I receive applications for some drama the project finder put at 2nd position or something rather often. However, I don’t even have enough releases for the 10 people I have, so they can translate the series on a regular basis.
Usually I encourage them therefore to join the forum, the German subbing community and/or participate in dramas that are actually recruiting. Therefore, team sizes here are usually more or less fixed and people don’t ask either. However, you are often happy to have even found 8-12 people.
In one drama, they added about 79 Spanish subtitlers to the team. That’s hardly 2 parts in 2 months, or something. <.<
I think that’s more like it. Certainly, it might be the case that someone who translates this stuff here for years has better knowledge about, e.g. how to address someone or drama-specific terms. However, I wouldn’t expect them to be necessarily better or worse than a beginner, facing genres that require either knowledge or quite a bit of research. Furthermore, someone with a background related to translating etc. may have a different starting point as well.
Still, some people probably won’t ever meet a certain level, since it’s rather difficult to increase their skill to express themselves in their own native language. However, this is even more difficult if it’s a secondary etc. language. These people will still find a place though, because the community is too small, some won’t check, or some moderators may have issues in that respect themselves as well. I find it more worrying though if everyone expects to be able to edit well. Basic issues can be prevented with add-ons checking grammar or spelling mistakes, though (as long as you can still distinguish between false positives here).
In middle-sized communities it’s often not about selecting the best subtitlers but about finding enough in the first place.
I don’t know if some guidelines are really able to reflect everyone’s reality on Viki. Furthermore, it came to my attention that in some language communities volunteers are closely monitored, while it’s not the case in others. Personally, I’m not sure what to think about this. While it could he helpful, I think it can as well turn into establishing misleading ‘rules’ on their own.
The “Options” choice (#1 on image) becomes visible when you start playback on Viki’s player.
I also like to have a black background for the subs (#4). That helps show white subs really clearly. On my Smart TV, it’s translucent black and not opaque so the setting lets some background show through the black colour.
I am not new to Viki, but I am fairly new to the ‘technical’ aspects of behind-the-scenes as far as subtitling and editing, etc., are concerned. I’ve learned a bit thanks to the discussions here, but I was curious about something. Forgive me if this has been discussed before…
I recently finished a drama that is technically still listed as ‘on-air’, though all the episodes have now been released. This is the first time I’ve watched a drama so close to when it was actually ‘airing’, so I am not sure if what I noticed is common, but as I got to the last several (maybe 5-6) episodes, the subtitles were ‘incomplete’, and I don’t mean missing, but that sentences had no capitalization and no punctuation, as well as grammar errors such as incorrect verb tense, etc. I know, now, that there are steps from actual translation to editing to final editing, so I was wondering if this was normal, and that it is still a work in progress before a final product is visible. To clarify my question: Are subtitles released to the public in their ‘raw’ state before they are ‘polished’ by the editors?
Yes, the subtitles are shown immediately when a subtitler puts them in. It’s why shows go from 0% to 100%. So it could be that the translators subtitled the entire video, but the editors hadn’t taken a look at it yet. Another possibility is that the show came with subtitles already, and those can be very bad (such as no capitalization of sentences)
That was my assumption, but I thought I would ask. I had encountered cases of missing subtitles, but this was the first time I had seen a case like this, so I was curious. Thanks for the answer.
I suspect that this catches many viewers by surprise. It would be a good strategy to put a notice in episodes such as “Viewer warning: Subtitle editing is still in progress. The present subs may still contain a number of errors.”
That happened a little bit more than 3 months ago/close to 4? past 4 months?. That recent. FYI that might work with the subbers, but not with a CM/Moderator or Editor that can open channel, delete segments or say they edited the sub, but oddly enough the edit was done exactly like ''you/I/ us/ wrote it.
“Viewer warning: Subtitle editing is still in progress.
I think this is a really good idea.
As long as they don’t forget to erase the sentence once subtitles are done. They wrote in a drama for the first 4 minutes at least: ''This drama has no english subtitles, will add subtitles soon. The drama has all the subtitles but they forgot to delete what they wrote in the beginning. This is a first time I see this though and I didn’t bother to look who was the CM bc I’m done with the drama.
I’m always sorry to hear when anyone discusses problems they face during the subtitling process. One would think and hope that everyone has the mindset that they want to get things right for the sake of the viewers. It’s better for everyone if things are correct, right?
This may or may not be a good solution. Without having any idea how this could be accomplished, it would still be nice if there was a more central and/or more easily accessible place to learn about and be informed about the process of subtitling. Other than an awareness that subtitles take time to complete and may be missing when a show is first released, I was unaware of the rest of the process until I started reading these discussion boards. and at least I was able to get my question answered. I wonder how many casual viewers of Viki are even aware they can come here.
There is a simple way.
When an episode has been fully edited, then it is released to other languages. This gets written on the cover page (that looooong vertical image with various types of info that is on the Subtitle Team tab, just under the names of the contributors. And it gets updated as soon as a new episode is released.
So if you look there, you will know which episodes have been edited and which ones haven’t.
See the example below. It’s from the on-air show “At a Distance, Spring is Green”. If you look at the episode list, you’ll see that ten episodes are available, fully subbed in English. But here is the info that only 8 have been edited so far. This means that you can expect some mistakes in episodes 9 and 10.
This said, there is human error, so some little things can pass through the net, and may or may not be corrected post-release.
Thank you for pointing that out, but again, I don’t think it’s exactly ‘common knowledge’ or, more accurately, probably not self explanatory - meaning someone had to explain it to me, and unless you have an understanding of the inner workings of the subtitling process, it’s maybe not something a casual viewer would understand on their own. Not to mention, until recently, I watched everything exclusively on the Viki app on an ipad, and none of this information is actually on a show’s home page.
Ah, that darned app, there are so many things missing from it! Someone informed me that you cannot even see replies to comments.
And you’re right, it’s not common knowledge. We have asked Viki since forever to put some info on top of the messages, about the subtitling process etc., to avoid all the cursing. But they never listened to us.
I didn’t even realize how much of a difference there was between the app and the website until I was forced to start using the website recently due to technical issues with my app. But you’re right, I can see replies to an original comment but not my reply to a reply, and you don’t even have the option to make replies on the app.
Through a lengthy trial & error process of navigating all over the place on the website, I was able to find some of the places where you can ask questions, whether here in discussions or on the help page, but even if they had a simple link to FAQs on the Viki homepage, that seems like it would be simple but also VERY helpful. Just my two cents. I realize, after reading so many discussions, that getting things changed is probably a long shot at best.
New question: I am an English speaker and have Viki set to English, obviously, so every episode shows me what percentage is translated in English. Is this true for every language? Meaning, if I had my language set to Spanish, for example, would it actually tell me how much is subtitled in Spanish? Just curious, because knowing how much is subtitled is pretty simple with the percentages, at least for me in English.
It depends on the language you use to watch your dramas. I could change my interface to Korean, but the episodes still show the EN subtitles percentage because I watch dramas with English subs. It changes if I change the subtitle language.
Yes. However, if an episode hasn’t been translated into Spanish, it shows the English percentage as a default. For example, I subtitle into Dutch, so I often put the subtitles in Dutch because I like to see the progress. And the picture underneath is what I see when an episode is subtitled partly and when an episode doesn’t have subtitles in Dutch yet.
Basic issues can be prevented with add-ons checking grammar or spelling mistakes, though (as long as you can still distinguish between false positives here).
