ENGLISH EDITORS thread

You mean an All Language Moderator. :slight_smile:

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Oops! Thanks for correcting me :sweat_smile:

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Yeah, I learned that slowly. But Iā€™m begging you, do NOT take on a 50+ episode drama youā€™re not interested in. A lot of those projects take forever and if you arenā€™t even interested, itā€™ll be really exhausting. Take shorter projects(max 30 episodes) if you donā€™t really like the plot. Korean dramas are nearly impossible to get into when youā€™re still a newbie, so you could try your luck with Chinese or other-region shows.

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By the way, not all shows make use of a GE. Especially in movies, this part is often done by the CE.
On the other hand, some shows have more than one GE so that you can divide the workload.

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Two of them do, and the other one is not looking for a GE.

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Oops, yes. I just found out.
Columbia/Legacy
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
LP Title: A Childā€™s Christmas
Released on: 1968-07-15
Associated Performer: Gene Autry with The Pinafores
Composer, Lyricist: Johnny Marks
ā„— Originally released 1949 Columbia Records

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I really didnā€™t realise before that it was so competitive! I kept seeing mistakes in subtitles, and thought they must need more people to help. And obviously, itā€™s all hard work, and there are many good subtitlers, editors, etc.; butā€¦ if there are so many people filling the positions and waiting to - and it all being set out in this comprehensive structure for each show, with multiple checkpoints from different eyes - it makes me wonder why so many mistakes and awkward expressions still exist. Of course, if I keep going on the path of trying to get in and do get into a show, Iā€™ll probably make or miss such things, too :smile:. Translation is a tricky process. But this is the reason for having all the layers, isnā€™t it?

I guess partly my point is that if there are so many of us wanting to help as editors, with all the needed skills, and there is this obvious need on so many showsā€¦ can we not just be used? Even, if only, to touch things up from shows that have finished their editing, but somehow stuff was missed. It feels like such a roundabout process to find the right person who has the power to let you in and will do it, and figure out which shows have managers or moderators who will do this. Part of the problem is that those of us who donā€™t know another language sufficiently to do subtitles (translation) canā€™t get our experience in that way, and editors seem to be wanted who have lots of experience. So it seems like the only people who become editors are those who can translate, and ā€˜move up the ranksā€™ that way :thinking:.

Ahh, new person rant :sunglasses:.

Are there Chinese shows that have less than 40+ episodes? :joy:

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Time pressure might be part of the reason.

Thatā€™s actually not true. We have some monolingual editors as well.
What you could do is let an experienced CE train you.

Yes, lots of them, especially the more modern shows.

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I know it can be frustrating for newbies, but these roundabout methods developed precisely because there were irresponsible volunteers who did their jobs for the sake of quantity, not quality. There is and has been enough misuse of power all across the website.

One more thing:
The mistakes youā€™ve been seeing in subtitlesā€” what dramas are those? Are they On-Air? There is a possibility that they havenā€™t been touched by the editors yet. The episode shows 100% subtitle completion when all the segments have been filled, not when all corrections have been made.

There are also some long, boring dramas with low viewership and low ratings, which makes the project progress at a snailā€™s pace. Since source language translators are in high demand, they may work on multiple projects at the same time. Thus, the priority shifts to newer, more popular dramas, while the older ones drag on. Then the Domino Effect kicks in - if one volunteer delays, the entire chain of volunteers after him/her(including all the other language teams) gets delayed. Because these volunteers get delayed so much, they look for other projects. The popular projects usually have a deadline - one or two episodes are released per week. So the low-rated, not-very-popular dramas take the back seat. You could have a hundred editors on the show, but none of them can work if the TE or subtitler hasnā€™t worked on the episode.

Thereā€™s a 47-episode drama Iā€™m working on that is terribly boring. All the comments say it ends very badly(I refuse to watch it myself because I know I wonā€™t be able to stand working on the drama if I already know whatā€™s going to happen). The ratings and plotlines are a mess. It finished airing in June 2021, but we reached the halfway mark only about a month ago. So anyone who watches past that mark will be watching either corrected pre-subs or untouched pre-subs.

The CM/Mods usually update everyone about the subtitling progress in the Channel page - the page under the Subtitle Team.

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Good news!

Thereā€™s a C-Drama that will be recruiting its team.

You can contact the CM, she is also works as an English editor.

Hurry up, the seats will be filled soon :wink:

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Iā€™ll tell you my personal opinion about this.

Reason 1.
Editors are not always good. They think they are, but they are not.
Why?
Their educational background, their speech habits, their age. How attentive they were at school, how good their school was, how do their peers speak, how educated was their family, how much they have read in their lives, how much they use internet chatrooms and fora, how deep their understanding of the culture of the original language ā€¦ all play a role. Sometimes theyā€™re just lazy.
Way to fix this:
Thereā€™s none. Since they donā€™t know thereā€™s a problem, they wonā€™t do anything to fix it. If you tell them, you are the bad one and they resent you. They may leave the team with ruffled feathers.

Reason 2.
They sometimes let things slip.
Why?
Even the best editor is only human. Because they were tired, it was late at night. Because they wanted to finish quickly and then start dinner for the family. Because thereā€™s no time or willingness (for an unpaid job) to go through episode three times. Because they are foreigners.
I consider myself a good editor with a good knowledge of English if I may say so myself, sensitive to things that donā€™t make sense or sound weird. Yet, at the end of the day, Iā€™m not a native English speaker and there are some nuances (prepositions or a turn of phrase) that Korean subbers use and I donā€™t think of correcting.
How I compensate for that?
I create myself a safety net. A native English person either before me or after me. When Iā€™m General Editor, I usually work with a native CE so the responsibility is hers, no problems. When Iā€™m CE, I make sure the GE is native. And, for good measure, I often ask a Viki volunteer who is a professional editor in real life, to do post-release editing - that is, check again to catch anything I might have omitted. I go through each and every one of his corrections (after all, as CE, I have the ultimate responsibility): some of them I might not agree with, if they change a nuance of meaning. But I study them carefully and try to think of how I can make it so that he doesnā€™t have to correct that again in the future episodes. Yes, these instances are few. But if I can avoid them, why not?

Reason 3.
Brain auto-correct. There is this phenomenon that our brain tends to auto-correct small spelling mistakes and thinks itā€™s reading the right thing. There are scientific experiments for that. You understand what you read, even with the misplaced or missing letter, and your brain automatically sees it as complete and correct. Quoting from a website:

Here is a brief sentence that has intentional misspellings. Can you read it?
Tihs is a smaple snetecne to tset yuor brianā€™s abiltiy to corrcet mitskaes!
We bet you could read it, couldnā€™t you? See? Your brain helped you to read the sentence ā€” despite the misspellings!
So how does your brain do this? And how does it do it so easily? You didnā€™t even have to think about the misspellings and figure them out, did you? Your brain just did it automatically.
Scientists believe that the brainā€™s ability to make sense out of misspelled words ā€” and to do so automatically and so quickly ā€” stems from the fact that most proficient readers donā€™t read words one letter at a time. Instead, most readers recognize entire words at once by seeing the first and last letters of the word and combining that information with other important information, such as the length, shape and content of the word.
So, as long as the first and last letters are correct and the other letters that make up the word are there ā€” and the mixed up letters are not many or not far apart ā€” our brains can make sense of them quickly. This allows us to read quickly and efficiently without getting slowed down or tripped up by misspellings.
Read more here

Now, this otherwise very useful function is not good at all for us editors! We have to willingly set it aside to find each and every spelling mistake. But some will undoubtedly slip. And sometimes they slip for two people!

How do I fix that?
I usually tell Other Language moderators that, if they see any spelling, punctuation or formatting mistakes, to please let me know in Team Discussions. And they do! There are some of them who are very helpful in that, and send me a list for each episode they finish editing. Thus thereā€™s a whole bunch of other people as an extra safety net.

Of course I donā€™t know about other editors. What I told you is what I personally do.

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Oh - I was looking at this one today - thanks!

Some on air, some not. Some 5 or 7 years old. I donā€™t watch the boring ones :wink:. I have high standards :smile:. Usually I watch ones that are rated over 9 (average).

Ah, this is good to know. Thanks! The rest of what you say makes sense.

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Iā€™m a victim of that sometimes, especially if Iā€™m editing late in the night or after a tough day. I think the sentence is right, but something is still nagging me. So Iā€™ll pass that segment and return after a while. I always spot the mistake after that.

Also, my native language is Greek, and the structure of sentences a lot of time is different from English. So by mistake, a couple of times I edited the subtitle keeping in mind the Greek syntax rather than the English one. Thankfully, Iā€™ve managed to control it.
Thatā€™s one of the problems bilingual or multilingual English editors have to face.

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Still, those have to be finished one day and I see why some CEs rather proceed without, e.g., their TE if they finish one episode every 2 weeks. On the other hand, I can see that projects without a TE tend to have more mistakes (therefore, Iā€™d rather remove the GE if anything - but the majority of GEs are rather fast).

Generally speaking, Iā€™m curious how many issues there are given the fact that many GEs or CEs arenā€™t native speakers. However, the projects where Iā€™m actually aware of the ā€œweirdā€ English or mistakes are usually old projects. E.g., Iā€™m currently translating a project from 2012 where itā€™s very obvious that terms, sentences etc. make no sense in that context and there are tons of punctuation issues as well. However, I didnā€™t encounter such issues in recent projects, aside from some minor mistakes.

As CM you often donā€™t get as many applications for Editor positions (at least not for smaller projects). So, I donā€™t think that the chance is too bad if you can convince someone and react once the project is recruiting its team.

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Doesnā€™t the Chief Editor recruit the English team, including the editors? Just as the Other Language mods recruit their team?

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Iā€™ve seen different ways. There were series where the CE was the last one to join. However, I rather ask my CE as well, but I donā€™t think thatā€™s always the case.

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As a CE, I would hate it if the CM imposed a GE to work for me, as those two have to work very closely and share similar styles. But yes, of course, I know that sometimes itā€™s done that way.

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Yes, the GEs are pretty fast. For the project I was talking about, the GEs are given a three-day deadline, after which the CE takes over.

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It sounds like you are very conscientious. I agree with all your statements here, again :grin:. I also pick up nuances and I think this is what frustrates me when reading subtitles. Most of the time, theyā€™re great; often, theyā€™re almost perfect, but not quite. Sometimes, theyā€™re kind of awful.

Itā€™s good that you create this ā€˜safety netā€™, being aware of your own limitations. I think you have a very good system.

One of the reasons this convoluted process to get into editing subtitles here is so frustrating is that I am a native English speaker, I do speak/write well and have a very good handle on my language, I do have very good education, I havenā€™t grown up with text-speak, and I love that language and want it to be used fully and skillfully, for all that it offers. Sigh. This is life :sunglasses:.

I really appreciate your insights. Thanks

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On the page/article in the Viki Contributor Community that explains about the different positions and how to get them, it says to contact the Channel Manager about General Editor positions. It seems to all work quite differently from what these articles explain! Iā€™ve been getting a lot of different and more correct information - about how it actually happens - here. In the future, Iā€™ll try contacting the editors - although the teams tab doesnā€™t always show Chief Editor positions, just Moderators for the different languages, and Editors for the different languages. Itā€™s hard to know, from that information, who to contact. I guess the Moderators?

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