I just looked at the main page. we’re getting 1 K drama and then a bunch of makeup and cooking shows…is this it for the dramas we’re getting for the year?
I’d be very disappointed to find this to be true.
How can we find out if anything else is in the pipeline, does anyone know?
While I am sure there are followers for all these variety shows, I still believe the real strength of Viki as a whole is the drama, and I would hate to see them go in a direction that does not focus and shine in that department.
Crouching Dieter, Hidden Donut
There were several C dramas and at least one Kdrama I was hoping to see on the Coming Soon list…!
You have spoken my mind, I noticed that as well, it seems also lots of varietyshow although some might be funny aren’t subbed… wished for more good movies… the competition is catching up with dramas that were viki exclusives… plus their own viki doesn’t have… oh well…
What’s with these DIA channels… something like the youtube personal channels?? who will sub these??
K-dramas usually don’t show up on the coming soon page until a week or two before they start to air. At least as far as I’ve seen. And Viki usually gets a decent number of the on-air K-dramas. C-dramas though are super sporadic.
What I find more pointless is the fact that they’re featured here in the first place. I’m already subscribed to Cho’s Daily Cook and HoneyKki on YouTube. Why would I want to watch the same videos on Viki?
As for who will sub them, I think some of them are pretty good for novice subbers or subbers who aren’t 100% fluent in a language because they don’t use very complex grammatical structures. I personally wouldn’t mind subbing them while taking a study break. I find subbing very addictive, so if I can’t stop subbing a DIA video, it’s a lot less problematic than if I get addicted to subbing a drama
But at the end of the day, it was an unnecessary addition.
I agree, they are probably easier to translate also for newcomers but the amount of such shows are so increasing and I wonder if they can really keep up with it…
I don’t get it why Viki does get so many variety shows while their tools are too limited to have them segged and subbed properly. For this fact variety shows are not popular among most seggers/subbers (including myself) because it’s just a nightmare.
Viki knows their tools are too limited for this too.
That’s true. Variety shows tend to have on-screen writing that adds to the experience. Not translating it just doesn’t feel right.
As someone who also watches variety shows from time to time, I’d much rather watch them on YouTube where I know the on-screen text will be translated as well.
Is the onscreen writing that important? For instance in W special episode, they tried to translate the hard writing as well as the spoken commentary/interviews, but it mostly repeated the same things, or it was silly comments like “Oh, now they’re shy” “he’s really sweating” or useless things like that. If it’s that sort of thing, who cares? I don’t. I actually dislike it when a video has little graphics and animations on it, exclamation marks, little hearts, or drawing of ears, whiskers or I don’t know what around the person’s face. Korean and Japanese shows do it a lot. Are they all aimed at pre-teens or what?
It’s like they are trying to comment on the show on our behalf. I don’t find it interesting, useful or funny.
I only understand added text when it adds information: as in medical shows, it explains a medical term. Or in variety shows, when it has the lyrics to a song, the song title and author, the name of the singer and things like that. These are of course very useful, and actually could be awfully useful to the subtitler, because the lyrics of the song are already there and it’s not necessary to guess them by ear or to go search for them on the web.
For the W special there where parts where the on screen captions where the same as what they said but in a lot of cases the on screen caption is different but is related to what they said.
But the captions on screen is not the only issue… there are more:
To fast talking by multiple people or to many people talking at about the same time.
The character space of a segment is limited. Don’t know how many characters it can take exactly but it happened to me that when I was segging an After School Club episode with K.Will that even a normal English sentence didn’t fit in a segment because it was a few characters to long. Then you need to cut a perfectly fine sentence in 2 to make it work but the best thing would of course be that it just stays one sentence. And that’s just one person speaking. It gave me a headache when Eric, K.will and uhh Kevin I believe, talked at the same time. Like Eric asked K.will something, he was answering and both Eric and Kevin responded to that while K.Will wasn’t finished talking yet.
So the main issue is where to cut and what to subtitle and what to drop. Next to that even if the character space is unlimited per segment eventually you would still have the problem of who said what?!
Oh, yes, I can see what you mean. Overlapping dialogue, just as in real life. First of all it might be difficult to understand everything they’re saying. Then you would have to put the person’s name or initials before the sentence, and that would take even more space!
I have the same problem. I’m aware that Viki will have to get the licens first and me paying for the service with the pass is no guarantee that they can get new K drama licens. At the moment there are a lot of new Chinese dramas… most of which I do not watch because they often are not good productions quality vise. But I’m fine with that too as I’m aware that some people love Chinese dramas just as I do enjoy K-drama. The thing is however if Viki is not able to acquire new Korean shows soon I’m pretty sure not to extend my pass for a next round and if I could go to dramafever I probably would do so (what I can’t as they are not available here). Others feel probably similar. I mean even if they can not get new once …why not try to at least acquire oldér ones that are not available for certain regions. There are so many k-dramas that I can not watch due to not having the licens in my country… this would make it at least more interesting until they can acquire some licenses for up to date dramas :(…im just sad and need a new Dosis proper dramas …so please Viki hear this and excuse my grumpy ramblings.
