Viki. The volunteers do an outstanding job! They make it much easier to understand some of the detail of what is spoken with their notations. Hats off to those wonderful people!
NF. Easy to read, understandable but often don’t have the detail notes that would make what was spoken make sense.
Prime. This one is a hit or miss for me. I’ve watched some shows where the dialog was so choppy and grammatically incorrect, it had to have been subbed by a machine. Some show’s subbing is very good while other’s leave a LOT to be desired.
IQIYI. My biggest complaint about this service is that I do not believe they offer subs with black background (which makes, for me who watches everything on my 50" TV, easier reading). I’ve checked with them and the background is available for those who use the app through their phone, etc. but that doesn’t work for me. Very seldom, but occasionally, I believe some of their subs are also machine-produced.
I must say that sometimes human subbers can be as bad as machines, or even worse. Nowadays AI translators have gotten much better than they were even two years ago. Whereas stupid people who translate literally and lazy people who used to play videogames on their phone at school when their own language was taught, have always existed and will always exist. As we say in Italian, the mother of fools is always pregnant.
Viki. The volunteers do an outstanding job! They make it much easier to understand some of the detail of what is spoken with their notations. Hats off to those wonderful people!
I had taken a break from watching anything on viki, now its just annoying that some segments are 7 secs long when there seems to be a reasonable gap in between the speech to have separate segments. I don’t want to read two full, long sentences in one segment.
Prime. This one is a hit or miss for me. I’ve watched some shows where the dialog was so choppy and grammatically incorrect, it had to have been subbed by a machine. Some show’s subbing is very good while other’s leave a LOT to be desired.
Are you talking about their original shows or other shows they host? If the subs are in the original language, perhaps its from the original producers. Otherwise, I think all the other languages they offer are machine translated.
I have only watched a couple things of Asian content on this platform, but I was quite surprised by the very poor quality on one of them. It looks like this was possibly a joint production between Prime and one of the big-name production companies in Korea, so I don’t know the source of the subs, but the grammar and punctuation were terrible, and they couldn’t even keep the character names and genders straight at times.
The thing with RViki now is that the segments at times are way too short, and the subber writes more than they should since there was no need to add all those extra words they put in there, but I’m guessing they are piling their contribution count since now is harder for them to get contribution counts they don’t deserve in the first place. If subbers for their own greedy selfish reasons want to get away with that, the implemented new rules prevent them from doing so, but somehow they found a way to add excess words, and that is affecting so much the viewers enjoyment of reading the subtitles bc they are gone in a flash!
In regards to other sites like Netflix/PRIME/HBO MaX I have no complaints whatsoever or I have seen any grammatical errors in their subtitles. BUT… this
does needs mention here, and I hope all you dissatisfied with those site subs check and see if you have CAPTION mode on, and make CAPTION is off and SUBTITLES mode is on. I was angry and frustrated until my daughter fixed that for me and told me to make sure I don’t turn on captions. Captions besides adding ridiculous stuff like; ‘‘Honking the horn’’ or ‘‘light switch on/off ‘’ ‘’ bird poop’’ these added words take your focus away from the scene’s dialog, and there is definitely too many unnecessary words to read in the screen.
A HORRIBLE thing PRIME is doing now is that they dub (mainly) the Japanese dramas/movies/dramas, and I can’t take the dubbing off! I like to hear the real voices of the Japanese actor/actress bc it sounds so much better to my ears. I have actually refuse to watch a drama/movie bc is dubbed in English, and I can’t deal with it since to me, it doesn’t sound right at all. It takes so much away from a dramatic/romantic/ scene, and it’s a real shame.
I have seen a few movies/dramas with AI created subs, and you can almost feel like you are a robot as you read the sentence/subtitle. I have already written complains and hope they look into that more closely, and hopefully they can fix that problem. I already solved the Caption issue I wasn’t aware of, and finally resolved it thanks to my daughter.
Many many years ago, we at Ninja Academy for Segmenting volunteered to teach and to include close captioning segments but the viki staff at the time declined the offer.
Would have been super helpful and made things a lot easier for OL that require knowing gender/age, etc. They would have been able to work on the subs without referencing the video (as much). Something simple to indicate speech has switched to to l. formal, derogatory, m. form. h. form. , abbreviations or maybe even a interface selection for designation, would make translation easier for some languages.
I feel your pain. Until I learned to differentiate courtesy levels in Korean, I had to beg the English team to illuminate me on what the characters were using.
Since then I’ve figured out a simple (not 100% accurate, but has a pretty decent percentage, good enough for most OL volunteers) to discern this by ear + by knowing what would be reasonably expected, given the Korean rules in society (those rules are the same in Chinese and Japanese society as well). I detailed it on a thread about editing (very good thread generally, highly recommended, many people said useful things there)
But … working at the subs without referencing the video? That’s a no no for me, if I find out a subber doesn’t follow the drama and watch all the episodes, I never work with her/him again. You are bound to make very stupid mistakes if you don’t know what’s going on, the character’s relationships, the backstory, to what they refer to when they talk. So more work for me the editor, just because of the subber’s laziness and greediness to take ten projects at the same time.
Yes, I know is for the hearing impaired. It doesn’t bother me at all except that some movies/dramas on Prime/netflix for example, offer only [caption] and no option for regular subtitles. I believe captions are made mainly by AI, but in certain movies/dramas, they do add the name of the one who did the caption/subtitles.
Like one time I read a ‘‘caption’’ [MAN WALKING THROUGH THE LEAVES.] besides the fact that they always add the periods inside the brackets (we all know by now that’s a no/no), what bothers me the most is that some of the descriptions in the caption are totally unnecessary since the viewer is deaf, not blind. The hearing impaired viewer can see the man is walking through the leaves, so I find it a bit insensitive. But I think I know their ulterior motive since to get paid good money, the subber has to meet a large quota of words done by them.
PS. When there’s no options for regular subs in the movies/dramas; I don’t bother to watch with caption only because is overwhelming for me to see so much stuff all over the place, and that period inside the bracket is like a knife going deeper into the wound …
People get excited for some future show only for it to be a letdown. They shouldn’t be picking up projects they have no interest or clue if they’d like it or not. Best to just not sub if interest is lost, if you don’t even want to watch the show.
I don’t understand what the reason is for the quantity rush is. Is that for gold qc or clout? Why have others butcher your language with machine translation when you can do it by hand?
Writing more words in the same segment doesn’t affect their contribution count.
I agree. I watch everything in the original language. Dubs, no matter in what language, make the show seem unnatural. On the other hand, for people who have trouble reading subttles, it can be a good thing.
By the way, Viki now has some English-dubbed shows in the Coming Soon…
Yes, I would have rather see something that would make more sense like [Leaves rustling] or [Leaves crunching]. Whomever wrote the caption forgot that captions are designed for viewers who cannot hear the audio in a video. They forgot that the hearing impaired viewer can see the man is walking through the leaves since they are not blind, but deaf. lol
You mean; they won’t add contribution count here at RViki even if they add more extra words than needed in a segment/translated sentence? Maybe you didn’t understood what I meant to say or rules have changed here that much? The more words you write in a sentence/segment, the higher the numbers in your contribution count goes up. By experience, I know some people in Spanish write more words than the original translation (Korean/Chinese/ Japanese) has, but they really didn’t needed to add so many words in the first place, they manipulated the sentence so they could write more words that could have been omitted, and would have never affected the sentence.
Yes, Spanish translation has a few more words than what we write in English, but not the exaggerated way some subbers do just to add more contribution count, and reach Gold QC levels.
For Netflix and Prime you do have to meet a large amount of translations (subtitles) done in order to get paid. The contract you sign has plenty of rules that must be follow. The hardest one at whatever time they contact you 2 in the morning or 12 midnight you have to be willing to get up and do your translation work. Maybe they have changed since I applied to but if they haven’t is more or less like that. Is a big commitment and sacrifice that goes along a very well paid job. They are more strict with age/Education. Proficiency in two or more language and so on.
{NOT HERE] I was offered six (6) cents per segment/subtitles (that was almost 10 years ago), and I refused to continue bc the videos were short, but to make decent amount of money you would have to work day and night, non stop, and that’s definitely not for me. Besides having to do the segments, subtitles, the timing had to be close to perfect which was very draining to do if the person constantly paused when they talked or added words like you know/ and so on…
That’s wrong. It doesn’t matter if you put 500 characters in the segment (or whatever the limit is), the subtitle count will only go up by 1. AFAIK, that’s the way it has always been. Subbers that only want contribution points would be using fewest characters as possible.
Abusing contribution count, by adding words to existing subtitles needlessly, is possible.
ilikedeadclowns
Abusing contribution count, by adding words to existing subtitles needlessly, to boost contribution count is possible.
I heard things changed a lot in here, and some don’t get added contribution counts, but I really don’t know the full details about that since they keep changing the rules, and they don’t make sense anymore; so I don’t ever bother to read them.
Well that’s the way it was last I partook on viki. That’s a shame if changing the subtitles no longer counts as a contribution. Editing is even more thankless then.
The first time any user makes an editing change to a segment, they will get one contribution count, and this is true whether the change is one character or a hundred. After that, if the same user goes back to a segment they have already edited and makes further changes, they will not get any additional contribution counts for that segment. This is for editing of subtitles only and not from the perspective of a segmenter.
On the other hand, if you commit, you commit. I volunteered for Bride of the Water God because I read it was the same writer who made Misaeng (Incomplete Life), which is a masterpiece. I was sorely disappointed, I didn’t like it at all, and translating was a chore. But this doesn’t mean that I abandoned the project! I stuck to it to the bitter end. Same for Melting Me Softly (I joined because I like Ji Chang Wook), for the Undateables (I went there because of Namgoong Min, but the drama was a complete train wreck, and he wasn’t even good in it) and all the other on-air projects which sound great for any reason and then turn out to be meh. You can’t let the team down.
