This is the article that I have always wanted the Viki Community to read and understand:
"For now, we are useful."
Salut,
En ce moment je refais les sous-titres français d’une émission de variété culinaire, les sous-titres ont étés généré par un “robot viki”.
Je peux vous dire que c’est un travail très mal mal exécuté. Énormément de fautes d’orthographes, mauvaise grammaire et la conjugaison me pique aux yeux ! Plus les codes raccourcis non respectés…
Qui plus est, repasser derrière pour corriger toutes ces erreurs demande deux fois plus de temps et de travail.
Chris.
PS: Je cherche quelqu’un pour l’édition et des traducteurs. :clin d’œil:
Bon point!
Over the years, Viki’s volunteers have developed their own training programs and standards for capturing cultural references, obscure idioms, and other tricky linguistic nuances. Their self-managed system involves several roles that don’t require fluency in multiple languages, although translation experience is also not necessary to become a subtitler.
Redoing short segments that cause text to disappear too quickly is tedious and doesn’t count toward contributions for Viki’s leaderboard, yet segmenters still clean up the mistakes. “We don’t want people thinking that was our work,” she explains, “because it was not done well.”
I honestly respect the entire community so much for this, especially the older volunteers, trainers, and senseis. There is so much heart involved in everything you do. You have brought warmth to this online community and taught others how to lead and work well with each other. I still can’t imagine how everyone managed to coordinate and create this largely self-managed volunteer base, providing quality subtitles, taking the time to translate OSTs, spending hours just lengthening segments and joining them purely for the sake of viewers’ comfort, and providing detailed translators’ notes. No one can truly appreciate the care, effort and meticulous work you all do unless they actually start volunteering themselves. I’m sorry you don’t always receive the thanks you deserve because our work is largely behind the scenes. For however long this lasts, I will be glad to be part of this community. I hope things get better and we all are able to continue working together for a long time.
Like the article said, “Rakuten Viki’s army of volunteers just want to subtitle some K-drama in peace.”
I felt that the article itself was written really well. It quite closely reflects the sentiments of the community in not too many words. The interviewees have nailed some of the biggest issues.
Also, I joined Viki in 2014. By that time the company had already been sold to Rakuten, but not many knew about it and most found out once the logo was changed years later. I’m assuming that the long “incubation period” was due to many fan channels (not the “fan channels” younger volunteers might think of) which were only half-licensed.