Contributing with google translate/Deepl

General Discussion
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Because you said I recently modified the document and added that rule, out of fear (honestly, I don’t know who told you this) and to demonstrate that I have nothing to hide, I leave below a printscreen of an older project document from my early days as a moderator. After the printscreen, I will leave that fragment in Romanian, so that whoever sees this topic can translate it into their language. This way, I make sure that I don’t leave the impression that I am altering the translation in any way.

image

Aveti mare grija cu Google Translate. Daca traducerea voastra se bazeaza doar pe acesta, va rog frumos sa va opriti din tradus. Nu sunt impotriva folosirii lui, dar sub nicio forma nu accept copy-paste. Trebuie sa adaptati la modul de vorbire in romana, precum si la scena din serial (genul personajelor, adresare formala/informala, timpul vorbirii etc.). Se vede cu ochiul liber, cand se face copy-paste si pentru asta imi rezev dreptul sa nu mai colaboram. La editare nu vreau sa refac traduceri. Nu acesta este obiectivul principal al editarii.

It is true that for some time I removed this rule from the document, since those who participated in the translation were not subject to it and I did not feel the need to specify it. Now, being a moderator/editor for many more projects, the number of those who are part of the team has increased considerably, as has the way of translating. Therefore, I found it necessary to reintroduce this mention.

Just because you are unhappy with the fact that you can’t take a top spot, doesn’t mean you have the right to attack me publicly, without even demonstrating the quality I offer. I have not and will not be interested in the process by which someone translates, as long as what is in the editor meets my requirements.

If you really understand the concept of community, you should also understand that the main thing we have to do is to understand each other, to help each other, to give each other a chance, to learn from each other. That’s why I won’t turn anyone down as long as what they leave behind is common sense. I’m here to grow the community, not divide, diminish or destroy it.

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34

As a member of the Romanian community, I have nothing but praise for dimghro. We always translate or moderate together and I really like his way of doing things. He gets involved in a lot of projects and spends most of his time here on Viki, so of course the number of contributions will be high. I personally don’t see any problem with that, we are proud of every Romanian translator that’s on the leaderboard and we are also grateful for each and every contribution (since all of us are doing what we can). At the end of the day, the most important thing is that the projects are well translated in a decent amount of time, and he never failed to do that. We should be grateful towards the volunteers that are working hard and are doing a good job, but instead, you are here complaining publicly with unfounded arguments… As for the Romanian volunteer that disclosed our team’s document without any approval for such a cause… you could have just talked in private if you had any problem.

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35

Without taking it to the personal level (I have no idea about dimghro’s acitivity on Viki), I understand where the original poster is coming from. I think many translators are frustrated (including myself) because Viki rewards quantity above quality. If someone is into quantity and statistics, the world is their oyster here. That’s fine. But Viki is offering nothing for slower translators who like to perfect their work. There is no alternative, just sheer numbers. There could be a system alongside the number ranking for best quality translation as well. It is perhaps not complete paranoia to suspect that there is a reason why Viki does not promote this: they don’t care about quality. For me, this is painful to see. And there ARE people who machine translate and create completely grotesque texts, with no regard to what is actually going on in that scene: they do not even adjust it to formal/informal language. It’s just a google translate dump. We have all seen this, I’m sure. I don’t begrudge anyone their position on the charts, I’m just sad to see that those who do not do this are not rewarded at all.

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36

The problem is: who would be judging that? It might not be fair, if the volunteers themselves do that (since sometimes people have conflicts), it might not be accurate, if the viewers do that (since they don’t know the english/original language and can’t judge the accuracy).

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37

Potential vindictive downvoting could be prevented by only allowing positive feedback. Viewers can maybe vote with a :+1: or a :heart:. I don’t know what would work but surely Viki could come up with something.

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39

I think this would be a good system for appointing CMs! All applications would be anonymous.

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40

We have no way of knowing if the viewers even have the skills to judge the subtitles.
And they could still “downvote” their enemy by upvoting everyone but them.

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41

I would also think that viewers would be more inclined to grade a bad translation than a good one, creating a skewed grading system.

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42

The viewers can only judge if the subtitles sound natural in their own language or wooden/idiotic/wrong to gobbledigook and everything in between (I have seen 99% gobbledigook subtitles in my language here on Viki, I kid you not). Of course, viewers may not be able to judge how accurate your translation is. I’m just suggesting some kind of reward for those translators who don’t mindlessly google translate.

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43

At this point any actual system would be an improvement :smiling_face_with_tear:

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44

Actually, even in their own language, not everyone can do that.

That would be great, but still very hard to implement in an effective way.

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45

Since I’m a viewer (reader), I think I can tell the difference quite well now :joy: Maybe the viewer should grade the individual translator…:thinking: wonder if Viki doesn’t have so many translators anymore?! :joy: escaped for the sake of honesty… Sometimes it’s really bad…

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46

I’ve seen people defending machine translations here and there. I don’t think machine translations are ever good enough for subtitles. Here’s why.

  1. Machines don’t see the context of the scene, “they” don’t know what has gone on before, what is the relationship between the speakers. They also don’t know the characters, their motivations and fears. They don’t know the nuances. Fun fact: Machine translations can’t consistently use formal/informal language as English lacks this distinction. English also lacks distinction between singular and plural “you”. On the other hand, English has gendered pronouns, while some languages don’t. These 3 things already pose a siginificant confusion risk.
  2. MT uses bland language. Real language use by real people is full of idioms; MT is very much idiom-free. There is no flavor. This causes unnatural, wooden, too official, stiff language. Sometimes unintentionally funny language. Also, MT can’t really do anything with non-contemporary language, for example, expressions and words you need to use in historical/costume dramas.
  3. Sometimes MT just gives you gobbledigook. It can make mistakes.
  4. Robots don’t have your experience, knowledge, instinct and judgement. That’s the truth. They are not moved by the story and the talent of the writers and are not motivated to render some beautiful/moving/funny lines into your language to create the same impact. You are the heart and soul through which all this is filtered. Machines don’t have hearts and souls. Yet. :wink:
  5. Literal translations are not always the best translations. This is where your creativity comes in.
  6. Sometimes MT gives you convoluted sentences. For a subtitle to work, they should capture the full meaning of the original sentence in a way that can be instantly grasped by the viewer, without having to pause the scene and read the sentence thoroughly in an attempt to wrap their heads around it.
    For these reasons, MT is not even a good foundation for subtitles. You’ll find that even if you use it, correcting it amounts to starting everything from scratch. My view is that for good subtitles, you need to understand what is going on in a scene and then to translate the scene rather than decontextualized, individual sentences in it, if that makes sense.
    MT makes the viewing experience sadly awful, although many viewers may feel it is better than nothing. But do we really need subtitlers to just add automatic translations? Is there any added value? I think some people will argue that it is speedy. There is that, sure.
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47

Sadly, that is the case. Bad subbers or machines… as long as they produce subtitles FAST, the majority of Viki’s source of income does prefer that above quality that they have to wait for.
Personally, I can get so irritated about bad subtitles that I tend to switch to other languages if I’m watching something, but I am not exactly the majority here…

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48

@mirjam_465
That’s because you are so wonderfully versatile in languages. You can simply :smiling_face:

In fact, I’ve now also noticed that the machines translate really badly when they are used. :rofl: even though I use the machine myself…

I also switch to English so that I can somehow translate it for myself… :relieved: somehow :sweat_smile:

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Hah! Have you ever watched K drama on other streaming sites? It irritates me so much on H***U, because if you choose subtitles, you received close captions with very inappropriate descriptions of sounds such as when men are laughing the caption is “giggling” and whenever footsteps are heard, even for a lady wearing spiked heels, it’s “heavy footsteps”. Have you ever heard paper “clattering”? Do the hearing challenged even know what “quirky music” is? Even worse, some dramas are only available dubbed. If you like the sound of Seo Ji Seob’s voice, too bad. The dubbing sounds like it is from a Gungfu movie from Hong Kong.

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LOL :rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl:

You just made my day with this funny comment!! It’s definitely what you wrote! And what about the websites that, when is playing a soft music, they put “high-pitched whistle” in the subtitle to indicate that there’s music background!!

KKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK = LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL!!!

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A recent report on MT and Generative AI translation identified the following translation mistakes:

Translation mistake typology

In this analysis, we identify the following types of translation errors:

  • Mistranslation
  • Literal translation — a near word-for-word translation that lacks necessary adaptation
  • Translated DNT(do-not-translate) — a part of text that should not have been translated (like an acronym or proper noun) was translated
  • False DNT —a part of text was mistakenly left untranslated
  • Mishandled DNT — DNT was handled inconsistently or incorrectly
  • Omission
  • Untranslated —the entire text or a significant portion was left in the original language
  • Hallucination — a GenAI-specific issue where the output has no relation to the original text
  • Punctuation
  • Grammar
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Most of these issues are logical limitations of MT, but I get a chuckle out of the fact that machines hallucinate too.

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