So … how quickly can people read?
It has been proved by recent studies that, as people become more used to subtitles, their reading speed increases, so the old character limit (42 per line and 2 lines per sub) is no longer relevant.
But viewers are not a homogeneous block, so their reading speed differs.
Most of the big platforms prefer catering to the lowest denominator (cater to the slowest readers) to be on the safe side.
Why? Because these huge platforms have very diverse content. Many of their users watch content from different countries but mostly content of their own country and language, and only occasionally foreign films and series, so they are not used to subtitles that much.
On the contrary, Viki viewers come here to consume East Asian content, and that’s all that is offered here. Some of the viewers might be Asian themselves, those people don’t need subtitles, so we’re not concerned about them. All the rest of us do. And we have become very good at reading them!
Therefore, Viki should not ape other platforms. It is a unique platform with unique viewers and has its own rules.
What Viki contributors had to say
Here is a past thread on this topic. How quickly can a viewer read subtitles?
It also depends on segment length
I would like to highlight an important observation by user piranna on that thread:
On NFLX, the subtitle duration on screen lasts less than Viki and a single-line sub is preferred over a 2-line sub. From this, they might use less seg combination and have to compress subtitles. The number of characters is limited by the segment duration.
Yes, a segment can last from 1 to 7 (or even 8) seconds, and obviously the character limit cannot be the same in all cases! If it’s one second, the limit should be even shorter. We usually test by running the video and making sure there’s enough time to read comfortably, otherwise we shorten the subtitle.
Some of the relevant studies:
English is shorter than most other languages
English words of Saxon/Norse/Germanic origin are short, one or two syllables. Those are an important part of the English lexicon (33%, but if you count the compounds and phrasal verbs they become much more than that!) So, typically, the average English text is shorter than a text of a Romance language and also Greek - and probably German as well. The same sentence, with the same number of words, will have more characters and be overall longer.
I know this as a professional translator for decades, and that’s why we all always quote a price counted by the page of the finished translation, not by the page of the original. In a book, for example, the finished translation from English was always a few pages more.
In subtitles, the percentage of short words is even more, because usually the longer, Latin derived words are the technical and specialized ones, or the most cultured ones. Daily conversation has a higher percentage of short, Norse words. Subtitles being mostly conversation (and not scholarly articles), have the most short words of any kind of translation.
This makes the new limits it a nightmare for Other Language teams. The English pre-subs will obviously be within the limits, but when the OL teams start translating them, they will immediately see the problem!
Is Viki really copying what other platforms do?
Not exactly. NFL says it is preferable to stick to a maximum of around 42 characters per line and 2 lines per subtitle, however it doesn’t enforce precise limits, except in languages like Korean where a character is a whole syllable and Chinese where a character is a whole word. But it must be noted that their segments are typically shorter too, and they don’t use extensions as we do (i.e. the subtitle stops exactly when the actor stops speaking, while on Viki, whenever possible, we have a 1-second extension to give the time to read comfortably).
So, is this a case of Viki “being more royal than the king”, as we say in Greek?
What will happen if Viki doesn’t listen to us?
We will tell the segmenters to chop the segments more (into smaller ones). That’s what will happen. They won’t mind, I think, because they will get greater contribution numbers.
Yes, I know, it’s cheating. But if you make us do it with absurd rules, we will find a way to do our job properly despite them.
Exactly.
Forced localization
The last point trangstar made is very important, because it will force us towards localization. We won’t be able to include any foreign words or concepts anymore, since there will be no way to explain what they are to the new viewers in a note. Instead, we’ll have to substitute with our local language’s words and concepts (which may not match at all) or with a generic word instead of a precise one.
“We will go to Lotte world” becomes “we will go to an amusement park” and
“He is running for the Blue House” becomes “he is running for president”.
All the unique Chinese idioms, proverbs and 4-character sayings will have to be substituted with English ones. Sometimes it’s not easy to remember the right English proverb, so what will happen is that the translation will just “explain” the meaning, which is not so impactful.
This is a huge change to the whole Viki translation style, which will completely lose its flavour and become flat and boring like all the other translations we have been mocking.
Counting the formatting is not fair!
I have been told that the html tags also count as characters. Thus, just putting italics means you lose 6 characters!
(Oh yes, they will reply to this that normally they wanted to put a limit of just 94 characters, but they were nice and put 100 to account for that… 
)
Disrespect
Viki has been saying how important volunteers are to them. Most of us know that this is just lip service.
We didn’t even deserve an official announcement about this. We just found out. Like being fired and finding out because you go to work and finding your things in a box and your computer pass…word changed.