A little off-topic, but since you raised the question:
good or bad segments are easy for anybody to evaluate. It’s not the case with subtitles. I had this discussion only yesterday with one of my sunbaes here.
I was shocked to discover a moderator/subtitler who has done lots of projects and many thousands of subtitles, yet her language skills are not of native level, and makes not only spelling mistakes, not only word by word translation from the English, but also the kind of mistakes not even a middle-schooler would do (like singular subject with plural verb, this sort of thing). That’s why I’m saying she might be a foreign learner of the language of a not advanced level.
The worst thing is that some of her projects are very high-profile top top on air dramas, where she is the main subtitler, and she has no editor to clean up after her either.
So my question was, how can a poor CM know this? They see on this person’s profile all these contributions, and they say “oh, she must be good” etc.
And suppose one of us writes to the CM and tells her “this person as a translator is a joke” (I didn’t do this, I’m just speaking hypothetically). Who can the CM believe? Maybe it’s a lie, maybe the person reporting is just jealous. And if there are enough people who write and complain, maybe these people have some enmity because of a previous falling out and are just bullying an innocent good worker. There is no way the CM can know all these languages and make a decision.
By the way: this particular case has had a more or less satisfactory development and is temporarily solved. But I’m mentioning it as an example, because it got me thinking.
ugh I also have problems with late segments T_T I do well in the other areas, but I always get too many lates. I am in level 3 in NSSA right now, hopefully I get better by the end of the program ^.^
Well, the only way is to always check the end of the previous one, in case there is some start of a consonant or syllable from the next. The problem is when your segment starts after a pause. It’s bothersome to create a fake segment just to listen to this, and then delete it.
Try XXL segging. Also I just noticed I got better at visually identifying where the green bar should be after the seg is created.
Of course this is after more practice.
After creating the XXL segment, find the first hint of voice. I pause at that point. I look at where on the waveform that is. Then I play again and try to stop it right before that point. Remember NSSA guidelines say green must fully pass the yellow bar.
The waveform helps me remember the “place.”
@irmar I think that is an excellent way of checking as you go. ^^
I use XXL segging a lot ^.^ I really like this method. The weird thing is there are times when I get many segments right, but on the next assignment wrong again D: I’m waiting for my sensei’s reply, hopefully I did better.
A big problem I have is that if I close the page and maybe even the browser and then come back to it, there are things which weren’t there. Something that was on time now is not.
@sophie2you Everyone seems to love the XXL method but I’m terrible at it >.< I’m better at continuous segmenting (the shift+space bar method) but I still have a long way to go haha.
I liked the continuous segmenting more initially, but then… I got annoyed that I had to check and recheck every single segment, so I asked my senseis for help. They recommended the XXL segmenting method. It wasn’t what I wanted at first since I wanted to be exact even if it was slower, but I quickly got used to it… as I do with all things.
No, of course not. Channel Managers cannot know, since they don’t speak all the languages. They don’t know which Moderators are doing a good job, and which translators do a good job. It’s a huge problem. There are Moderators who also subtitle and they are the worst. I’ve seen many instances of this.
Yes, a moderator can see, but only if the moderator him/herself is “super” as you put it. There are not that many “super” moderators, and I’ve seen some who correct perfectly good subtitles to put their own mistaken version.
I was really lucky because the moment I set foot here I met two very special ladies, Mahoula (who is well known to you) and Simona (simonadeluca_54), who helped me get started in the best of ways.
My style of being a moderator as it has developed in the months that followed is vastly different than theirs: I am much more intrusive, one might say, much more nitpicky and I bother my translators more, while they rather tend to let things slide - maybe because they have a zillion projects. But as far as courtesy, sharing and helpfulness goes, they were and are my role models.
Viewers who care comment in the comments section or directly pm the chief/editors to say XYZ should be this. I’ve seen it in TC, too. Save for maybe one editor? Everyone seems to correct these things right away. I was watching pageturner and saw like 10 errors? I pm’d chief with explanations and asked if I or she or someone on team can fix. I wonder if a mass pm to non-English moderators already went out.
Like you said it may be because there are not as many people who are as picky or as skilled as you are in Italian and Greek that the feedback is hard to receive. I was fortunate to have one current project with someone and several projects in the past where there were at least one member with better Korean skills than me. Whenever I wasn’t sure I’d ask and then fill in or they would fill in for me. <= where learning happens for me (aside from normal fishing for words in the dictionary). So maybe need more people or have some kind of encouraging atmosphere to correct when needed.
Also the general nature of most? Kor-Eng subtitlers I ran into…tend not to be attached to their subtitles. We have a mutual understanding of please make this better if you can! kind of thing. Some review corrections done by chief. I think most don’t? I usually don’t as my English is fixed and not much else…
For Korean shows people comment in the comments (viewers) or TC (ex-teammates) if things are wrong. In Chinese I also saw people commenting and suggesting better translations or providing context in my love of all time, Nirvana in Fire. I’m not sure if those people already contribute. So the English team though not perfect we do get a substantial amount of feedback even from non-Korean viewers like you!!
