They’re already replacing us little by little on dramas.
Even with active members on active dramas.
Using the excuse we are not active or not enough fast to use their bots and make us edit it… how shameless.
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hi, I am just a subscriber, I enjoy the fruits of your labour when you translate the shows. But as a subscriber how can I take a stand with you. I understand your concerns but it seems that the new CEO has a different agenda and choose to ignore both its customers and its Volunteers.
This new Japanese CEO has no respect for its volunteers why don’t all the volunteers stop translating at the same time. I will keep an eye out for suggestions as to how I can help you.
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The thing is that they do not just use bots when there is no team or if the speed of subs is not on a level they want for unsubbed episodes but they even delete already done subs.
So let’s say you are working on a drama with a small team and need more time because of that and then they just delete EVERYTHING volunteers already did.
It is just a waste of time then. It’s the volunteers’ time.
I think everyone who already worked as editor or moderator or subtitler or CM here knows that the amount of time the volunteers spend is not that little. It’s okay to do something without being paid forit but it’s not doing something that may be deleted at any point.
At least for me that is no option. I do not want my time being wasted in that way and like others already wrote:
Today it’s French, tomorrow it’s Italian, then it’s Polish and next day German and so on…
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I feel really discouraged reading all the messages here and I am really disappointed in RViki for making this decision. Imagine they added the bot for English. Then how horrible would it be for all other OL subbers. But doing it for French would be okay? No. And French team has more volunteers than some other language teams. Everyone is contributing and doing his/her best to sub/segment, but now you could just be replaced one day if Viki decides you’re ‘too slow’? It’s terrible to know this could happen.
Communauté française: Vous avez reçu un message tel sans respect pour vos contributions. Je crois que c’est vraiment inacceptable 
Comme quelqu’un a dit: Aujuord’hui c’est le français, demain sera une autre langue. Qu’est-ce que je peux dire d’autre que je trouve c’est très ennuyer pour tout le monde et je veux vous aider avec que je peux faire.
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Viki Community Team, if we leave, there’s no more community.
Without community, what would happen to some of you? Everyone still keeping their job or soon bots too?
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I really don’t understand how they think this is a good idea… I don’t speak French very well so I can’t look at the current subs from the bot to see how good they are, but doesn’t everyone know that bot translation still has such a long way to go? Don’t they think people who watch stuff on Viki will have a lesser opinion of the site as a whole when they see terrible bot translations? It’s better to have no subtitles at all rather than bad ones, even aside from how disrespectful it is towards the many volunteers to suddenly use these bots.
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They were betting on moderators to fix the subs. Which was perhaps the reason they chose on-going projects. The moderators would feel more pushed to finish the editing all the way to the end.
I wondered why they didn’t chose an option of releasing the bot onto a new project. But which fool of a moderator would edit all of that crap for full 16-60 episodes? 
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This situation is not acceptable. We as a community cannot let this happen to any of our teams. French will be just the start. I suggest you to absolutely NOT EDIT any of the horrible subs they do with the bot, if they want to improve their bot let them pay subbers for that, but no using us to improve their stuff like lab mouses for free, when edit this horrible segments and subs takes way more time. I have supported viki for very long because of our community, the “we”, the way we work and that I have learned that we can work passionately for the same cause just for the love to it, but this is disrespectful. French is just the start.
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Guys, I know it won’t be consoling you too much, but there already are dramas with automated Spanish and Portuguese subtitles… I don’t remember exactly which ones, but I’m pretty sure I saw 2 or 3. I’ll look for them and mention them later, if I manage to find them…
On another hand, as a CM, I will block all languages at my channels, as sign of protest. Won’t be of much help, though, 'cause my biggest channel right now is a C-drama with license everywhere but China and Taiwan, and it took us over a year to sub it, because we had no subbers with access to it; the French subtitles were, however, added over night… (sorry, @kobolt …). I know for sure that Romanian is next, so we’re trying to create a little wave with other Romanian mods as well. Maybe, just MAYBE we can achieve something if we all stick together…
Fighting to all French volunteers! (you are not alone^^)
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We will NEVER edit subs done by their bot. I’m currently deleting the subs of Vikibot from one of my channel.
If they want to test their bot, then they can do it on channels on which no volunteer can sub, maybe they will see the reaction of fans then when they will complain because they understand nothing.
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Im with you!! French bot translators?? There’s nothing like the human brain! How could a robot give the meaning of the series across?? Bad Bad Bad!!!
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I haven’t been in the Viki subbing community for very long, but in just the one month that I’ve started subbing, I’ve quickly found the volunteers here to be some of the most passionate and driven people I’ve encountered. As someone who has experience in AI, machine learning, and natural language processing, I can easily say that machine/bot translations are NOWHERE close to being at the stage where they can accurately capture the nuances, subtleties, and the varying levels of emotional depth of the human language, regardless of what language is being translated.
In my opinion, this is a huge misstep on Viki’s part. One of the things that I wondered immediately is why they chose French as the language to do this with. From what I can tell, the French subbing community at Viki is one of the most active ones, so why start with French? If they must, why not a language that currently doesn’t have the benefit of many active subbers?
From the way this was rolled out so abruptly and from the way Viki emphasized that “subbers may correct translations that are not up to standard,” my guess is that there is something more going on behind the scenes. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a company (or Viki itself) who wanted to perfect their machine translation algorithms and decided to collaborate with Viki, with Viki benefiting in some way. By utilizing it on French at Viki, whoever is benefiting from the use of the algorithms not only gets immediate feedback from the corrections as essentially free information/data to feed and fix their bot through machine learning, but they also get the advantage of having a large number of real, live people doing the job. This is why I believe they started out with French. Such a task requires a large number of active and competent people fixing the translations, and Viki (or whoever) is taking advantage of that in some way, shape, or form.
I can’t say much about the future of translations at Viki, but I can say that I’m utterly disappointed with the way Viki implemented all of this. If they really had to, they could have started a test run with a new project with the agreement and approval of the CM and moderators, with full transparency and disclosure as to what they were hoping to use the translation tool on in the future.
All in all, I hope Viki reconsiders all of this and that they make some corrections on their part. Viki’s slogan is “Global TV powered by fans,” and it’s known for its crowd-sourced subtitles. Having real, passionate people providing subtitles is not just a way to get accurate translations, but a way to showcase the beauty of language, most of which is precisely rooted in those nuances. Fixing subtitles for a bot is not the same thing, regardless of what some people may think. In most cases, fixing something that is not your own work is often a lot more tiring than organically producing them.
For Viki to casually glance over all the work that subtitlers have contributed so quickly and insincerely is not a step in the right direction, and I can only hope this changes in the future. Until then, the French community has my full support and I hope we can convince Viki otherwise 
Oh, and apologies for the long post (couldn’t help myself haha). I’m mostly a silent reader, but for this I had to say something.
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I have been on Viki for eight years now, and I have NEVER been so appalled! They are using us like lab rats to correct their autobots for free, requiring more work for us and disregarding all the hard work, love, passion, and dedication we put into our subbing!
I am an English subber and only know a little about French, but enough to know it is a rich, nuanced, complicated, and beautiful language that a robot simply cannot translate accurately! You take away, not only the beauty of the French language, but the beauty in the translation of the rich cultural and humorous nuances of the original languages!
Viki was built on volunteer-based subs and known for their subtitle accuracy and attention to detail. That is why people pay here instead of going to illegal sites. That is why us volunteers take pride in our work. That is why we continue to volunteer, because of this lovely community of people across the world united by love for the same cultures and entertainment with the same heartfelt drive to share that with others who otherwise would not have such good access to it.
Viki, how can you take that all away? Please listen to the ones who helped you make it this far and made Viki into what it is today. And please respect ALL of us as volunteers, no matter which language.
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Contact VIKI directly through customer service… let them know your complaint. Let them know, that you stand with us.
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Here an exemple. I do not know this drama, but this is what i found by chance. There is no meaning, no fluidity. How can they dare to offer this to their french viewers. I hope they will reconsider their choice.
age of legends ep40, around 11min
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Exactly, back in the day, they used to ask us before they launched any major change that could affect us. I remember the old viki profiles and how when they wanted to change the way the platform looks, they asked us and made a beta to test it with us; and that was just for how the website will look like! This shows how they used to respect us and appreciate what we had to say about how things worked in here. But not anymore
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I am not a translator nor someone who watches with french subtitles, but I wanted to voice my support for the volunteers.
I think it’s pretty horrible that instead of actually making a move to pay/hire volunteers so you have an actual translation staff for each language - they just decide to cheap out and go with bots.
I understand that sometimes volunteers may not be able to donate a lot of time due to RL or/and finding enough people may be an issue depending on the time of the year. But to replace it with a service that is just going to irritate users (free and paid alike) and basically turning a nose up at people who have been graciously volunteering for months and even years is just a slap in the face to everyone.
In all honesty, it’s going to be counterproductive in the long run because you will just anger everyone. Volunteers will become less and the amount of people willing to do paid subscriptions will go down because who wants to deal with the extra aggravation of paying for a service with substandard translations and obvious lack of respect to it’s users.
Shame on you, Viki.
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The sentences means nothing this syntax, just aweful, I’m going to cry seeing that…
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I work on a couple of platforms where the segments can be automated… they are ALWAYS wrong. There is one where you cannot bulk delete, so the level of frustration when having to remove…ALL of them in order to re-segment and THEN caption. Indescribable.
This is just a horrid decision on VIKI’s part.
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My eyes bled when I saw that and I wanted to cry. Notre pauvre langue française, massacrée sur l’autel du gain, c’est bien triste tout ça… 
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