I am just curious why some dramas are subtitled only part way through series? or I will start to get into a drama then the drama just stops getting subtitled thereby stopping me from watching. I like to watch new dramas but am hesitant to do it for fear that halfway through they will just stop subtitling it. I have learned now to look through all the episodes before watching older dramas to make sure all the episodes are subtitled. it also gets quite irritating when subtitling is only 96% done or less as it gets to hard ti fill in the unsubtitled parts.
I would also like to add to my original post. I am not complaining but am more curious. when volunteers do subtitling and I notice that an episode isnāt complete (90% or 95%) they had taken time to subtitle music but never finished the dialogue. would it not be more time saving to just subtitle the dialogue and forgoing the time it take to do the lyrics? as a viewer I sometime get frustrated only because they took their precious time they had to add lyrics to songs while (sometimes) important dialogue is missing. I would rather them skip the songs if it means they have more time to do the dialogue of the show. and to be honest as a fan of kpop and jpop I listen to the music all the time without knowing (or caring) what the lyrics are itās all about the rhythm and beat and doesnāt really take away from the drama if you donāt know the lyrics.
Your best option is to do what I do bc like you, I have started a few dramas and by the 11th episode guess what? no more subtitles are available and of course, CM is inactive and you get no where here trying to find info.
So now, I do a few steps: check if all episodes are there suppose the drama has 16 episodes I go to the last episode and check if the english subtitles are there at least 90%. If I see no subs in last episode I donāt even bother to watch the first episode.Let me tell you 96% done is not bad at all bc the main thing is the ending scene subbed if not you are lost in the next episode.
This is so common here now that Iām making a list of the dramas that are only halfway bc this is getting so ridiculous now and I hope you do the same maybe the site can get a team to finish the subs and we get closure.
I donāt even bother watching the first episode unless Iām 100% sure is fully subbed and 90% is good enough for me even 80% bc at least I wonāt be left hanging with no hope of closure to see the end.
I remember I wanted to see a taiwanese drama ending and it took me 3 months but this nice girl did the subs in english from me. I told her just give me 15 minutes from the end scene and at least 10 from the beginning bc in between is sometimes crap. I finally got closure that I saw the ending. I swear to myself I would not go through that ever again and believe me, I donāt.
Subtitling is done by volunteers. If the drama or movie did not interest subbers enough that they would stick around to complete the series, thereās nothing you can do about it. Last year viki got licenses late on lots of dramas that were between three months and one year old and through fate I was suddenly chief editor of about seven of these older dramas as well as three on air dramas. There are a finite number of subtitlers from Korean to English so there are simply not enough people to cover all the on air channels and the older ones all at once. can you imagine having over one hundred hours of episodes uploaded over a two week period? Therefore we subbed them slowly giving priority to current dramas. Even now there are just two more episodes to complete before all seven older dramas will be completed.
Iām glad you took the time to explain your situation but I still feel that is not right to leave them unfinished. I know the site is very short on Korean to English subbers but to leave a drama half way done to start another one makes absolutely no sense to me.
The way I am I would never leave a project until it was finished. Besides, at this site we have way too many dramas halfway for months and even a year and people requesting/begging for subtitles. If you was in that situation, why not ask for more help? Iām sure someone else could have taken over what you couldnāt cover.
Why not recruit korean/english newbies/subtitler anxious and willing to work? That means that whenever you went to another drama your took the whole team with you to start working in the new release drama?
I know we have people here waiting around to manage and work in a drama new or old. I bet they would love to take over what you couldnāt do. Iām not getting this at all. So there was no way you could release those other dramas by saying is too much for me and i canāt do it, can you find someone else to do such and such drama?
If the subbers donāt like the drama that doesnāt give them the right to stop working on the drama. I have worked on dramas that I 100% hate but i stick to it to the end and finished what I had to do, whether I like it or not. Is a matter of principles you commit to something you go full speed ahead till the end and finish what you need to do. Is part of the responsibility we have when joining a team. No wonder I have seen so many dramas unfinished and with no hope of closure if you do it and the other one do it too is a never ending cycle. Meantime we have so many posting here in discussion willing to work as a subber and receiving no answer. SMH
What am I missing? Once you are assigned, no one else can touch your project/drama?
Thatās awesome!
It was a stroke of bad luck that you happened to be swamped with such an unexpected workload all at once. And I know Korean-English subbers are so few and so overworked, that itās very difficult to interest them in older thingsā¦
On the other hand, people get so mad if you donāt subtitle on-air dramas in a timely manner. The insults, the arrogant, entitled behaviour of those people is really something else. As if subtitlers were their paid employees!
I am also a person that honours her commitments, and I did complete a drama I really hated (Typically Women) because I had committed to do it, but I felt so miserable thatā¦ never again! Now in old dramas I make sure Iāve watched a couple of episodes and read reviews as well as recaps of the ending before committing to translating or moderating it. Life is too short. We already have millions of unpleasant things we HAVE to do in our outside lives/jobs: at least here on viki we should work on something we enjoy and believe in.
cgwm808 and her team always do a fantastic job in all the dramas segmenting, subbing etcā¦I donāt take that away from her. I was just wondering why she was stuck with all this dramas and wondered if there was no other options for her only she can answer that for me
She explained that she had asked for these in various time moments, but these dramas did not get licensed when they were on-air. Then, some time after they were finished, and when she had probably forgotten all about it, suddenly viki bought those licenses.
It has happened to me too, with āBring it on ghostā which aired this summer. I was supposed to be Italian subtitler for that. It didnāt get the license, we all forgot about it and suddenly, a month ago, viki got the license. I was full of other things, so as the moderator forgot about her promise to me, I didnāt remind her. 
).
All of us are busy with a mixture of new and old: some on-air drama or two and at the same time, little by little, behind the scenes, we get on with some older ones, to be done in a more leisurely way since there is no pressure.
Even if she had said āI am resigning from my post, leaving those to other CMsā, do you think that the Korean-English subtitlers (who are the core problem because of their scarcity) wouldnāt magically appear? Those other hypothetic CMs would have the very same problem she had.
I once needed a Ko-En translator to translate 25% of an episode to finish a whole series and I begged everyone I knew for WEEKS until I found a kind soul to do the job! My post must still be here in Discussions.
All volunteers prefer the fun and excitement of on-air. I speak from experience. I never had trouble gathering a team for on-air stuff, even if it was less than stellar. But when I was recruiting for Misaeng: An Incomplete Life, which is arguably the very best k-drama ever made, and I only found 4 people, with me 5, so Iāll have to translate two parts to finish one episode per week and be finished in 20 weeks, 5 months!
Andā¦ I am in three other old projects, which all lag, with contributors (and CMs in some cases) absent for many weeks, no matter how many messages I send to urge them to take action.
Mind you, Iām not saying itās a good thing, far from it! Iām just saying that thatās what it is and we have to live with it.
And yet, despite this situation, with patience and persistence, these seven dramas she took alongside her other commitments are almost finished!
So no, I donāt think āother optionsā would make the work quicker. If anything, a senior contributor like cgwm808 has access to many more people to ask than you, me or any other of the less experienced and busy CMs.
I can picture her asking members of a team she was working for an on-air project with: āCan you also please do some small part of that old project whenever you have some time?ā Something like that. In that case, a person cannot refuse, because tomorrow he or she will have to ask for a favour (to be made moderator in some drama), so he or she wants to be in the CMs good books. Something like that. In Greek thereās a saying āOne hand washes the other and both of them wash the faceā (Or am I thinking in a too Mediterranean way? LOL!)
You brought memories to me from my 90 year old grandma (RIP) wise wonderful Puertorican woman who loved that saying and always helped and gave so much to those in need. She did kept it at āāUna mano lava la otraāā āāOne hand washes the otherāā never heard the face part from her.
One time 40 something years ago(I was a pre-teen) there was a rice shortage in Puerto Rico since she worked at a store she already knew that was going happen so she bought and saved plenty of rice bags. When shortage came and when people had no rice in their house to eat, she would give from our supply of rice and we asked her why she was doing that and she kept repeating the saying:āāOne hand washes the otherāā today is them in need, tomorrow it could be us.āāā
Oh, that was so sweet, thanks for sharing!
Although that beautiful expression in Greece is also used to mean less pure things. Like a politician giving a job to your son and you gathering votes for him, or a corrupt official and a corrupt businessman exchanging favours. But the original meaning is also used.
@angelight313_168
When I originally signed on as Chief Editor for those 7 dramas, they werenāt going to all be broadcast at the same time and I was interested in each of the projects. They had several different channel managers too. But when viki got the licenses, the dramas had been fully broadcast. I was still interested in working on the dramas so I did my best to recruit among the finite number of Korean to English subbers ā and sometimes I did write to people that I certainly would like the subbers to come for the whole series but even if they came and worked on only one episode, I would be grateful. For each of the seven, I was lucky that there have been one or two people who have worked on every episode ā perhaps not every week but whenever they had a little extra time. With consistent editing even if the subbers on the last few episodes were not the same people as at the beginnning. we could make the dialogue consistent throughout the series. And because I was on some very popular on-air dramas, I was turning away some new subbers because the on-air shows were getting subbed really fast. I donāt like to make a team too large so I do turn away qualified people at a certain point because I donāt want to disappoint people who volunteered to subtitle, come on upload day a few hours after upload and find the whole episode subbed week after week. So when the popular on-air dramas were full, I offered to newbies the option of working on the āolderā channels. Another factor was that most of the popular on-air channels are not accessible to newbies who arenāt QCās ā some had never subbed before ā and some older channels were accessible. With zero subs to their names they couldnāt even become QC trainees. So I would suggest the newbie look over the older channels and see which ones they could access. And in that way the older channels got subbed. Having gone through the experience, I can never fault a CM for a drama in any language for not completing rapidly if the license was gotten late. But I do agree that the mods and CM should continue for months or possibly years to complete the series.
And I really dislike it when someone is on everything current but few dramas ever get completed in that someoneās language. I think for someone watching in the less popular languages itās better to see a series completely subbed rather than the first episodes of everything subbed and nothing else.
Well, my grandmother never mentioned the part about the face so it seems it got to my country (Puerto Rico) and she used that saying her way bc she added in spanish to that āātoday is them, tomorrow it could be usāā
We were arguing and trying to convince her to sell the rice bc we felt we could use the extra money and she was really upset about that.I feel bad now but I was young and ignorant.
I never heard that saying before but from my grandma (in spanish). She had so many saying that I can write a book. I swear, I always thought she was the one who created them but if even in Greece that saying is knownā¦lol How naive of me, in that respect.
cgwm808 Thank you so much for explaining that to me bc it makes a lot of sense now and I applaud your dedication and caring enough not to leave them unfinished no matter the hardships you had to go through.
Sadly not everyone here is as responsible as you are and I have seen dramas with no english subs after the 5th. or 11th. episode and I read the viewers comments begging for subtitles and is in a way heartbreaking to me for I went through that with a few dramas here. They just left them w/o subs and my need of closure got to a point that I wrote to everyone I could begging for the subs. I remember it was for a taiwanese drama titled SPRING ( I havenāt checked if they still have it here) I waited 8 months to see the english subs completed and have peace and closure finally.
Then it happened again with a Chinese drama and that one is here on viki. I saw the ending again recently and oddly enough checked and saw it has none of my spanish subs I did on the drama, so Iām guessing they redid the whole drama or something bc it does have much better English subtitles. I believe the drama was dumped bc the ending was such a frustrating mess. But I got closure and it felt really good.
I feel now things will get even worse since viki will upload the dramas at a higher/faster paceā¦ The newbies are not longer accepted or included at all unless they are QC or gold QC. That doesnāt make sense to me bc the idea of change was to have more working teams/helping hands available for dramas. Those newbies also helped you in the older dramas. You were able to use newbies before, that seems impossible now. I also read a few CM left viki for good. I feel the work will just keep piling up bc there is so much the few of you can do.This doesnāt look good at all.
On that note, there is a 2012 drama, Can We Get Married with Sung Joon, that I really wanted to watch, which only lacks English subs in the three last episodes. And it features very popular actors etc., so itās strange that it never got finished. I am sure Jasmine, the CM, is struggling and I do wish someone lent her a helping hand. Itās too bad I donāt know Koreanā¦
My screenshot was taken today, soā¦ yes, weird.
I sure didnāt know this was an ongoing thing. maybe if Viki seen all these complaints they would do something, be it licensing or whatever!
Maybe people are very spoiled? Back in 2005-2009 if you had English subtitles, great!!! If they were missing too bad!
But viki the site got fewer licenses so there was less work too! Alsoā¦ it is really hard to always hit 100%. On my channel I need help filling in the last ones because I cannot hear them.
I have always wondered why the subtitler preferences arenāt taken into account if the site wanted English subtitles.
For example the really popular chi-eng dramas get subbed really fast but most shows are a one worker deal. There are so many shows and not a lot of these subtitlers.