Lately, I’ve been encountering some very “eager” Community Managers. In the last years I’ve indeed met a few short deadlines as a language moderator, but in fact “a week for this movie” or “5 days for 2 episodes” are still fine and manageable if the team size is all right.
I can understand that CMs don’t want OL moderators to abandon a project or take ages to proceed with anything. But this isn’t what I want to talk about. At the same time, I’m aware that some language communities are rather large or have at least very fast teams that can manage to do episodes within one day or two days.
I can understand as well that in case of dramas highly in demand, a CM might want a faster translation if it’s starring great actors that are quite interesting for the Viki audience.
But… nowadays, it’s common to pressure people a lot in any sort of drama that’s neither starring Ji Chang Wook nor has a BL tag. No matter, if it’s some small, old Chinese drama or some third rate KDrama. Maybe they misunderstand Viki’s messages that ask for a fast OL release, or they think that their Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, whatever community has the same size as the Hindi community. I can assure you that’s not the case.
My own language community has always been working with deadlines around 3 to 7 days. 3 days are rare. We won’t find a team if we tell everyone to translate some, e.g., law drama within 3 days. Especially not if the moderator is rather new. There are enough projects, often no fixed teams etc. They can choose where to participate and people only jump you if you do BL or a highly anticipated Korean drama. Yeah, no long line for Japanese actor No. 78798. And not for Chinese actor No. 78956 either, unless it’s Yang Yang or Sean Xiao.
Will you lose anything if teams work on your average drama at a normal pace? Otherwise, nobody might have even applied for moderator. There’s a list of over 100 projects that weren’t translated into German yet. I don’t think it’s wrong to have reasonable expectations, and you can voice them from the start, but I can’t just take 30 contributors from nowhere that will do 50 episodes within 2 months. It might take 3-4 months instead. Is that unreasonable? Viki may demand a speedy release to other languages (not the translation), or they might even want fast work in case of highly anticipated languages such as Portuguese or Spanish.
Therefore, I’d wish we’d take some time to understand the language communities better first - even if Viki apparently doesn’t either. It took us a while to encourage some people to moderate. Now, they are treated like that (and some texts are quite unfriendly) and might refrain from moderating in the future, even though they delivered at least 2 episodes per week. Please reconsider.
24 hours for an episode is considered way too much for many Romanian users. I am not talking about those with bad quality subtitles, but about the ones who create quality translations on Viki. We are not translating only one project so we can concentrate all our energy for one or two projects. I think there will be many dramas not translated because we won’t have enough time. For those chinese historical dramas we translate by episode. Maybe the Cm will ask us to translate it in 24 hours
Nobody even initially applied to this one for weeks. They only accepted it later on. Maybe nobody would have been interested then.
Same with some long project. All the latest projects of this size were either abandoned or aren’t fully translated into German until now because they had no team, weren’t active etc. Now, it was supposed to be done very fast (but I was able to find another solution). But in case they would’ve insisted on it, I could’ve easily said, “Good luck, then.”
German and Romanian are medium-sized communities. Maybe we battle and send 12 applications for some BL, but certainly not for very long stuff with some “okay” cast. Not that I mind doing less popular projects, they can be very appealing, and we do have a bunch of history lovers too (for example), but the less popular it is, the smaller the team will be.
I did hear that Viki demanded “European subtitles within 24 hours” in some cases lately. But that’s plain impossible. Even other streaming websites avoided this previously.
How much are you getting paid? To have this kind of pressure, for sure the paycheck has to have a lot of zeros.
We are volunteers, we have jobs, they need to have a little understanding about this.
Viki, with absolutely no reasonable explanation and bent on reality, starts imposing exaggerated deadlines that deviate from what volunteering on Viki entailed. You have the unpleasant habit of treating all communities the same. If Portuguese or Spanish users, for example, are always shouting that they want subtitles in a shorter time, it doesn’t mean that users from other countries want the same. If I’m not right, then post statistics to back up this new direction.
Personally, I think it’s already getting to a point where we’re being treated like employees, except we’re not some paid ones.
I understand the desire and the reason for wanting faster roll out to OL, but please don’t mix things up.
CMs who considered themselves bosses have always existed. But this time they either got it wrong or took the opportunity to impose their so-called CM authority (which by the way, doesn’t exist… without the English team doing almost everything, the CM would be pointless on a channel).
Dear CMs, please bear in mind that:
just like everyone else here, you are volunteers - you don’t work in the Rakuten company, you don’t get paid for what you do, so I see no reason to become exaggerated and unfounded with your demands;
many of us are active in our spare time, so we have a job/family/life outside Viki - we chose this activity precisely because it is a volunteer one and the absence of pressure was a reason to relax and do a good job;
you don’t know the size of all the communities and the number of active volunteers who translate to a good quality, so you can’t decide how they work - my community has currently over 30 projects without Romanian moderators and the list is only growing since the introduction of the limit, which never happened before the limit… conclusion? in my community there have never been so many active moderators for Viki to impose the limit on us… what can be understood from this? Viki has not analyzed the situation at the level of each community, which they seem to repeat with this request to translate within 24 hours;
don’t be part of destroying the spirit of volunteerism that has made us all offer so many subtitles.
I’m all for subtitling in a reasonable time, as it has been so far and as I have demanded for every project where I have been CM, but this new situation is already another topic. Here we are talking about a request that logically, at least in my logic, should be remunerated.
If Viki doesn’t want us here anymore, they should tell us directly and not resort to such trickery to get us to quit. Effectively at this point we end up in a situation where basically the volunteers, namely these CMs who are very unreasonable, are destroying what has been created and developed over the years through the volunteer activity.
P.S: I have nothing against the two communities mentioned; I wish I had such a large community capable of providing subtitles very quickly, but to me it is clear that Viki is making again and again the same mistake of putting everyone under the same decisions, when we all bring so many pertinent arguments that what they are doing is not right and founded.
Well, probably they’ll say that there’s a higher demand for fast subs. But let’s be serious, these two communities are incredibly fast. I really don’t get why they should have presubs, destroying the subtitling desire… Yes, they still have the possibility to edit them, but for sure it doesn’t give the same vibe and pleasure like doing subs from scratch.
Netflix has a healthy “incubation period” of 2 weeks for non-English European languages. We may assume that their English-to-German or English-toCroatian translators might actually have access to the material in advance of the first airing with English subs, so as to give a good time buffer for their translators (and anything that might go wrong in the meantime).
I am mostly a Solo-Mod. That means that it takes me on average 5-6 hours per 1-hour episode to translate and edit.
To commit to a 16-episode K-drama and sub regularly, I have to work on that one drama alone 10-12 hours for 8 consecutive weeks. I can do that once in a while. I can’t do that on every drama.
I hate to work on one series and one series alone. I have to mix several projects at once.
There is something that happens at episode 7-9 where almost every drama becomes tedious to translate and you have to push yourself to move forward. Find the motivation within. This I call a hero step.
If an on-air series is bad, and I mean roll-your-eyes-bad, it will take me twice as long to translate it because I can’t concentrate to translate effectively. It’s a natural self-defence mechanism.
and most important point here - we are all volunteers here. We should be grateful we have each other as a community; not exercise power-tripping.
If you, as a CM, take me on, I can guarantee my subs will be of high quality and good formatting.
I cannot guarantee you any deadlines as to when I will finish.
The moment somebody insist on deadlines in hours, instead of weeks and months, you’re not going to get me as your Croatian Moderator. As simple as that.
I guess it’s similar to the argument for pre-subs in English: at least there is something from the get-go. Because no matter how fast those teams might be, they still have to wait for the English team to release eps, right? Therefore, impatient viewers have subs to read in the meantime, even if their quality might be questionable, just as is the case with some English pre-subs.
You frequently refer to “controlling groups” and speak with such conviction as if you had inside knowledge of what is occurring at VIKI, but all you ever do is repeat the same thing without providing any actual information. Perhaps you ought to drop names or provide some pertinent information. I get the impression that you are highly obsessed with the idea of controlling groups.
This is a first I hear something like this… Is this officially posted in some Viki rules or is this mentioned by Viki staff to CM’s or Moderators respectively, I’m somewhat puzzled?
I don’t think xylune meant this post to get out of control, please be respectful and stop attacking like you have a personal grudge. I’m very unhappy to see this happening on discussions again and I believe you have been flagged in past.
Furthermore, I kindly ask you not to cause my topic to be closed just because of another topic being discussed…
Considering the messages Viki sends to people, I would say that Viki staff encourages this sort of behavior and e.g., translations within 24 hours as well as someone mentioned before.
In one case mentioned, I know why people were rushed, but it’s rather a misunderstanding based on previous belated license removals of some movies. So people were thinking that the same might happen again and asked to rush the translation and releases.
But mostly I want to empathize that language communities are different and same goes for teams. I do know that Spanish teams often split 6 parts into 12 parts and give some time limits to translate them. But that’s it, I don’t know how most language communities work in detail, and that’s something that will be the case for most of us. And that’s why we shouldn’t think that every community is the same. Same for Viki. Even other streaming services take forever in some cases to provide, e.g. the German translation. So it makes no sense to expect that medium-sized or even small teams will necessarily translate stuff within 24 hours.
However, this isn’t a thread about recruitment. It’s not a thread about “controlling groups” either, therefore I won’t elaborate here why I do not support this theory.
Viki may demand a speedy release to other languages (not the translation), or they might even want fast work in case of highly anticipated languages such as Portuguese or Spanish.
