OMG I do that only if I have another members in the team, I thought it is the way to make things more clear about roles of the members! so correct me if I am wrong, The language mod is the top editor, subber, so he can sub and edit after subbers, and edit after editors. the editor can sub and edit other subbers work, and the subber only can sub and edit what they done and can not edit what editors and mods do! and no need to the mod to assign his self as editor or to assign the role of a subber for an editor.
not all of this roles and counters are clear to everyone, as most of us just jump in, so if the CM / mod didn’t point it out to the specific member who have done it wrong, he will carry it on to other projects until it become the norm.
“As Channel Managers of teams, you have to assign yourself in positions on the team that you want to participate in. Example: As a CM, I have to add myself as a Greek Moderator & Greek Subtitler if I plan to hold these positions and participate in these roles.”
They explicitaly stated that here:
So I guess you have to assign yourself mod + editor + subber, if you want to moderate a team, edit subtitles and write new subs
Why? If I am moderator it does not follow automatically that I am an editor, so I usually add myself as an editor as well (not subber though, this is really unnecessary, although I sometimes have to chip in and sub as well, if a subber cannot show up).
So that, when people go to the Team tab and click on editors, they know who is for each language, they know whom to complain about and whom to write to if they see a mistake. Otherwise my language would show as having no editor. Yes, yes, there’s the cover page, but how many people really scroll down to read that - or know of its existence, except for us volunteers?
It’s not a given that the moderator is always the editor as well. In my case it’s always like that. Although I sometimes put a second editor among my best subbers, to have a look at the finished subs to catch things I might have missed.
In the Italian community it’s very frequent there are two editors (editor A who does the basic things and editor B who passes after her for a final look) who are not the moderator. It used to happen much more in the past, where powerful people hoarded moderating jobs even when they had zero time to edit. Now of course, with the beneficial 5-project limit, this is not as prevalent. Nowadays, usually the moderator is one of the two editors. (Whether they do edit or not, or they do it after 8 months or one year, is another pair of sleeves, which has no place on this thread).
In English teams it’s the opposite. I am often General Editor but I also have to be added as moderator (English moderator or All languages moderator in order to be able to change/delete segments if needed) because the Editor role is limited in its “powers”.
As a last note, I believe that in reality the editor is not a “lesser” role than the moderator. Apart from choosing the team (in English teams the editor usually does that as well) and announcing when episodes are released, the moderator doesn’t do that much. As for the Team Notes and/or worksheet and subbing guidelines - it depends on the cases, As I said I always have both roles, so I’m not sure of who does it when they are two different people.
In English teams I do know I’m always the one to do this thankless job of spending half a day to make something that almost nobody except for us editors will ever consult (English subbers are notorious for never reading Team Notes, and paid subbers follow this tradition to a T). The Chief Editor then looks at it and makes any needed changes and that’s it. In English teams, whenever you see someone listed as moderator, you never know whether s/he’s an editor, a page designer or something else.
Incorrect. It vastly varies within communities and within projects.
So you’re saying that the Brazilian volunteer community is not one of the large ones? Whenever I have a project as CM, I am FLOODED by requests for Brazilian Portuguese. Like 10 Brazilians and 10 Spanish for 1 or 2 of each other language. And whenever I go to the Manage section and look at the teams, they always have many more subbers (not as many as the Spanish, but still much more than other languages).
Yes, they also have the most sub-whiners, so I do understand the pressure.
The two are totally unrelated. I of course agree that pre-subs are a curse and make our lives difficult. And if you tell me that the paid subbers are worse than your usual teams, I have to believe your word for it. In English, for instance, it’s not necessarily true, there are some paid subbers who are better, some who are worse, and some who are more or less same. Great variety there. For instance now, in “Love Affairs in the Afternoon”, I can do a full pass of editing pretty quickly, because the paid subber was good. But I get pissed anyway because s/he didn’t bother reading Team Notes and I have to change those things that she disregarded, every single time. All in all, though, I don’t see that awkward, incomprehensible English that some Korean subbers produce.
But it’s not subbers who get those messages and have to reply to them, no? So it doesn’t take up their time. Yours, as a moderator/editor, yes.
Viki did this anyway, so your method, our methods, didn’t help. They took this decision regardless of our efforts to be as quick as we could.
You do know how difficult it is to determine this for each single volunteer, right? On their profile page there’s a list of projects, but it doesn’t say which ones are finished in your language and which are not. You have to go to every single drama and check the episodes for the given language. It takes AGES to do that and here it is appropriate to say what you said, “we also have other stuff to do in our life”!
How nice, how helpful it would be if this kind of info was immediately visible on profile pages?
Yes. I don’t really mind the adding if they are doing all the work (since it will show on their profile). Ngl I have done it too when I end up doing the editing, because it is something that takes quite a lot of time and I want to take credit for my contributions.
The problem is that sometimes they are just adding themselves in different roles and don’t finish the ‘‘job’’ they are supposed to do. For example they are mods and they add themselves as editors, but after fully subbing the series/movie (and free a slot) they don’t actually do the editing or they do it ages later. And because of that, other people that may be available to do the job quicker with the same quality end up looking elsewhere.
You are right, but unfortunately when you are both the editor and the mod you can just finish subbing something and leave it unedited and then just take other projects every time you free a slot.
That is true. The mod has the greatest responsibility when it comes to a project. My problem is that sometimes the mod is also doing the editor’s ‘‘job’’.
So even if they are restricted by the 5 projects rule that is just for the subbing. There is no way to check the number of projects they have as an editor and they haven’t finished. If someone has 5 mod projects and every time they finish 2 of them they take new ones and leave their previous work without editing, the platform ends up with tens of unedited projects that sometimes have way too many mistakes that it is difficult to enjoy the series/movie.
I know this may be just my problem, but because of translating here, every time I see a mistake in translation especially when it comes to spelling or grammar, I can easily spot it and it bothers me too much. We all make some mistakes here and there and it is natural, but when something is not edited then the mistakes can be too many.
That’s true and I get it. There are definitely some unfortunate cases when it comes to projects for one way or another and after all this is why (fortunately) we can translate in more than one project.
Yes, exactly! That is the ‘‘problem’’ from my pov. Unfortunately, like you said, there is nothing that can be done. Only some checks from mods and cms.
But also like irmar said it would be nice to also have a restriction for subbers.
These were the good ol days. Now we get lucky if we get 10 active ones. In a team with 25 people, about 6 come in to sub in most of the releases, the others come once in blue moon and I don’t think it’s their fault. They help as they can, but the home office is over, and now we have many old volunteers that left the community for many different reasons. What we have now is few people that actually come up to help. And I don’t know how long since your last CM, but there’s actually new dramas with zero requests from portuguese mods.
I don’t know about the others, but I add myself as editor so people see there’s an editor for the language. I received a lot of request to edit the translation. And sometimes I add myself as subber when I have other person as co-mod. We do this so when we send the GO message we only add “subbers” and everyone gets the message. If I send the message with “mod” even if I add only my language it ends up being sent to the english team because they are added as all languages mod. And also because, when the team is really slow, I go in and sub myself too. I don’t particularly like doing this because editing my own work can make me blind to some mistakes.
Yes, I do. Because I do this with every request. I check the drama and if the drama is still airing, the quality of the subs and how much experience the person has. I take everything in consideration, even the profile picture, the viki username and the “about me” part of the profile. This used to take a lot of my time. But since I get way less requests now, I do this about 2 times or less a week. I’m almost begging to people to help nowadays. This is how critical the things are. I used to reject people all the time because I had a full team of 40 people and now I get lucky if 15 agree to help. #cryindramalanguage
I think you’ve misinterpreted this statement. Or, I should probably say that the statement allows itself to be misinterpreted without any context. The aim of the above statement is to limit Moderator positions to only 5 and not allow cheating. If, as a CM, I also work as a Croatian Mod, but don’t assign that role to myself, then that is cheating on the 5 project rule for Mods.
The point about subbers who should not be editing is also true - those added as subbers should never be added as also editors (and vice versa!).
So, to simplify things for anyone who is struggling with the role management on Viki…
Viki’s roles are hierarchical:
Mod - write subs, edit, recruit into a team
Editor - write subs, edit
Subber - write subs
Now, as for the second part of this statement, I think it’s extremely embarrassing for Viki to write such a thing because it’s simply not true and needs to be corrected asap:
Oh, I beg to differ. As a Moderator, you are automatically the Chief Editor of your language. You can have other Editors, of course. But I hold you responsible for the quality of Italian subs on your project.
Before anybody gets upset, the term “lesser role” refers to a role which is more limited in its permissions (permission to read, write, modify, print, lock, overwrite, insert, run a program etc.).
As I said, I always edit the projects I moderate, so for me personally this is not an issue. But in the Italian community there are many (used to be much more, before the 5-project rule) people who are moderators and their responsibility is to find good editors, but they don’t edit themselves. Not necessarily good subbers, mind you. They usually post the project and accept every member of the FB group who applies in a first comes first served basis, based on the assumption that all members of the group are automatically of a certain level. (Which is debatable. That’s why editors are even more important).
This still happens, to a large extent. They just organize and supervise the whole project, but very often they don’t edit as such, as they have two (hopefully) capable people who specialize in this. Because these moderators are very busy running their Facebook groups and organizing the Italian NSSA course. They were the ones who trained the editors and have worked with them many times in the past, so they chose them because they trust they will do a good job.
I’m not judging whether this way of doing things is bad or good, just trying to explain there are many different ways of going about things.
While I think that stuff like “okay” is very common in Germany, I don’t like words like “daten” (to date) a lot. Still, I think it’s fine to have a language that is somewhere between written and spoken German to sound “natural.”
That was in the past. Viki changed in the last months, and you sometimes don’t even receive any Portuguese application.
If subtitlers’ projects are limited, there will be no more translations for even more projects. There are at least 200 active dramas and movies that haven’t been (fully) translated into German yet. If we limit projects, nobody will work on a majority of the Chinese dramas in the future, since they’re already less popular. People will work on Kdramas and BL and maybe on dramas with their favorite actor. That’s it.
I generally tend to differentiate between a translator’s challenge and what I would like to watch. Translating a drama such as “Court Lady” is challenging, for example, but I’m not interested in its story. I didn’t watch it. Is it now bad after I researched various stuff to translate it? Not necessarily. We can’t really judge the result based on assumptions made.
I would agree that a lot of subtitlers are not considered “amazing.” Lots of people tend to ignore the guidelines, or they simply can’t get away from the English wording and structures. Often I can see sentences nobody would have ever said like that. They might have watched the drama while I didn’t, but the result is not necessarily better or a good one. It depends heavily on the individual person. Furthermore, I won’t spend much time editing if I change “Direktor” to “Direktorin,” but it’ll take me a long time to fix weird terms or bad grammar. Certainly, we can influence how some relationships are shown through subtitles, but it’s only a part of it.
Furthermore, if we limit subtitlers’ projects it doesn’t take the release speed or the team size into account. Huge teams may have a very low subtitle count sometimes, since they cut their shows into 8-14 parts per episode. Then you’re treated the same as some team where people do x parts per episode or whole episodes. Of course, you might want to do more shows if you only do 2 parts on a whole show of 30 episodes in some cases.
Even if we have more moderators, we don’t necessarily get more projects done or anything. People may sometimes get 5-8 applications for some Kdrama or BL. But nobody will apply for other projects for months, and people won’t do them either. If we all only work on what we love the most, we have 10 subtitlers for 8 episodes à 15 minutes and 2 people for 50 episodes à 45 min. On the other hand, some people may rather come to Viki to watch some Cdrama in their language than the Kdrama that is already available on 4 platforms anyway. I like doing BLs too. I like watching them sometimes. Still, as a translator it’s rather boring and simple. The dialogues are very easy, it’s not challenging or anything and editors line up to correct them. However, there’s not much to do. About everyone can do them well.
Of course, since we are volunteering, we can do what we like only. And if we only like BL and Kdramas, we can just tell the audiences to talk to our hand if they want to watch some historical drama. However, when I apply, I don’t limit myself to “I want to watch this.” I wonder if it might be interesting to translate, if the topic is a good one, or if I have a general idea how to guide a team through it.
Furthermore, I don’t think that the results are necessarily better after the rule of having 5 projects got introduced. We simply have less translated projects, that’s all. Oh, and more applications for BL. And it’s not like the best subtitlers always apply for the most difficult stuff, either. They rather apply for the easy projects.
After all, this is a nice tale, but I don’t think it reflects on my reality.
Yeah, I take it back. You are right, there is no other way to understand this. Upon second and third read I realize that this was most likely casually written by some Viki staff who doesn’t really understand neither team work nor role permissions set up on Viki.
Can you point me to the original webpage so that I can complain?
In my community(ies) the introduction of this rule has had a huge impact for the better - although there are now less projects with Croatian/Serbian/Bosnian/Serbo-Croatian Moderator on board, a lot more projects have been finished
If there would be a counter for Subbers too, then our language volunteers could not do many dramas.
Let´s say a subber can take also just 5 dramas, then most of the drama would be left over and no one would translate them. most of the volunteers would get for the chance to translate their favourite genre and many dramas would simply be left aside (mostly chinese dramas).
Oh, then you’re more virtuous than I am! I only apply for projects that I think will interest me. Why? Because as an editor I have to watch two, often three times. And watching something you don’t like three times is torture, it’s not pleasure anymore, it’s like a chore. (Of course sometimes my predictions don’t come true, and a drama that seemed interesting ends up being a sorry mess. Those things can happen, and if they happen, I still do the job as I should)
Listen, I’m a professional translator in real life. I’ve translated many, many boring things. Like a whole book detailing the composing technique of Nikos Skalkottas, where I had to stop twice at every line to search for a term because I was trained in classical music and in contemporary atonal music I was completely out of my water. And another one, a novel, which was really difficult to stomach (about Hiroshima, describing in detail what happened to the people after the explosion) - so much that it gave me nightmares every single day. And a camping gaz brochure. But if I’m paid, it’s my job, I will do it. Here on Viki, however, I’m not paid, and if I do something for free, I want to have fun doing it.
Am I selfish? Maybe. But then, the projects I do undertake, I do them with passion and I don’t grudge the time to take care of details.
You’re saying that if everybody thought like me, and if there were limits to projects, less projects would be subbed on Viki? That’s for sure. But we can’t sub everything anyway. I will work on the ones I like, and other volunteers on the ones they like. We all have different tastes. For instance, you’ll never catch me volunteering for a BL, and other people may not like the ones that I like. Which is fine! Variety is a good thing.
Moreover, if I don’t like a drama, I am not that eager for it to be available to as many people in the world as possible. Why would I? In fact, I would rather actively discourage them from watching it.
But, as I said, everyone has different tastes, so these projects will be done by someone else. After all, there will always be newbies, who are in no position to choose, and the ones greedy for contributions, who will do anything just to get that badge.
And in case none of us likes a drama, why would we insist that it;s translated, for those 2-3 souls that want to watch it?
A few closing thoughts…
Viki has been letting us down, nowadays my loyalty has dropped a few notches, I don’t feel I owe them anything.
Presently Viki is almost exclusively for paid subscribers. Who whine and whine and it’s their fault if paid segmenters and subbers are taking our volunteers’ place. I don’t feel I owe those viewers much either.
Since another Viki rule says “everyone” (who is not using translation software) is allowed to participate, of course the overall quality is bad. No one can expect an editor to spend so much time in a terrible “editing tool” that lacks all those things one has when it’s an editing work for full text instead of subtitles.
Besides, average romance shows have very often such simple sentences that in most cases when a subber can’t handle it, a translation software could (including software that corrects grammar etc.)
Talking about wrong translations in OL than English: Sometimes the reason for wrong OL subtitles is that the English subtitles are very bad. Bad source = bad result. That includes very odd English sentences that make it hard to understand the context and translate it properly into OL. It also takes way more time because nicely written English lines are easier and faster to translate than lines that are so odd that - without knowing the scene and thinking logical about what is written - the OL translation will become wrong, especially context-wise.
As a result Viki will never have a homogen quality and if they would want to have that, they have to exchange volunteers for professionals and setting certain standards which would cost them lots of money.
