So true about the rules not applying 100% to other languages…
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@memour I think everyone is a bit scared/nervous when they first join a team but really we don’t bite 
Some might think that by joining a team it becomes more of a job instead volunteering because in a way you do commit to something but really nobody can or will force you to sub or seg every week. It’s ok to take a break. All the team asks from you is to come regularly when you can and to be able to work together because you are a part of the team. That’s also when those unofficial rules are coming handy, that way everyone knows what to do and if someone doesn’t you can always ask.
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No it isn’t you. Sometimes viki can be an unfriendly place and mistakes made from not knowing can get you a scolding from the CMs or moderators. That is why Ninja Academy did the Channel Roles. Too many people wanted to do these various jobs, but were unsure on what to do. This way, a new person would have a foundation on what to do. It really makes me sad to see the amount of work that was put into all these guides that are designed to help when people say things like it doesn’t provide everything. Well, yes. The Ninja segmenting guide, subtitling guide, Channel Role guide do not contain everything, but they contain the most important things to help others volunteer on viki. To put everything, one would have to write a huge manual. These guides were done to be of service, so I was very happy that they were of help to you. That is what they were meant to do. Viki used to make a reference to these guides.
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I believe that viki has less of a focus on quality than the team leaders have, therefore they don’t have strict rules.
My personal opinion:
Always contact a Moderator/Channel Manager before starting to add subs. If they don’t reply within a certain period (say, a week), then start, but not before.
Why? Because many people don’t know how bad they are at translating. They may think their skills are OK but they’re not. I’m not speaking of you personally, as you well understand I hope (moreover, I don’t know a word of Norwegian 
I have seen so many cases in which there have been 3-4 people subtitling each part of an episode, each one in a different style, calling the characters in a different way (their job titles or other appellatives). A sorry mess.
I have seen so many cases of enthusiastic beginners who don’t know the rules about formatting marks, spaces, lines, musical notes and so on.
I have seen so many cases of enthusiastic would-be-editors who mess up perfectly good subtitles, thinking that they are correcting them.
And let me not start about the segments. I have recently spent almost a whole day trying to fix the choppy 1 second or less segments in a classic B/W film I am managing. It would have been easier to delete them all and start afresh, but it was subtitled in great part in five or six languages, among which Chinese, so all these subtitles would have been lost.
Exactly. I think people would do well to stick to those, regardless of language. Of course there are individual Guidelines created by users in other languages. I also made mine for Italian, because each language has its own particularities, but I always refer my subtitlers to the General English Guidelines, as these are in my opinion the foundation on which we should base our activities here.
The viki guideline to “not discourage anyone from participating” I think should be taken with a grain of salt. Not everybody is fit to do the job decently and they should be told so in a polite, civilized but decisive way. The viewers deserve to enjoy their favourite shows with at least decent - if not perfect - subtitles. If a person is a beginner in a language and they think they can subtitle - no, dear, I’m very sorry but no. If a person was playing games on their cellphones during middle and high school, and cannot even write their own language properly - no dear, very sorry but no!
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@irmar I hope that doesn’t include me who doesn’t know Korean fluenty, yet I sub some dramas. I really only do it to get the team moving for the viewers.
I think that you - and some other Ko-En subtitlers I know -, translate only the ones you are sure of, leaving blank all the rest. Right? In that case it’s perfectly OK, because other people who know more can fill in the rest of the subtitles, and the job is not below par. It’s as if I, who am only a beginner in Korean, started filling in the “Kumawo”, “ottoke”, “aigoo”, “saranghe” and the other 20-30 words and expressions I know. Although personally I would never dream of doing such a thing, it will do no harm.
The difference is knowning exactly how far you can go.
Self-awareness is the key. Whereas there are people who think they are gods and are arrogant, thinking they can even correct native speakers.
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I think newcomers don’t do their homework… I wonder if these fans think just going into the editor and type that’s all to subbing…
I used to write directions to newcomers when they are starting out, now I put important links on my profile and send them there so that they can access the links faster instead of searching… explaining certain things all over again can be time consuming.
German teams work with google docs and kakaotalk app. The doc has always brief summary of subtitling rules and sometimes other details about honorifics and/or a list with special wordings.
In overall I think that there are way too many links and info in various places and some are not as easy to find. I think viki promotes subtitling like it’s a fun stuff, it is but should be done correctly for the viewers to enjoy quality subtitles… it is a constant work and learning process and with just fast subbing to acquire high count in subs the quality will certainly suffer.
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Absolutely!
But I don’t think it’s the newcomer’s fault. I was a newcomer some months ago, and although I did diligently watch a couple of videos on subtitling and how to use the editor, then I went to project finder thinking that it was, as the title says, a place to find projects to subtitle. I found a show where my language was still missing a percentage of subtitles, I went in and started to translate. I did something like 3-4 episodes by myself, and nobody bothered me. On the project finder page, there was no indication that I had to ask permission or anything! It was after some time, visiting the main page of a show and looking at the wall picture, that I saw “If you want to subtitle ask the moderator”. And I went “aaaahhh… that’s how it’s done!”
And I’m internet savvy, and not stupid. So if I didn’t get it, I understand that other people may also not get it.
So yes, I do agree that viki is only user-friendly for visitors who want to watch a show or movie, but it’s difficult to navigate for volunteers.
Even I, after all those months of very active involvement here, if you ask me to tell you how to find Submit a Channel, or Subtitling Rules, or Submit a help request etc, I wouldn’t be able to tell you right off my head. I’d have to go find it, maybe clicking at the wrong place once or twice. Nowadays I would find it pretty quickly, because it’s been some months, and I’ve submitted quite a few requests, but I still don’t go “with closed eyes”. That’s why I also have put a couple of useful links in my About me page. Some of them are for newcomers, but some are for me!
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I so much agree with you, it’s not possible!
I made the same “mistake” when I first started and got a bit less-than-civil PM from a moderator of the show. The courtesy norms are not at all visible to the newbies and we should’t treat these people as if they made a horrendous error. They are just new.
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Hi there,
It’s been a while since I was very active at Viki, and things have been changed a little, or maybe I never have understood some points?
No matter, I’m picking up this old thread to learn about volunteer rules once again and ask you to help me a bit.
I’m a bit confused, especially about the editor.
Was there an editor years ago already?
In the list of the team of a channel, I see channel manager, moderators, segmenters and subtitlers, but cannot remember seeing editor.
Is editor one of them, or an extra assignment?
I was reading the Subbing Guide of Ninha Academy posted in this thread, and if I understand right, I may not simply come and edit lines even if I’m a moderator and can unlock subs.
Can anybody tell me more about this?
Thanks in advance,
The moderator can edit her own language, unless she has appointed a subtitler as editor. Nobody else except the moderator and the appointed editor can edit other people’s subtitles, but they are usually welcome to point out mistakes to the moderator or editor by personal message.
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So the moderator always knows if there is an editor or not?
I was thinking if somebody else could have appointed one, or maybe by Viki or channel manager.
Recently somebody overwritten my subtitles and she said there was no editor, so she did that right away.
Then I wondered how she knows that there isn’t any, because I cannot find “editor” in the team list at all.
She must have meant there was no moderator for this language, I suppose?
An editor for non-English languages officially still doesn’t exist, I think. Maybe she indeed thought of a Moderator. (Is there one for Japanese in this project?) But then I would be a little worried - what if she was the one who misunderstood how the system really works.
If there is no Moderator for Japanese, I should think it would be nice if she notified the CM that she wanted to do changes on the project.
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Normally the Editor will introduce themselves, either by PM or in the Team Discussion area, so you don’t go into shock. The Editor position is usually listed on the front page wallpaper. One of the Moderators might be the designated editor because they need to be able to lock and unlock the subtitles. Sometimes but not always the editor will be listed as a subtitler without Mod powers. So the best bet is to ask your Language Moderator or the Channel Manager by PM if it’s still unclear.
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Hi,
you know I’m subbing in Japanese. 
It was many years ago I joined that team and it was at the beginning of my Viki-activity, so I can’t remember exactly, but I must have been a moderator. Or at least, I was able to lock and unlock at that drama after exchanging messages with the channel manager. What I didn’t know was, that the CM had been changed in the last years, and suddenly, it was unlocked and someone had overwritten my sub.
The new CM didn’t know either about me, nor about her. It could have been some kind of an unlucky issue.
This another subtitler didn’t think on writing prior to somebody, I hadn’t noticed the changes of the team and I was pretty shocked to find out that a lot of my lines had been changed. In the most cases she removed commas and piriods.
It’s not easy to know the whole system, courtesy or rules for subbing. I’ve been doing that not too few, but I sill have questions like here.
It was years ago, when I started, and I can’t remember how much guidance I could find in that time.
I would say… I would wish there was a guidance shown somewhere that nobody would overlook…
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dear choesook,
then, it is something quite unclear to see?
If I see some mistakes I want to edit, and it’s not a drama I’m already in team, I always send a note to CM or M, sometimes also to the translator who wrote lines I’d like to edit.
To make a confession, sometimes it happenes that I touch the subs first, but right after I contact them.
I will be more careful with asking in the future.
There will be always some people who don’t think of these point, but I shouldn’t be too much shocked.
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Normally the Language Moderator will send a pm to all subbers saying “Ms So and So is our editor”.
It often happens that an editor is not a moderator. At least in Italian teams I see this many times.
In Five Children there were two Italian moderators, but I was appointed as editor with no moderating powers (maybe because you can’t have more than one), so I had to write to one of them every time I was finished, so that she could lock the episode.
In some other Italian teams there is one moderator but two editors, so that if the series has two episodes airing each week, each editor edits one of them. Sometimes one of the two editors is the moderator herself, sometimes the moderator does not edit at all (these Italian moderators typically have about a zillion projects running at the same time, so where would they find the time to also edit?)
I usually edit everything I moderate, as I’m very good at it (sorry for saying so myself). And it makes me very angry when a subtitler takes the liberty of editing the subtitles of somebody else or, worse still, touching and changing again what I have edited (yes, the latter happened to me yesterday. I am still thinking of a nice way to speak to her about it because I don’t trust myself right now).
The correct procedure is send a message with “what do you think about…” and let the editor have the final word, even if you don’t agree.
When I am a subtitler, I very rarely get back to the editor trying to explain why I don’t agree with their corrections; and if I do, I walk on eggshells trying to make myself humble and so on, so they don’t think I overstep my boundaries. After all the editor and moderator have the end responsibility, so let them do as they wish.
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LOL I am like this. As a subber with mod privileges (usually) I sometimes unlock to see the changes. Sometimes I think mine may~~~ be better but I shut up and don’t say anything because i’m not EDITOR! S/HE IS!
But if it is something I really don’t want changed I tell chief (or I guess in your case moderator) and hope for the best
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Hi sophie2you,
so you new about the editor… I didn’t, as you can see.
But I was always sending a note if I want to correct mistakes and had got a permission.
By the way, does moderators have to ask CM if they may also edit?
Or is editing part of their job if they don’t assign anybody for editing?
dear irmar,
How is it possible that someone changes your edited lines?
In the case you are a moderator, don’t you leave the editor locked?