned to the site. My understanding is that after the unsuccessful use on the historical dramas and our need to remove them, that a CM would be able to say NO to such help - or YES - if they desired, in the four languages where it was used.
My objection was based on having hired the best Teams for all the languages and the fact that the Moderators said the language used was decidedly inferior to the standard for normal translation. These were all historical/costume dramas, and it was for the best interest of the drama that I asked to be able to remove it and did in all instances.
So please, unless there is a revival of this project somewhere - and we did get told by a community message it would occur or had when it did, just not where and how much of it…
Please let’s try to forget this incident and move forward, okay? Condor and the other dramas are now okay.
And I can’t say I disagree with the decision to do that either. 
