Ok, I know it’s a contradictive issue. But still I’ll ask.
Are there any contributors who would like to have a tool for rating of Kor-Eng (or Chi-Eng, or Jap-Eng) subtitling team’s work quality? I mean, their speed (or everybody thinks it does not matter?), their accuracy, their edition quality? I would suggest to make an access to this tool opened only for the contributors of the same team.
But surely I will not be surprised, if it turns out that we should be immensely grateful for absolutely any kind of subtitles.
Thank you for your attention.
If you want a rating system like that, it should be for all language teams, not just English. In this way, people are able to directly see wheter the subtitles in language X have good quality or not. Although, people could get impatient if their language isn’t finished on time and give bad ratings. So then there should be rules about how and from what moment you’re alllowed to rate. Definetely not open from the very beginning a drama starts, but maybe halfway through.
You are right, but we always are told: the Kor-Eng (or Chi-Eng) subtitlers are the Viki’s alpha and omega, the main base, we all depend on them. And the matter is the other language subtitles are good only if English subtitles are good, because they are our base, right?
After reading your somewhat awkwardly-phrased post here, all I can say is this:
NO. No, we do not need to RATE people here for their SPEED and ACCURACY.
Invitation: Please take a long walk off a short pier with this suggestion.
As to whether you should be grateful to have subs, the answer is YES.
And with that, let’s just drop this one into the circular file that it richly deserves being thrown into without any further ceremony.
(balls up the page of text, and with a Kareem Abdul-Jabbar skyhook, sends it gracefully into the corner trash bin…raising arms for the SCOOOORREEEE! wildly cheering virtual fans erupt)
If you are working together in the same team, isn’t it easier to talk to each other instead of rating someone badly? Constructive critic needs more than a “thumb up” or “thumb down”. That’s what I think ^^
When I notice something weird I either talk to my language mod or ask the english editor if he/she could take a look at it.
For someone who wants to rate English subtitles, perhaps the use of English was a bit…awkward…for you?
Ahhhh you’re a TROLL.
You are trolling here. Now I get it.
You don’t volunteer here, do you.
You just want to insult people and then when we give you an honest answer, we’re the bad guys.
You realize we don’t have to read any more of your posts, right?
And I stand by my original post. It was NOT insulting to you as a human. If, indeed, trolls are part of humanity - I hear there is some debate about that one… (musing)
Crouching Dieter, Hidden Donut
Yeah that’s pretty much the tale, one under the bridge…let’s just forget this nonsense and move forward…possibly with the very subs this person wants to “rate”. they have to be there first, RIGHT? back to actually working on dramas and not feeding into our troll’s notion of “drama”.
Honey…that guy is a troll. Don’t waste time and energy answering him any further. We’ll summon someone who deals with his sort and well, let’s just go back to happily doing what we do, for the majority of reasonable people who enjoy dramas with us.
@—>--- for your hard work.
Regarding constructive criticism, that is of course the proper route and employing it within a Team a very important way we all strive to become better at subtitling, segmenting, and all things within the work we do here. My Teams are instructed to do exactly as you describe - they are always welcome to comment or question, and we brainstorm on the most difficult signs and other challenges as a group together in our TD board. Because working together as a real Team is a pleasure, and a must when we work with a challenging drama.
Ah, you are opening a whole can of worms here.
Two subbers talk to each other, let’s forget about that, unless they happen to be personal friends or something. Let’s focus on the subber who finds a mistake by somebody else and tells the moderator, privately, and the moderator who while editing finds a mistake and tells the subber, privately.
Some subtitlers are bad, they don’t even know good grammar in their mothertongue. Probably in the school years when it was being taught, they were browsing facebook on their smartphones during class. But hey, they don’t know it, so they think they’re decent enough.
1a. They don’t accept criticism, not even from the moderator/editor. They leave the team with ruffled feathers saying things like “who gives you the right to play teacher or grammar nazi with me, we are here to have fun, not to get anxious with someone breathing over our shoulder”
1b. They think they can criticize other people’s subtitles, and sometimes they would like to correct a good subtitle with a wrong one.
Some moderators are very bad. They don’t know good English (and translate all the idioms word by word with hilarious results), and are bad at their own language too. I’ve seen things that make me shudder from people with more than 5 years’ experience and more than 200.000 subtitles.
1a. They don’t know they are bad. (Yes, it’s a recurring thing. And it’s natural. If they knew they were lacking, they would try to gradually become better. But they don’t know it, thus they never advance). They think that their years on viki makes them better than newer people. So they don’t accept criticism from anybody and if you dare point out a mistake, no matter how politely, they will snap and bite you and ask you to get lost and never contact them again.
1b. As moderators, they can do much more harm than a “mere” subtitler.
Because they don’t correct bad subtitles
Because they wrongly correct good subtitles
Because they write bad subtitles themselves.
Of course there are also very good moderators and very good subtitlers. (Numerically fewer, unfortunately)
So who is to rate whom? And who decides whose opinion is to be trusted?
My languages are Greek and Italian. I don’t know about Italian, but I can bet that you don’t understand Greek. I can tell you that I’m super-good and X is bad. Why should you believe me? How can you control if I’m telling you the truth? Exactly. You have no way of doing that. What did you say? Ask other Greek moderators? And what if you happen to ask someone whom I’ve had a fight with, who now hates me and who will slander me unjustly? (there are already two like that).
Sorry, but I made it clear in my first message.
I meant all the subbers translating from English to their own language rate the English translation of Korean-English subbers. Or Chinese English ones.
The original poster has apparently changed their story twice already and I believe we may have a troll who is just trying to stir things up and possibly build bad blood between the English teams and the Other Languages.
IMHO, we already have too many “ratings” around here, given that many folks “rate” a drama unseen merely because they do not have subtitles yet in their language of choice. I’d rather see the viki mother ship prevent people from rating ANY drama or movie channel that does not yet have videos loaded onto it.
Anyway - I have seen plenty of evidence that within English version teams, there is a general understanding that we are all there to generate the best possible version we can, and try to complete the project. There are subbers of various abilities, and this will always be the case, short of a fully-professional team here that would also have to be highly PAID.
As for the other languages subbers rating the English version, that too can be pretty funny…I am not sure folks could distinguish in some cases a “cow” from a “kowtow” and perhaps would not be the best raters of a correct English version either.
The fluency in both languages is not that common here overall. Most of us are learning one language or the other and doing our best to improve over time. Perhaps the rating would be more a comment on the editing or lack thereof, rather than the subbers’ skills?
(sigh).
Okay, back to trying to put out the best English version possible.
GeNie of the Lamp cough! POOF!(trail of gently floating tissues…)
I know you only spoke of the English translations, but afterwards the thread has expanded saying that if those should be rated, why not the other ones. So I was responding to that.
As for non-English language volunteers rating the English translation… For most of us English is typically not our first language. Some of us know it excellently, but most don’t have a level of proficiency such that they can rate it. They might not understand something and believe it’s inintelligible just because they don’t know an expression…
I agree we can’t rate translation from a language we can’t speak, but we can rate “I will borrow you a horse” or “he is” for visibly female characters. Or google monsters. What am I supposed to do when I have to translate such obvious mistakes? Keep the original? Some editors fix it, some don’t. If they don’t, I go by instinct.
This is a bit complicated. Some mistakes were grammatically correct ten years ago, so people either aren’t aware or they just forget.
Definitely. We all see such things every now and then, and when I see them in a show where I’m also working, I try to point out those things - at the risk of becoming annoying and getting told that I’m overstepping my boundaries, as I’m not part of the English team. (So far people have been nice about it)
But, again, you cannot differentiate between the people who would rightly point out those obvious mistakes and the ones rating badly something because of their own ignorance. Unfortunately, the justified bad rating for the first case would be mixed with the unjustified bad rating for the second case. The dry wood with the damp wood, to use a Greek expression.
See, the problem is that we have to think of ALL the potential “voters”, the “masses”. Including those who don’t know anything, those who have personal grudges because they haven’t been accepted in the team, or even the trolls.
I wasn’t talking about that, when I wrote “who decides” - although what you say is also an issue.
I was saying that generally, here at viki, because of the fact that there are so many different languages, the people outside the language community have no means to ascertain who is good and who is bad. So, when we are not talking only of the English subtitles, but of the other languages as well, it is a huge problem and impossible to rate anybody. Inside each language community as well, you cannot rate, because who rates, and who decides that someone gets to be the judge? That’s what I meant by “who rates whom?” And when I wrote about “opinion”, I didn’t mean the opinion on grammar rules which may have changed in the last twenty years, but the opinion of another translator’s worth.
I am CM of a series, and I want to find a Polish, Hungarian, Finnish, Dutch etc moderator. How do I go about it, in order to choose the best one? Do I look at her number of subtitles or the number/prestige of her projects? How can I trust that, when I have seen and know for sure that some of the more long-standing members of the Greek subbing community write horrid “alabournezika” * subtitles, so obviously length of time here and number of projects don’t mean shit?
If this is true for our language, it must be true of other languages as well. And as I don’t know Polish, Hungarian (and most other languages of the world), the only thing I can judge is care in punctuation and formatting. That’s all!
For non Greeks: alabournezika means something that doesn’t make sense, like Martian, or Sims talk - although I’m not sure I should be denigrating Sims talk, which is a highly coherent and organized language.
True. This is not something volunteers should have to handle, though.
I think Viki should provide support. They should hire a few language managers. For the most popular languages, at least.
Viki relies heavily on volunteers. It would make sense to have a dedicated professional team. If they have money to spend on revamping the homepage every 11 days, they can also spend some for language support.
Not a bad idea. I’m replying to the other thread you made. But it would be nice if they controlled not only translation quality but also completeness of projects. Both translators and moderators.
Delicatesse - denotation: of gourmets: a company of lovers of good food and wine—Lipton, 1970.
connotation: perhaps you intend to treat them so well as to wine and dine them extravagantly?
I believe you might have aimed at the word “delicately” but missed it.
With all due respect, I still entirely disagree with a rating system, because I really do not want to have to say what I think sometimes when I view less than correct English subtitles. This is still an entirely volunteer effort. Let’s not forget the baby in the midst of the bathwater, and throw the whole thing out.
As for any moderators who fail to complete the task in Other Languages once the English version is indeed released, that is the province of the Channel Manager.
My personal view there is that when the English version is completely released, there is usually some idea if another language moderator has left things to sit or not, especially in a longer drama. I will be asking any moderator who has been inactive for over a month to please show signs of life or I will probably move to replace them. There are indeed folks here who collect dramas like charms on a bracelet and neglect many of them.
I also choose to try to hire for all future moderation jobs those with a proven record of completion in their language and who also recognize the importance of working well with true teams, not one-person “translation engines”.
Will my strategy be perfect? Probably not, but it’s what I have come up with personally - and again, we do have to remember it is a volunteer effort.
Want professionals? Then pay absolutely everyone, and evaluate absolutely everyone just like a real JOB.
I think you will find you’re still short of the translators to get things into English - and also possibly of qualified segmenting, as not all who graduate remain to segment for example…and subtitles are not the only thing that require skill and competence. Did we not already discuss the fact we’re short editors on top of it all?
People…in hell want ice water.
(shrug) All I personally can do is the best I can, with the Teams I work with, and to enjoy the experience of doing our best to bring really cool Asian dramas to the rest of the world. Work with a team, as a Team, and be happy.
It’s a good day so far. Two episodes released and well, my cold didn’t appear to cause any cows to get in with the kowtows.
I am CM of a series, and I want to find a Polish, Hungarian, Finnish, Dutch etc moderator. How do I go about it, in order to choose the best one?
I don’t know about other languages, but I am one of the senseis for the Dutch Subbing Academy and we try to teach our students as best as we can about subbing and translating. When they are finished and pass the exam, they will get a badge.
