Subathon 2020 - C/T dramas only

[fastsloth]

please do that in my topic as well

[feyfayer]

I had no idea this was a thing either. I mainly sub and segment Chinese or Taiwanese dramas, but I’m not sure I’ll participate in this one

[sonmachinima]

I got an email with this info yesterday and I read it twice because first I thought that can’t be true… (with the parting of the community & dramas)

@lutra

The email was only readable after I deactivated the anti spam/script /ad blocker in my browser, before that the mail was almost blank with few words that didn’t give proper info (only subathon was visible and new features).

[sonmachinima]

I think we should discuss here instead of splitting the discussion into 2 threads.

Best would be to add a link so all post here since this thread already has more answers

[sonmachinima]

I think Viki has chosen both Chinese and Taiwanese channels because they are REALLY in need of volunteers. You can contribute as a segmenter or subber for any language but for Chinese or Taiwanese channels.

Chinese channels are the ones that have too many episodes to help.

I was thinking about this aspect too but if people only sub Chinese / Taiwanese dramas because of a subathon the quality will suffer because if they feel forced to do something they might care less about the final result and just want the badge.

If VIKI really wants Chinese / Taiwanese dramas to be subbed faster VIKI should think about a more efficient way than a subathon.

(Depending on the language the Chinese dramas that are interesting do have subbers though; it may take longer when the teams are smaller and the dramas have more episodes but it’s not as if Chinese dramas (not sure about Taiwanese) do have per se a huge delay / no subbers at all, especially not in the mentioned ‘special’ languages.)

I’m only working on Chinese dramas (with ~2 exceptions in the past) and the volunteers are usually from the same group (segmenters, channel managers, OL moderators, subbers). The segmenting and English subs teams are quite fast, the Spanish and Portuguese teams are very fast too, Italian, French and German teams need a bit longer but are usually the first OL that complete the whole drama. So at least for the Chinese dramas I was working on the delay for OL was mainly caused if we had to wait for the GO from the English editor and not because we had no subbers at all.

(The languages with fewer subbers that need more time to finish a drama aren’t even appreciated by this event with a special badge. There are some volunteers for certain languages who almost sub dramas by their own because they don’t find enough other subbers to help them.)

[fastsloth]

Subathon 2020 - please include all languages

Dear Viki Team and @giant_sean @vikicommunity We understand that you included those specific languages because of some american celebrations but we are from all over the world. This community is for everyone not just american, and that is why i would like you to consider adding all languages, that will encourage the whole community to contribute. For example most of my work is in Arabic and i would love it if when i wanted to watch a drama that i will find it in arabic. this is the subathon…

[mirjam_465]

I think Viki has chosen both Chinese and Taiwanese channels because they are REALLY in need of volunteers. You can contribute as a segmenter or subber for any language but for Chinese or Taiwanese channels.

I think it would help more if the episodes of the long Chinese dramas wouldn’t get released so fast after each other. Six episodes a week is quite overwhelming for a lonely subber.
For Taiwanese dramas it would help if there were more licenses. There’s so many Taiwanese dramas that a lot of people can’t even watch, let alone sub.
And you can contribute for any language, but you won’t get a top 100 badge for any language, cause they are only for the chosen few.

[bozoli]

I was not happy with why only CHINESE/TAIWANESE, but after the explanation, I looked at myself and realized that I never worked on any Chinese show

I was just about to say that one of the aims was probably for volunteers so set in their K-dramas to venture into an uncharted territory It’s not the first time a subathon focuses on a certain type of drama. This is hardly extraordinary.

However, Romanian and Arabic are extremely popular on Viki, and yet, no mention of them in the subathon. Why?

What’s worse is, they try to explain why they focus on only those five languages (cultural months and all of that), but they skip why they included French! Like, “they won’t notice if our explanation sentence is very long”. Pffff…

I was thinking about this aspect too but if people only sub Chinese / Taiwanese dramas because of a subathon the quality will suffer because if they feel forced to do something they might care less about the final result and just want the badge.

It might, but it hasn’t for me. If one’s working habits are good, it’s hard to do a crappy job.
Also, subathons generally, for the same reason as you mentioned, bring out the dot and GT dumbasses who think they can get away with cheating.

I think it would help more if the episodes of the long Chinese dramas wouldn’t get released so fast after each other. Six episodes a week is quite overwhelming for a lonely subber.

I know exactly what you mean. But I’ve seen cases where the upload to Viki is slower than broadcasting, and Viki then usually looses its audience. They go watch it on YouTube or some other mysterious Facebook channel/page.

[sonmachinima]

It might, but it hasn’t for me. If one’s working habits are good, it’s hard to do a crappy job.
Also, subathons generally, for the same reason as you mentioned, bring out the dot and GT dumbasses who think they can get away with cheating.

It depends on the person, of course. I was also thinking about the organisation, e.g. for my recent projects we already build the teams and made the charts who’s subbing which part/episode; when someone now just wants to join because of the subathon while we have to wait for the GO of the English editor a new team member probably won’t be able to sub enough parts to get a special badge or a badge at all because that would mean to take another subber’s part away - or that the English editor works super fast so they’d release 10+ episodes for OL within the subathon week. For some dramas / languages that subathon idea in this regard might work (joining a team and immediately working on it) but for many dramas / languages it won’t work. (I’m moderating 2 of the new on air titles they mention in the list and one drama has some technical issues so it is delayed because the main team couldn’t work on it for couple of days and the other drama is just at the beginning / in progress of the editing of the main team) so VIKI should have put some older, not on air dramas in the list that don’t have subs yet but are fully edited by the main team so new OL subbers could start subbing right away during the subathon.

I know exactly what you mean. But I’ve seen cases where the upload to Viki is slower than broadcasting, and Viki then usually looses its audience.

That only/mainly counts for English subs, right? I mainly saw English subs on Youtube, rarely other European languages (for example). The only other place I saw European languages for Asian dramas is Netflix but 1. Netflix is not free and 2. Netflix rarely has the same dramas VIKI has so they aren’t direct rivals in almost all cases.

[bozoli]

That only/mainly counts for English subs, right?

Yes, definitely. I’ve never seen any other subs for Chinese dramas outside of Viki. Maybe there are some, but I’m not aware of them.

[mirjam_465]

We even have downtime during the subathon! Not a very good timing, if you ask me …

So that’s 9 am in mainland Europe, 8 am in The UK, 10 am in Finland, Belarus, Ukraine, Moscow area (Russia), Greece, Cyprus, Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey, and 7 am in Reykjavik.

Let’s hope it’s really short and won’t lead to any complications.

[hmk_201288_223]

[mirjam_465]

Were the “specific languages” back then the same as now?

[teufelchen_netty_266]

Japp. Still the same

[vikicommunity]

Hi everyone,

Thanks for your feedback in regards to the Fall Subathon!

The focus on Chinese and Taiwanese shows for the subathon is because we’ve been getting a lot more shows from China and Taiwan recently. Thus, we wanted to encourage more contributions to these shows, and get some people to try out something new if they’ve never worked on a Chinese or Taiwanese show before.

The emphasis on specific languages and heritage months was meant to celebrate, not exclude. We still plan to have subathons that are open to all languages as we’ve always done, and in the future we’d love to have subathons celebrating more languages! If you have ideas for how we can celebrate specific languages, we’d be happy to hear them. We welcome you to share your ideas for how we can celebrate more languages, or any new subathon ideas you may have here.

UPDATE: Segment timer and subtitle editor maintenance that is scheduled for Oct. 19 00:00 PDT is expected to take 15-30 minutes.

Thank you!

Viki Community Team

[hmk_201288_223]

Were the “specific languages” back then the same as now?

There weren’t any specific languages but it is happening now To encourage contributors to work on these dramas.

[sonmachinima]

It makes no sense though since these specific languages are almost always the ones that are finished first after the English subs/edit is done…

(I didn’t see a single drama that did not have any Spanish / Portuguese subs and they are always super quick, even without subathon.)

[denisse_bach]

Romanian is as “hispanic” as French is, though. Why wasn’t it included in the list of languages for the special 100 top?..

[twinkling]

The emphasis on specific languages and heritage months was meant to celebrate

The celebrations that were talked about in this subathon are over, aren’t they??
Then, there is a festival that just started on 18th in India just on the day subathon started and will last 10 days. It is called Navratri (Google it if want to)
Logically speaking, if celebrations is the main motive, then why weren’t all Indian languages included to celebrate the occasion?

I wonder if you have an answer for this

[mirjam_465]

Lots of countries have celebrations in October:

October 2020 Calendar of Public Holidays | Office Holidays

But celebrations or not, in any case it’s not fair to leave people/countries out just because they’re not “special” or well-known enough.