Ach, it was okay just until this afternoon, I was editing an old drama. This sucks. Maybe we shouldn’t have mentioned it here.
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It’s been like that for me since yesterday.
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I’d like to give a recent example how this limitation affects the overall quality of subtitles in another language than English.
Few days ago I was translating a scene in a hospital of a modern drama. The medic said and explained some diagnosis, the effects and combined effects (plus side effects with certain medicines…). While English is very simple and often posts words randomly in a row like pearls on a necklace, German language and grammar is way more complex and needs a certain structure - like a woven carpet.
With the 100 character limit it was impossible to translate that scene into proper German.
If the scene would have been a synced version with German voice over no details would get lost (that’s btw a core reason why Germans don’t watch subtitled stuff regularly and why all our TV - and most shows on [censored by V] etc are with German synchronisation instead of German subtitles).
Germans who watch stuff without German voiceover tend to either understand the spoken language or are some kind of hardcore fans (with a certain commitment and willingly pausing a scene for reading the subtitles if necessary…)
Another aspect of this limitation is that it requires higher subtitling and translation skills because now a subtitler has to decide which content to keep and post in e.g. German and which content to drop.
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I don’t know any Chinese streaming platform that offers German subtitles yet.
It’s always English, Spanish plus some Asian languages.
For English subs you don’t need as many characters as you need for German sentences.
(I only watch stuff with English subs because German needs too many lines.
The English subs on Chinese platforms are often good or better because they fully understand the Chinese meaning and structure of Chinese language so they don’t add unecessary filler words. Very often they also focus mainly on names instead of titles (Brother, Sister etc). Sometimes they add these relations between characters in another way.
I think these translations (that I’ve seen on Chinese platforms) are either done by professional translators or by AI with proof reading (AI is very advanced now and can translate better than many people because AI knows as many languages as possible and can explain and understand different language structures, including translating from one language into another language with proper grammar structure, which is very often lost when people translate long sentences over multiple segments from English to German).
PS:
English subs very often add titles that aren’t there, e.g. in Chinese they say a simple: Yes and then on Viki it’s a Yes, Sir or whatever. Then the [German] subs might stick to English, adding stuff that’s not said in the origin version.
The Chinese translations I saw on their platforms did not add unsaid English words to Chinese dialogues.
Another aspect are typical expressions like “oh my god” or such things that are rarely used in Chinese dialogues in the way it’s used in US dialogues.
So thinking translating everything that’s written in English subs on Viki means you’d translate 100% of what’s said in Chinese is not always the case.
Then you’ll have typical Chinese metaphors, especially in fantasy and historical and its lyrics, about landscapes etc that stand e.g. for the (ancient) empire. Viki subs usually stick to the words while English subs on other platforms sometimes use the meaning behind the metaphors which can make subtitles shorter.
Another approach requires different (background) knowledge & skills that’s rarely possible for free-time hobby subtitlers.
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There are times when this is necessary. I don’t know Chinese, but for instance Korean has two different words for yes: “ne” *(pronounced deh) and “ye”. Now, the second is the respectful form. The one that a subordinate would say to his superior, soldiers to their commander, and sometimes it is said sarcastically to a friend or family member who wants to boss over you. For instance a mother to her capricious daughter “Yes, yes Mylady”.
That’s why, when translating “ye”, especially in historical dramas, we put “Yes sir”.
In Italian in those cases we write “Sissignore” instead of just “sì” (oi oi, how many more characters! I suppose we must stop translating this nuance!).
In German, "Ja” is the standard way to say “yes”. It’s neutral and can be used in virtually any situation. "Jawohl”, on the other hand, carries more emphasis. It’s like saying “Yes, absolutely” or “Yes, sir!” in English.
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In some cases the Chinese dialogue has something additional to the “yes” term, I’m not talking about these cases.
When I started to sub Chinese dramas I got support by native Chinese speakers (who know their culture, including ancient aspects) and are fluent in German and English as well.
They said that in these simple “yes” cases it’s not necessary to add something additional in German, even when it’s written like that in English.
Another aspect, that’s mainly changed in German subs compared to Chinese dialogues is the speaker’s perspective “Title” vs “I/you”.
E.g. in Chinese fantasy or historical they use their title while talking about themselves, not only the king but also a General etc. A maid talks also about herself in third person.
A person might talk about herself and another person as if she talks about two other people without being involved by herself.
In German subs we usually write “I” though and “you” or “we” instead of “title x” and “title y” like each other, we’d write I like you.
(That’s something for easier translation and viewer experience while in professional translations (synced versions) of medieval European shows/movies they keep that ancient form of speaking.)
In general I’d say such details are probably not that important for the viewers who just want to know the topic of a story and the details (it is mainly interesting for people who are into language details and historical changes of language over time).
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Oh yes, in Korean too.
“Teacher is very proud of you” (the person speaking is the teacher)
“Mom loves you very much” (the person speaking is the mother)
“Your humble servant thanks you, Your Majesty” (the person speaking is the “humble servant”)
In the first two cases, we always translate as “I”. In the third, we keep it as is.
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When talking to children or pets, western languages tend to do this, too.
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Actually, yes … because no matter how you look at it, the English won’t usually reach 150. But at least the other languages would have a bit more flexibility
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How segmenters like me feel after reversing too many segment combos when we discover one of the SEVEN pre-subbed languages exceeds 100-characters. 
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I just read an article about the Romanian subtitles on N3tflix and found that they have a limit of 42 per subtitle… 
Now I understand why those meaningless subtitles and I see the 100 limit quite decent. 
But I still want the formatting outside the limit.
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I read it is 84 per subtitle. “Around 42 per line”, “maximum 2 lines”.
Anyway, it’s probably achieved with very small choppy segments.
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They often leave out a part of the text. Sometimes important, sometimes not. For those who don’t understand the original language it’s as a guideline what’s happening. They also often cut sentences in 2 lines so you can read faster, so for me, it doesn’t really feel like the segments are too short. Others might feel differently of course.
In English, French, Italian and German (the only languages I’ve looked into), N3tflx allows 2 lines of text and 42 characters per line (a total of 84 characters). I wonder if the 42 characters you read in the article regarding Romanian is the same as this?
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I tthink it’s the same for Dutch (and probably not only on Netflix).
@marcel27 and @sweethope can probably tell us for sure.
I think it only differs for languages with different writing systems.
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For Dutch, N3tflix also uses 42 characters per line and a maximum of 2 lines:
I’m not sure, but I think other smaller screen sizes and apps impose new lines on us. In the early years of word processors (DOS era), word processors had 80 characters per line, it could have been more, but the programmers imposed this line length on themselves and often still do now. At the end of such a line there were 2 invisible characters, namely the CR (Carriage return) and LF (Line Feed). That was literally the carriage return and the feed of the paper roll 1 line up from the teletypewriter and it really had a physical limit of 80 characters, more characters did not fit on a row. You know those old FAX teletypewriters that made a lot of noise and if you didn’t screw them to the floor they would dance through the whole office when a fax came in. That they chose 84 characters could have something to do with these CR/LF characters but I don’t know for sure. I think 84 characters is a strange number. So 84 = 80 characters + 2(CR + LF). Viki has a 100 character limit and that is 16 characters more than N3tflix imposes.
The annoying thing is that not every language will be happy with 84 or 100 characters. There are languages that are very compact and with that language you can translate well in a few words, but there are also languages that need more space like German and probably Dutch.
I am in favor of the proposal to exclude the HTML formatting characters from the count and text between “[…]”, in itself that is not difficult for programmers to change unless they are dependent on all kinds of program editor libraries that they cannot or are not allowed to adjust.
Edit: changed error.
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I am new to translating, and to be honest it´s very discouraging to even try and continue to work. So let Viki translate via AI, they will put anything similar to fit the concept, but viewers will not understand. Because the main point is to translate as good as possible. But thinking of shortening when it´s not possible without totally changing the narative… I am very sad about it.
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Translating old shows will definitely be a challenge. Just focus on the newly segmented ones, the teams know the rules now and make shorter segments with less text.
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Well, perhaps it’s all a moot point anyway. I’ve been noticing the “VikiSubTeam” as a Channel Manager on many newly acquired films over the past 2 months. For the first time, the “VikiSubTeam” aka Staff is the Channel Manager on a new drama slated to premiere on Viki tomorrow: Not sure if there will be OL Mods or Segs team.
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It’s not the first time. It was also the case for Moon lovers scarlet few months ago. When the drama arrived on Viki it was written Vikisubteam in the team section then the team section disappeared. But there is subtitles in OL… We are not useful sometimes…
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