Is there a location on Viki or in the Discussions board where I can submit corrections to English subtitles on the series/films I watch? I don’t watch much more than anything else but K-Dramas on Viki these days, and although I am teaching myself Korean, the series and films I watch have English subtitles (and am so glad they do!).
Although I don’t run across subtitles that need correction often, occasionally I do see subtitles where there is perhaps a misspelling or typo that needs to be fixed (such as “bread” when it should be “beard”, or “aginst” when it should be “against”, using two that were in the latter part of a series I just watched).
As I love watching K-Drama on Viki, and so much appreciate all the work the great subtitle teams do so that I can watch these films, I would be MORE than happy to help contribute whatever fraction of assistance I can possibly give in appreciation for all their hard work. For the most part the quality of subtitles on the series and films I watch here on Viki has been a major factor in why I’m hooked on watching them.
If there is a section where someone can submit these minor corrections, just point me in that direction and as I come across any minor typos and misspellings, I’ll be sure to submit them (giving for example, the series title, episode number, time the subtitle appears in the episode, the original subtitle and the corrected subtitle).
Thank you in advance for any assistance with this, and thank you Viki and the subtitle teams for their fantastic work!!
Mass message all the relevant moderators, editors and channel managers. You can find the usernames on the subtitle team tab on the show page. Include what you said. If someone has the free time, they can correct it. Keep in mind, they might be inactive.
I once asked if I could be added to a team because I wanted to fix some small errors and all I got was basically “You’re new and have no experience, so won’t add you for [position], also we’ll let the errors stay and do better for future projects”
There’s also a report video issues on the web player. I’m not sure about mobile (if or where it is). You can just list all the things and report it to viki staff as well as possibly messaging everyone.
If you’re going to message everyone just keep a list for all the episodes and send it in one go.
What simi11 said is very important. Some shows might not be edited yet when you watch them. So, before anything else, make sure that you check the Team Tab on the show’s main page, to see the so-called cover page, which is that long image with info about the show etc. On top, you should see
Episodes 1 to X released to all languages.
This means that those episodes have not only been translated, but also edited.
If the mistake is in one of those episodes that have been edited, then you are welcome to send a list to the Chief Editor. If not, it means they will be edited soon (hopefully :).
Not messaging everybody. Not messaging Viki staff that is not responsible for this. The Chief Editor is the one who does the last and final edit, so s/he is the person who forgot to correct those, and now, in most cases, will happy for your help.
How to find the Chief Editor? They are mostly all listed as “English moderators”, although nowadays there is also the Editor title. Who is the Chief Editor among them? You will find that info on the aforementioned “cover page” (the loooong image).
Click on the person’s name if it’s a link. Otherwise, their profile page will be of this form: https://www.viki.com/users/irmar/overview
Here is my profile page. Remove irmar and put the person’s username, and you’ll get to their profile page. Just under their name there is an envelope. Click on it to send them a personal message.
If, after 7-10 days, the person doesn’t reply, you can write to the Channel Manager.
Tagging on to the information Irmar and Sim11 have provided… if you are not sure what is meant by “the show’s main page” that lists the channel manager, editors and moderators, the page is accessed as outlined below.
Scroll down the page until the details of the show appear. Sometimes it’s necessary to wait for this graphic to appear because some of the shows have large images to load.
Using this example of “Love In Contact,” Worthyromance is the Chief Editor and if any faults were found in the English subs, she would be the person to contact.
This is certainly not the way. “Mass messaging” will only feel as harrassment to the volunteers and the staff is too busy to deal with every single typo. Just send a friendly message to the Chief Editor (CE) as explained above, and they will probably be happy to correct the mistake or, alternatively, explain to you why it might not be a mistake after all.
In any case, keep in mind that the work is (mostly) done by volunteers who spend their time and energy to let you watch dramas so always remain friendly.
I really do very much appreciate all the answers though!! Even though the subtitle corrections I have are for series that have already been released with English subtitles for quite some time, as least now I have additional information for those series/films that are currently being worked on, too! As I just started with Viki this year, all the descriptions, meanings, instructions, screen grabs, etc. are excellent.
Confirms my assumption which my answer was based on.
If you’re rude.
Old series might not have them.
There is a series that was released on 2012 with a few segmenting errors on one episode. Can segments be locked now? If they can be, are they automatically locked after a span of time? I see one segmentor that’s still active on viki I don’t want to message them needlessly.
Re: Segments “off”. If it is as old as 2012, it may be that viki staff uploaded a slightly different version of the video so subs are out of sync. That used to happen all the time! sometimes scenes were reshot, songs were removed for copyright violations, etc. so viki staff would re-upload the video without notifying anyone until a new viewer noticed something was not quite right. On the Subtitle team page, you can see who the channel manager is. If you click on the avatar, you can check whether the person is still active (will have a gem showing a renewed QC) and recent contributions. If it has been more than a month or so for recent contributions, that person is no longer active. Then check out the Chief editor – listed as “Moderator” without a language designation or on older dramas as an English mod and see if any are active. Either the Chief Editor or the Channel Manager are your best bets for moving segments around. It’s a delicate job and we want to make sure we don’t lose subtitles in multiple languages.
What was done then? When I saw something like that, that extended beyond a few segments, I contacted a staff member and gave them the range of time to move said segments. (e.g. episode 9 21:00 to 40:00 , +16.5 secs, 48:15 to 1:06:10 -3 secs ). That’s too much work for volunteers to do, when staff has access to the subtitle files and this task literally takes seconds once they pull up the file. I dread to imagine the sheer amount of time spent on such things.
Usually this de-synchronization is systematic. It’s enough to say that segment timings are off in this-and-this episode. Nobody expects the volunteers to do it manually.
Believe it or not, early on, viki used to let any segmenter adjust an entire video but since 2011, we have asked the staff to shift stuff so many tenths of a second left or right in a video.
