Are non-English titles on VIKI machine-translated?

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So, I’ve been amused by some clunky German titles on VIKI for some time now, but this one takes the cake:
Only Boo! – Nur Buhrufe!

While “boo” can mean a "sound uttered to show contempt, scorn, or disapproval, “Boo”, in this case, relates to the American (slang?) word Boo, from beau, which is used to talk affectionately about or to a lover or boyfriend/girlfriend. And anyone who’s heard anything about this drama would realize this. The official English title doesn’t make a lot of sense too, not like the Thai title แค่ที่แกง – Only Kaeng / Only Curry / Only he who cooks curry – refers to the love interest, who is called Kaeng.

So, is this machine translated? Or has a real person made a huge blunder here?

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It could be that the person translated it that way, but could also mean that the person usen chat gpt or google translate to work on Viki and then in that situations of course we’ll see funny translations.

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So … it is translated by a human but there is no quality check on titles at all?

The more I think about it, the less funny it is to me. A title is not some simple sentence in the subtitles; together with the poster, it’s the first thing that tells potential viewers about a drama. And if the meaning is so different to the official (English) title, even almost the opposite, then one could say it’s misdirecting potential viewers.

And, as I said, the example above is just the most obviously wrong translation I’ve seen so far.
Two other examples, though not as bad:

(Translating a title willy-nilly like that might also violate copyright laws, but I’m no expert on that.)

If I were the copyright holder of “Only Boo!” and heard about how my carefully chosen title is completely changed in meaning, I’d be very angry that my work is misrepresented.

So, what I want to say, a bit more care regarding translation of titles would not go amiss.

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Ich hab vor Jahren auch mal angemerkt, dass es blöd ist, wenn ich diese übersetzten Titel nicht suchen kann, deshalb gehe ich von autotranslate aus. Als Übersetzer haben wir in der Vergangenheit auch schon viele Titel innerhalb der Serie entweder ins Englische oder haben es anders übersetzt im Deutschen geschrieben.
Auch scheint dies ein rein deutsches Problem zu sein. Die automatischen Übersetzer kommen mit dem deutschen oft nicht klar. Ich sehe das in einem Spiel wo ich den Chat jederzeit übersetzen kann. Übersetzte ich vom französischen, spanischen, russischen ins deutsche, muss ich denjenigen oft bitten, es anders zu formulieren, weil die Übersetzung absolut keinen Sinn macht. Versuchen diese Sprache aber das deutsche zu übersetzen, verstehen sie es wunderbar…

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Many moons ago, other language teams were able to translate title and summary, then Viki decided to do this on their own and blocked the teams. Although we advised back then that some summaries had mistakes… they continue to translate all. I have no idea who or what translates them :sweat_smile:

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I became curious about the copyright thing so I googled it, and according to several websites incl. US Copyright Office, “Copyright does not protect names, titles, slogans, or short phrases. In some cases, these things may be protected as trademarks.” (like Harry Potter movies).

There was a discussion among our community about this issue as well. Sometimes it is really hard to translate a title of a movie/show. Not everyone here speaks the original language so we depend on the English translation, which according to some sometimes seems to have little to do with the original title. Also, translating some titles can be challenging, for exaple “Missing you”. Like, who or what is missing you? And is “you” meant formally or informally? I would need to know in order to translate that correctly. Also, even if you translate it correctly, it might sound weird in the target language. English is simply a very soft, nice language where everything sounds lovely. Not so much in some other languages.

Speaking of things like “Grand Prince”, if the target language doesn’t have such title, then the person who translates it must come up with a solution. In German, they have as far as I know the Grossherzog (Grand Duke), but no Groosprinz (Grand Prince). I can imagine that whoever had to translated that, came up with a solution that wasn’t ideal but sounded at least close enough.

Anyway, the real issue here is, just as you mentioned, that Viki has no quality control of the subtitles. Even the English team with their editor teams make mistakes, some teams more than others. What about all the other langugages with no editor at all? There is often one person who has to be the “Moderator” while they are basically just a lone subtitler, with no one to talk to about issues, no one to help.

So yes, it would be great if all languages had someone who would edit it, because no one is perfect and we all make mistakes.

Until then, let’s be grateful that there are volunteers willing to spend their time on working for Viki and doing their best, how good this “best” might be.