Hello volunteers!
I was re-watching some shows in my language today as a change (I usually only watch in English) and while some shows are indeed done and seem to be edited, I was surprised that other shows (that were subtitled before a year) are subtitled and not edited!
It was a disaster! many things were wrong, I wonder how people could actually watch this! I’m so mad.
Moderators and editors keep on taking shows without finishing off shows they have or without finishing the editing they have!!! Some of them should really stop taking projects and just focus on their unfinished shows!!!
Please! Please! Moderators and editors don’t take on more than 4 unfinished projects, you should at least finish them before going to other new ones, the work will never be done this way!!
The only problem is, people who can actually edit are relatively less as compared to people who can subtitle/moderate. So, actual editors sometimes take more than they can have on their plates, which, of course, backfires. Subtitles in my language aren’t any good either. I can, right now, pick enough shows that are completed but not edited, that aren’t complete but still aren’t edited.
And since, “moderating” seems to be a cooler thing than editing or subtitling, volunteers naturally take this job more and ignore their actual role.
For me, my experience includes volunteering + reading discussions on these issues. I can’t nitpick on people with lots of projects, because even I have lots of projects but I am managing them well and giving attention to each detail in a subtitle.
It’s not just other languages…there are even English shows which are quite noticeably unedited. (The grammar looks like it’s been transcripted from the source language or the punctuation isn’t complete)
Unfortunately, there just aren’t enough competent and responsible editors who are not already inundated with projects. I feel guilty rejecting requests to TE or sub shows, so sometimes, I offer translation or editing advice privately without actually joining the English team.
Couldn’t agree more. The people I’ve worked with also translate the sentence structure from English to Hindi. English is SVO while Hindi is SOV style language. My seniors translate subtitles in SVO structure which feels unnatural. Yes, Hindi is a language without any defined sentence structure and even OSV, OV, SVO works but SOV is mostly used.
As for punctuation, even I used to copy English punctuation like a year ago, after I was corrected, I make sure to never copy and abide by Hindi punctuation rules.
That’s a huge problem in subtitling considered each language has different punctuation rules, it’s a common mistake I see in subtitles, even in english ones
What else is new? LOL.
That can be extremely helpul as well!
I guess there are different reasons for it. Sometimes shows were abandoned, sometimes moderators were quite hesitant to edit something (maybe before people spread that subtitles shouldn’t be edited (too much)). The Viki Rules indeed state that “Editing subtitles that are correct and/or complete for the sole purpose of increasing contribution counts” isn’t permitted, but it’s not like better wording can be considered as ‘increasing contribution counts’.
When I started contributing the first offer I received was about editing. Back then I didn’t think much about it, nowadays, it appears to be rather unusual considering that people can’t be sure about your language skills or knowledge of the respective target language. Therefore, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this.
We usually edit our shows by ourselves and when I started working on a half-finished show before it felt like subtitling it from scratch again. It’s a lot of work.
Still, it feels like some may overestimate themselves at the same time. Maybe an English teacher here might be able to get the grammar right, but I’m not as positive that they’d provide us with the best possible experience since they may lack knowledge about alternative wording, idioms or cultural knowledge. There might be different examples, but I’m afraid that from time to time the result will be about average.
Furthermore, there’s not much I can do if a series e.g. has an active Moderator in said language that doesn’t want to change things. It’s not only hard to prove your claims, but there’s no system to deal with those accordingly either unless the result is completely wrong or a major offense. If there are communication issues in the team or in between the English team and OL subbers it’s rather difficult to deal with that.
About this I’m aware we have general rules that generalize how many projects are reasonable. However, there are many differences in regard to the team size, complexity of series (and of course the team’s quality) etc. I indeed find it worrying as well if you’re a single Moderator translating 8 series at once into a rare language for many reasons.
While doing my CM project I felt like being the English CE appears to be cooler than translating something into one’s native language. I don’t know.