I went to the webpage last night (I was interested to join as a sensei for Italian) and I saw that the subbing academy is still on beta stage or something. There was just a list of applicants for various languages. So I thought it hasn’t yet officially started.
So I’m glad there is something for Dutch at least.
Of course you do understand I put these languages as examples of languages I don’t know, and I could have put Finnish, Estonian, Tagalog or Arabic… 
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Christina has moved the topic to its own thread. I was planning to delete my reply to her and copy paste it there. But I cannot do that unless you also do the same. Is it too much trouble to ask you that? Since it is sort of different than the original thread subject?
Yes, I know they’re just examples, but I just wanted to point out about the DSA. I’ve also talked with @piranna about it, to explain how the academy is set up. Cause hopefully by explaining things to others, I can help them set up their specific language academy. Although I know that the materials are there, but finding people to volunteer teaching is something else.
And who knows a fellow Dutch subber who doesn’t know about DSA yet comes across my post and decides to roll in?
That’ll mean another well-taught and good subber in the future 
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This thread has “raised some passions” (including my own), as the Croatians would say. But there are a few points I would like to make perfectly clear.
- I am not a native English speaker, but I can and do privately assess / rate English translations every single day. And I’m not even talking about the obvious grammar mistakes and alike. I mean I literally want to bang my head against the wall when I see choppy translations, lack of logic and painful sentence arrangements over and over and over again, for 800 subtitles per episode. Why? Not because I like to be critical towards another fellow human or enjoy some false sense of superiority in my language skills. No, it’s because for my viewers I have to make a meaningful whole out of all of that. And I’m not the only one. With me are 20 other Other Language Moderators (OLMs) scratching their heads and going with their guts. In science there is a saying “Crap in, crap out”. Means if your raw material or data is crap, no matter how good your analysis is, it will still come out as crap in the end. Perhaps it’s a mistake, but I don’t fight these choppy subtitles. Maybe, as it has already been insinuated here, some native speaker is going to respond to me that “I don’t understand it because my language skills are subpar”. My theoretical answer would be somewhere along the lines of Einstein: “If you can’t write it simply enough for the average viewer to understand it, you don’t understand what’s being said in the first place”.
Thankfully, I’m talking here about a minority of projects, as in the past few years perhaps 90% of shows I’ve seen have been excellently translated to and edited in English.
Which leads me to my second point.
2.All of that messy pain is simply avoided if the project has a good English editor. Plain and simple. Not FIVE of them, just one or two. Too many Editors spoil the broth, in my opinion. I would advise OLMs, particularly newbies, to check if the smaller projects already have an English Editor set in the team or if at least getting one is a priority for the CM. These people do bloody work, but make life so much easier for hundreds of OL translators who will be included into the project at some point.
I can’t shake the feeling of being judged and called out here. The comment probably comes from the fact that some Vikians are still not familiar with all the different shapes and forms a “Viki team” can assume. And I hope you never learn how it is to be one of three long-term active members on the site for your language. I’ll keep fighting though, with my “translation engine” skills, so that one day we may get that fourth active member, and maybe even the fifth one. But I don’t like to be snubbed if I translate a whole series by myself. After all, why should I be?
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Just quoting the obvious here…
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Sigh. Okay, I clearly missed a point here that should have been more carefully explained but I was trying also to still be NICE about something that happens far too often again. I should have simply laid this out instead of dancing around it.
There ARE certain individuals here who under the GUISE Of becoming moderator for their language then do NOT hire a team EVER despite the KNOWN numbers of people here IN THEIR LANGUAGE who may be hired, to the frustration of many more who WOULD HELP ON A DRAMA. We’re talking about languages that are WELL REPRESENTED HERE. Not 3 known in the whole language.
Persons like this one person “team” who then take ALL the dramas - then prevent subbers in their language from doing ANYTHING but become more and more frustrated at the lack of opportunity, and viewers too get frustrated at again, the lack of subs in that language.
IF you happen to be one of the few of your language and no one wants to join and you can sub the whole thing, good - but also bad in that yes, there is no one to check your work.
One of the aspects of moderation in the other language teams IS EDITING. Having more than 1 person on a team at least HOPEFULLY means the Moderator will do that job in that language and that is again, what I try to hire when I hire a moderator.
If you CM, you likely have run across the individuals who do exactly what I have described.
After more than 5 minutes, you can tell who is working with people, or has them to work WITH and who does not. If you are the one of 3 people, it’s great you are trying your best to make it happen for your language and yeah, obviously this is not the same question as those who close others out when there ARE OTHERS WILLING TO HELP.
So again, one more time, IF you one of 3 total in your entire language, that’s different from 100 people in your language and then telling ALL 99 other people to take a hike, and then doing it all YOURSELF. Running around, taking ALL the moderator positions you can, while others sit on the sidelines and do nothing.
That was the point about teams, and not just 1 person, in languages where we definitely have the support for this. Again, aimed at putting out something hopefully that’s great in the other language.
You may be the best subber on earth in your language - but there’s no way every CM is going to be competent in what, 200 languages?
I can, however, make a really GREAT guess that someone subbing in some facsimile of Spanish where it calls for LATIN is probably going to be wrong, even with my limited LATIN SKILLS. And that if I HIRE a person who tends to NOT HIRE ANYBODY ELSE, well, it’s going to take awhile and they are that person who does not form a team and otherwise try to work with people in their own language - and again the risk is there about the quality of their work.
I still say this and the supervisor thread shouldn’t be here anyway - yes I am responding, yes you are too, but seriously - It’s a volunteer site for pete’s sake.
If it gets too much like real world work, why bother to come here for FUN. I enjoy working as a CM here and other things. But if it gets too much like things I have done in the real world for pay - then I will ask myself why I am here torturing myself and not, say, getting another real world job AND getting paid. (shrug).
Hope you get 5 more good subbers in your language and form a little team of happy people, seriously. I really like the way the Indonesians are coming together finally around here, it’s pretty cool as far as new teams I work with. Makes it easier to finally get a good drama subbed in more languages.
CD, HD
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Your note did not come up on any notification for this thread - fyi - I just happened to scroll up and read it.
Sorry if you’re having difficulty moving to the other thread if it’s my fault. I mean, please feel free to block copy my post if that’s what you want. Maybe quote all of mine, copy yours to the other thread, and then delete the one here. I don’t know.
Wherever hers went - I probably won’t bother to follow this mess any further. I’ve got things to work on and well, I was out of commission for a couple of weeks.
Probably disqus not working entirely well - the notifications do seem to not really happen the last couple of days?
Good luck and enjoy the new thread wherever it may be - and let me know if you hear anything about that alleged QC/GOLD QC gift too lol.
CD, HD
I think that all of us here do the “mistake” - a perfectly natural one, of course - of talking about things from the point of view of our own language and our own experience. Things can be vastly different in other languages and other teams. I am saying this to myself as well.
There are languages with plenty of volunteers (like Spanish), there are languages with very few, stretched thin, and so on and so forth.
There are moderators who fall in love with a drama and ask the moderation even if they don’t have a team to speak of, and are happy to do it all on their own. There are others who collect dramas like trophies and don’t allow collaborators even when there are. There are others who don’t allow collaborators because they know these ones may be willing but are not good. I mean, there are so many different cases, and I am sure each one of you (of us) speaks of what she knows well, therefore all testimonials are truthful and valid, but we cannot and must not generalize, because our truth is not the only truth.
I am active as a volunteer for little more than a year, which is a relatively short time compared to many veterans here; but I’ve been VERY active here and there, and I am a curious person who likes to poke her nose around, so I’ve seen and heard a great variety of things and situations and people, good, bad and in-between.
Just as in the real world.
As for bad English subs, I already said that of course some of us can spot them, but there are many people who will rate them badly out of ignorance, so it’s difficult to assess objectively who can or cannot express an opinion.
On the English teams, when there is more than one English editor, it doesn’t mean that one goes over the other’s job, but rather they share the parts to finish more quickly. And of course they consult one another to reach a better result. It’s a very good thing, because I’ve noticed that even when I think I have edited, if perchance I look at it again, there are always some things I didn’t noticed the first time. We are human after all.
I have two fresh examples for you of things which escaped the editors’ eyes. They are from two different dramas (Please note that they are self-contained sentences, not a continuation of a previous one).
[QUOTE]
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After working for this company for 16 years, and then I got fired.
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Addition to sending him to college, to a language school abroad— If you ask me to do more, I feel frustrated— [/QUOTE]
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After seeing @deadliftdiva_548’s comment to my own, I was actually thinking the same thing - that I don’t know all the rubbish going on at the site, that I see Viki very much from my own perspective and that sharing more of the bad experiences here on the Discussions might be a really good thing overall.
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