I’m also on the subtitler team of that cdrama 
. I’m on the English-Spanish subtitler team 
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Oh, that’s cool
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See, the Project Finder lists all projects which are not complete, even by one episode. But the team is usually finalized by the time the projects start. To circumvent the problem and avoid people applying in vain, Viki made a wonderful tool, which is the “Hide project” tool, in the Manage page. That is, once your team is complete, you click on that button and the project doesn’t appear in Channel Finder.
But it seems that many managers forget to do that because it’s relatively new (what, one year?).
The shows being behind Viki Pass is a problem. Once upon a time, when I first joined, there were many unlocked shows you could do your first subs on. I worked on many old American cartoons and old Hollywood movies. Now all of these have disappeared. As for Asian shows, you even see some from 2008 which are behind Viki Pass. Absurd! Then how is a newbie going to start? They want to oblige new contributors to buy a Viki Pass for the first 3-4 months until they get their 3000 subtitles and can unsubscribe. But I think one must feel very cheated, to be obliged to pay in order to work for free!
Those managers or Channel Managers who don’t read applications, or not reply, are just rude. When you are a Channel Manager and you take a new show, it’s true that you’re swamped with messages. I’m talking about 40, 50 new messages in a day. And if you’re a Moderator, there will also be a lot from subbers. It’s natural that you don’t have the time to reply to all of them immediately. But one should make it a point to eventually reply, even if it’s a few days or a week late.
Sometimes, though, even with the best intentions, one can fail to do so. For instance, you briefly glance through a message, you mean to reply to it, you get distracted by something urgent, and the message is not “bold” anymore, it looks as if “read”. So you may forget about it and think you have already replied. We are human after all.
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I guess in a way I cheated myself in. I hope that this tip may help some of the newbies in the smaller language communities. I dodged the Viki Pass issue irmar talked about and the 0 experience issue mirjam_465 told us in this manner:
I found an older Korean drama for which only the first couple of episodes were translated in my language and apparently was abandoned. It was also free to watch for anyone at the time. I liked the drama so I wanted to finish it and applied. My luck was that my language moderator, who was also the only translator for my language, became inactive. I couldn’t reach her by message so I went straight to the Channel Manager and asked her by message to add me to the team. Which was no problem bc there was already a moderator in my language. Even though the mod was inactive, the channel manager gave me a chance! (Just like mirjam_465 said: I can’t be added to a team when there is no mod bc of my 0 exp.) I translated the remaining 14 or so episodes. Because the drama wasn’t airing then, there was no pressure and I could take my time to get acquainted with the translation tool and slowly gather 3000 translations to became a QC.
I’m not sure if there is still no need for a Viki Pass for this particular drama. But it was the case then and so I bypassed the issue irmar talked about. That was 2 years ago.
Little disclaimer: I do think that being under supervision when you start out is the best way. A moderator in your language who can be like a mentor and tell you the common mistakes in working as a subtitler. Also an experienced editor is important. But I found out a lot myself so I corrected some of my former mistakes and I got better at it. Now I can use the Project Finder to apply to become a moderator myself and I can pick projects that I really like. But let me remind you, my language community is rather small (and ‘gezellig’) so this will probably not apply to the Spanish, Portugese etc. communities I suppose.
Hope this helps and good luck!
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