Spanish presubs are awful đŸ€Šâ€â™‚ïž

Contributing
41

Well, I was waiting for more presubbed dramas to drop so I could have a better idea of the translations’ quality in French. First thing is, I don’t think these subs are machine translated, if so it would be more literal. If it has been so-so or acceptable subs, I would’ve accepted the situation as the business dimension is important to Viki.
Even basics sentences are not good.

A few examples on Chinese presubbed dramas:

EN → I want a grilled chicken breast salad.
FR → Je veux la salade avec le poulet grillĂ©e.
The French sub says: “I want the grilled salad with chicken.”

EN → I don’t know about your preference. That’s why I booked a Western restaurant.
FR → Comme je ne connais pas tes prĂ©fĂ©rences. J’ai rĂ©servĂ© un restaurant occidental.
The French sub says: “Since I don’t know your preference. I booked a Western restaurant.”

EN → If I’m still chasing
 (OST)
FR → Si je continue de chasser

The French subs says: “If I keep hunting”

EN → On the day of the opening ceremony, his father only reached his school after three hours of driving.
FR → Le premier jour, Ă  la cĂ©rĂ©monie d’ouverture, son pĂšre a conduit trois heures pour lui rendre visite.
The French sub says: “The first day, at the opening ceremony, his father drove three hours in order to visit him.”

EN → The day we turned 18 was our first day together.
FR → Le jour de nos 18 ans, le destin nous a rĂ©unis pour la premiĂšre fois.
The French sub says: "The day we turned 18, the fate brought us together for the first time.

EN → I owed you 5„.
FR → Je te devais 5 yen.
The French sub used the wrong currency, it’s from a Chinese drama not a Japanese one, so it should obviously be “yuan” and not “yen”.

We do not accept misleading or bad presubs in any language! If you want to hire professional translators, make sure they are proficient in both English and the targeted language!

PS: I suggest we rename the topic “We do not want bad presubs” :sweat_smile:

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42

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43

In the case of the presubs in Spanish. The presubbed Cdramas so far, I’m sure that they are subtitled by machine translation.

Unlike the presubbed Kdramas, only the most famous or popular ones have their subtitles made by humans, like “”Family by choice“” and “”What comes after love?“”.

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44

And @deval_chloe said that the French in Family by Choice was really bad so having subtitles made by humans doesn’t always help


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45

I take back what I said, French presubs are probably machine translations too. But some sentences felt like human mistranslation. The IA power, I guess
 ugh.
Please, Viki stop doing experiments. @vikicommunity

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46

I sound like a broken record but the pre-subs in English are often just as awful. Here are some recent examples from the past few months:
Children often feel the other parent’s vacancy after a divorce.
What kind of a misbehavior is this to a new employee?
Why are there such tasteful things in the world?
If we just make up time, we can talk my mother into compliance.
Once I see her formally and she can’t decipher between a joke and a response like a child, 

If too much, then starting next month?
Finish him up.
As you said, my mother jumped into the fire. Because he wanted to save my father.
The Couple Who Didn’t Planned to Be Together (Episode title)
My uniform response on reading these subs “Huh?”
This is why I go through the Hangul script as I am editing the English subs because I need to know what the character meant. As I review the English, I wonder if the original English is incomprehensible, what is happening to the translations to other languages.

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47

I often wonder whether the Spanish, Portuguese and French are done from the English or directly from Korean/Chinese etc.

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48

I think both options happen, if I compare the different translations. Sometimes one of the other presub languages even contains a bit of information that is missing in the English version. On the other hand, the OL presubs often come much later than the English ones and that might be a sign that they do use English.

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49

Yeah, Vikibot has come far, but it’s not there yet. It will take a few more years.

50

I feel a little sad reading all these posts. I’m happy that in minor languages we can still translate from scratch, and I feel for contributors from communities in whose languages subtitles are machine-translated. To give you a bit of encouragement, translators around the world are fighting against AI and MT right now, and for their jobs basically, so you’re not alone.

Obviously, I have no experience with machine-translated presubs on Viki in my language, but at work I have worked with workflows involving MTPE or AI-generated translations. This is sadly a direction in which many companies are heading to cut the costs and speed up the process. To be honest, not a great thing, so I try to avoid such jobs as much as I can, because in my experience they sometimes simply require more work than translating from scratch, so it does not really speed things up that much, plus it takes away all the fun (and half of the money :see_no_evil:), and makes you stuck on more literal and less natural translations. Basically your brain may get used to strange wording, calques from the source text, and sentences that are otherwise unnatural for your language, which sort of leads to “deterioration” of a language on a larger scale, if I may call it this way. As much as technology can be a great tool, also in translations, MT or AI usually prove useful for translations of technical, repetitive text, to a certain degree, depending on the type of text, but a human expert is always required in a driver’s seat before a document is delivered to a customer, obviously :upside_down_face: Otherwise, you may lose the customer :joy: because there’s strange and funny things made up by the machine to save “face” when it doesn’t “know” something.

However, with audiovisual translation there’s too many factors to take into account: video, text or images on screen, puns, audio, situational context, gender, jokes, wordplay, poetry at times, rhymes etc. Machines don’t get it. Machines are not artists, and audiovisual translation is a form of art and creation, at least in my opinion. If anyone is listening @vikicommunity, please, I really hope machine translations are not the future here. Please consider the fact that you have here many people who care about quality, including experts in various fields who can work quite fast in some communities and are ready to do it for you
 for free. How great is that? We understand this is business, and there may be things we are not aware of, but have mercy on your customers—viewers, and on us :face_holding_back_tears::yellow_heart:

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51

It will never be “there.”

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52

They’d better use AI to make robots that serve us tea while we translate. Language-wise, I see more harm than good in it.

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53

I am not that convinced.

54

Do you really think a bot will ever get to Level Bozoli? It might replace you
 but not for the right reasons.

55

I feel like it might given the right amount of time, probably 5-10 years, considering the acceleration in technology development.

56

It can accelerate all it wants, but it will always lack something that we humans do have. AI is basically our brains with something missing.

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57

As @maria_lavendula_77 said, the French presubs on Family by Choice are something :sweat_smile:
Here are some examples of presubs we got in episode 1:

EN: I love it.
FR presubs: Je me sens bien → I feel good.

EN: Fish.
FR presubs: Faim. → Hunger.

EN: Cruise ship.
FR presubs: Train. → Train.

EN: Apartment.
FR presubs: Une rue. → A street.

EN: Puppy.
FR presubs: Un faon. → A fawn.

EN: Rainbow.
FR presubs: Le vent → The wind.

EN: Plane.
FR presubs: Du pain. → Bread.

EN: Squid.
FR presubs: Un paon → A peacock.

EN: You heard from the chief, right?
FR presubs: Tu es au courant pour le chef, n’est-ce pas ? → You know about the chief, right?

EN: Aigoo, sometimes, you speak too easily.
FR presubs: Mon Dieu, des fois, tu parles trop. → My goodness, at times, you speak too much.

EN: You feel sorry for them, but they’re unlucky, so I shouldn’t be friends with them.
FR presubs: Tu as de la peine pour eux, mais ils sont malheureux, reste loin d’eux. → You feel sorry for them, but they’re miserable, stay away from them.

EN: Come to your senses!
FR presubs: Sois raisonnable ! → Be reasonable!

There’s way more but some are hard to explain to non French speakers.

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58

It would be great to respect the work of volunteers. And
do not accept bad presubs


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59

We do not accept bad presubs and support volunteers ! Machine translation is not the way to please viewers !

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60

That’s really not fair. People spend money in a subscription to have such bad French version. We all spend time to work on a show, to give the best translation, and we enjoy that. It’s a great satisfaction. But when you read such bad subtitles just because a Bot is quicker than the human been to translate, this is a big shame. Support the volunteers, and please put an end to this slaughter! Thanks.

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