@bozoli
As a Chief Editor for English subtitles on many Kdrama channels I really appreciate the questions and comments I receive from the other language moderators and channel managers. They often have a perspective on a subtitle’s content that I could never have imagined on my own and they have eagle eyes on my grammar, spelling and punctuation. Questions and comments from other language moderators give me insight into the comprehensibility of the English subtitles and translatability for the subbers.
I used to be fascinated with the charts done by many moderators showing the style of language spoken between characters but most experienced moderators for K drama now have got this wired so I don’t often get questions anymore on the level of speech but I am still willing to review the charts for newer moderators.
Sometimes another language moderator points out how the placement of a comma has changed the whole meaning of a sentence. The only “stupid” question is the one you were afraid to ask. Sometimes the other language moderator suggests a change of a subject of a sentence. As some of you know, Korean sentences can be neutral about who is the subject of the sentence – 1st person, (I), 2nd person (you) or 3rd person (he, she, they, it) and so asking whether the right person is referred to in the subtitle is a perfectly legitimate concern. Sometimes the tense of the predicate of a sentence is questioned – that is a perfectly legitimate concern.
And then there are naturally questions about idiomatic phrases in English or in Korean which has been pretty literally translated to English. When I get moderator questions, I try to give the whole rationale for a particular subtitle. The academic comes out of me and I think my reply tells far more than the moderator cared to know!
I only ask two things when pm-ing me:
- Please don’t write to tell me because there was an extra space or a missing space in an ellipsis or if there is a space missing after the hyphen when two character’s dialogue is in the same segment. As subbers yourself, you are aware that there are several thousand characters in a one hour segment and I focus my attention on lexical (meaning) content and sometimes miss those spaces which are matters of style only. The space doesn’t give any information to the viewer or increase comprehension – it’s purely cosmetic and therefore insignificant.
- Pm me directly with your questions and comments – not because I want to hide any of the errors of omission or commission in the editing or subbing process but because once I release the week’s second episode, I don’t stalk Team Discussion until the new episode is uploaded in the next week. So sometimes by the time I see the comment in Team Discussion, many other languages have already subbed the episode mentioned in the comment/question.