Wow, you managed to trim them so much compared to a year ago when you had a looong list! I really admire your dedication and hard work. (Of course you also have Saimdang, right? But still 7 is awesome)
I am now trying to do this to my crafts projects too. I am finishing a crochet square blanket started many years ago, but when I went to the shop yesterday, the main colour was discontinued, so now I have to think ways of making do with the rest of the colours. This will teach me not to leave projects for so long!
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@irmar
My dear my long list of forty or so projects I had was about projects I was only greek subber or only greek moderator. For some of them we lost the licence, some are fan channels so I have stopped working on them since we will lost them afterall. So now my list of series I am the greek moderator and need greek subtitlers are 31. When I have started volunteering here I didnât know its better to recruit first the teams and then ask for the position of greek mod. so when I encountered a series I liked that didnât have a greek moderator or subtitlers I asked it. I did that because I thought to myself if I find willing people to help why not give them more options to choose what they would like to translate. Moreover some I have taken because people asked me to take over since they were abandoned by their previous moderator.
Now that I have gained more experience here I understand that it wasnât the wisest move because I appear as a hoarder. I really tell you if someone contacts me and asks me to give them one or more of the series I am the greek moderator to work themselves I will gladly agree.
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Yes, I know what you mean. I also said âyesâ as a subber to anybody who asked me, at the beginning!
Another thing is that Greek subbers are really really few. AND most of the series are not available in our region and not all subbers are QC.
I was just browsing the list of series and films you published the other day as potentially interesting for Greeks, and 99% of them were not viewable for non QCs. (I was checking them one by one because I have a friend/dance pupil whom I convinced to come to viki especially to work on my project Misaeng:Incomplete Life, but she has to achieve 3000 subs quickly. I finally found two of my films and another one, so weâre more or less good)
Even shows from 2008 are behind vikipass and that is enough of an obstacle, but if you add to this the region restrictions, then the list of content one can actually see becomes really small.
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Why donât you get your friend to help Mahoula caption? She should be QCâd in a couple hours.
@lutra started this thread by asking the rhetorical question, what is needed for a good edit?
I edit exclusively Korean to English drama. My first priority is understanding by the viewer, including the other language subbers. This is entirely subjective â If I canât understand the dialogue I assume no one else can. Sometimes I can guess that the subber made a mistake in typing the word and that changing one letter in a word in the English sentence makes the sentence fit the plot perfectly. Sometime I write to the subber. And when I am lucky, I have the script or a kind subber who input the Korean so I can re-translate the sentence. Sometimes I have to listen many times to the dialogue, and then look up each word in the dictionary, hoping that the dictionary is going to give me alternate meanings to one or more of the keywords which will make the subtitle fit perfectly into the context of the story. And sometimes t I decide whether a parenthetical expression or a short explanation of some aspect of the subtitle which assists understanding by the consumer would be useful.
My second priority is getting the meaning as correct as possible. Or course this is essential to the first priority. As someone who will probably be forever a mere student of Korean, I have to rely first of all on great translation editors and second on constantly looking in the Korean to English dictionary. In order to get the meaning correct, I have to often guess at the screenwriterâs/ directorâs intent because the Korean dialogue is so context dependent and because the language leaves out a lot of clues as to number, gender, tense, direct or indirect object etc. It is not at all unusual for both the subbers and the editors not to be sure about whether the character is talking about several people or just one, whether the person(s) is(are) male or female etc. Often I figure out little details like that many minutes in the episode after the sentence was uttered. And the way we work one person in a part at a time, the subber in the earlier part doesnât know what the subber in a later part knows. So I cannot fault a subber for putting the wrong sex or number in a sub. I learned in linguistics that essentially for tenses in Korean there is past and non-past. So the same verb might be correctly interpreted as present or future â we just know for sure it is non-past.
Third priority is consistency with respect to the plot and perhaps an earlier version of a scene. Sometimes its hard to work on consistency because after I listen to the dialogue several times, I realize the director put a slightly different cut in the flashback â so then I have to decide, do I make the subs perfectly consistent, or should we be true to what was said in the flashback even if it is different than the original scene. Consistency in naming of places and characters, of who did what, of dates, etc.
Fourth in priority is correctness in grammar, spelling and punctuation because as a viewer it does irritate me when I see errors in any of these aspects of writing. Within this category, I prefer whenever possible to have the subtitles follow standard English word order: Subject, verb, object. Because Korean is Subject Object Verb and also there is tendency to put time and place at the beginning of the sentence, the Korean sentence is in fact like the examples Irmar wrote: sub 1: Director, Director, so that you can travel on the path of righteousness, to tell you good things,
sub 2: isnât that my duty? Because our segmenters usually donât understand Korean and some tend to end a segment every time a pause is encountered, the subtitlers often write subs in phrases instead of sentences. I would rewrite the subtitle as: Isnât it my duty to tell you good things so that you can travel on the path of righteousness? It is highly likely the Korean was something like this: first segment: âRighteousnessâ path on Director so can travel to Director to tell thing.â Second segment: " my responsibility is not?" Rather than saying you, the speaker correctly showed deference to the director by saying Director. The subtitler, faced with the word director twice in the Korean, put them both into the subtitle. For the second segment, (sub 2), there was no pronoun âthatâ but the subtitler inserted it.
âIn this home, for a very long time, like when you were newlyweds, hold each otherâs hands tightly, and enjoy a happy life.â You see how the sentence begins with place and time? "Hold each otherâs hands tightly as you did when newly wed and enjoy a happy life in this home for a very long time. " Korean: this home in very very long time newlywed when like each otherâs hands tightly hold and happily live.
Some of you have written that the subber should go back and check their own work. I have an opposing philosophy with respect to the subber spending time on grammar, spelling and punctuation. If the subber has the meaning correct and has a finite amount of time to contribute, I prefer they sub a lot and leave the grammar, spelling and punctuation to be fixed up by the editors. Far far too often, I see perfectly written sentences in English in a K drama which is dead wrong as to meaning or consistency with the plot. Those perfectly written sentences are going to lead the other language subbers and the viewers completely astray. So if the meaning is correct I am definitely not going to write to any subber for mistakes in grammar, spelling or punctuation. if the subber chooses one correct English definition of a Korean word when another definition is a better choice, I am not going to write to the subber about that choice.
Because I know my knowledge of Korean is incomplete, I rely on the translation editors to go over my subbing from raw Korean to English â I look forward to those edits because the edits increase my knowledge â and I am very very happy everytime anything I subbed withstood the translation edit and was left unchanged. Every day I get the âah hah experience for something I subbed â so thatâs what the screenwriter really meant!â when I review the edits of what i subbed. And when I chose to use a particular English meaning of a Korean word, when several alternatives are available, and the meaning I chose shows up in the next episode, i feel very gratified!
@irmar and @mahoula â if you find a good newbie subber who needs to be QC to help sub a current drama â after they have done a some subs (low hundreds in past six months is enough) on something older, you can write to viki staff and have them designated temporary QCâs to work on a specific drama.
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As I said before, there are only a couple of these shows which are open for non QCs and non vikipass holders, and those are not for captioning - and from looking at them a little, I donât think they would be of any interest to her. I donât want my friend to leave viki running, the idea is to lure her with exciting stuff to keep her in my teams as she has good knowledge of languages.
But this has been solved. If she translates my two classic films and one more itâs done.
You sound like an excellent candidate for chief editor or language moderator!
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I donât think I ever wrote to anyone? I did get annoyed about some idâs that do not subtitle completely/comprehensively.
I think I am a consistency nazi when I want to be one⊠I like to have the OST match the dialogue and everything use the same overarching words that highlight the themes. (I adopted this tendency from some senior editor IDs as I worked with them).
The time factor is kind of frustrating. I want to go faster but I cannot. A lot of my edits are usually a change of the verb or adjective. I sometimes unflip the flipped sentences (I think if it is in correct English order in a segment that is okay), but thatâs about it.
I am an editor with other editors around me, so we work together to find something that works. I didnât feel like it ever goes under-appreciated because!!! I can explain things in paragraphs and essays to my heartâs desire!!! I was always worried some connotation would be lost.
Sometimes it is because we mishear. I think in some show we were trying to figure out if it was the diaphragm or the sternum (both sound similar enough). I make sure to play them again if I wasnât sure I heard clearly. I find it hard to subtitle when the actors do not speak clearly.
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Ha ha, you wish! 
No, seriously, letâs not count our eggs before they are hatched. Letâs see if she gets hooked on Korean drama first and subtitling suits her, if she has time etc. If if if, then there is Beethoven Iâd put her in, because sheâs a pianist too and I think she will be especially interested in that.
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Well, if I would go for productivity, I would never chose editing. I would rather only make subtitles.
That means either you are pretty sure about your subs, or what?
I wonder, if every language moderator has that aspiration to tell every subber, I heard to often âplease do not demotivate the subbersâ ⊠But who asks about the motivation of an editor? Or maybe I am just not out to be one?
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That is a good point - I always told my team, if they canât do a subtitle segment just to let it be.
In earlier days when you could write posts at viki, I made one where German subbers could leave a not, when they were stuck with translation. And I always got them some choices, but left it for them to chose the ârightâ subtitle. The other thing was that I told them to translate carefully, that they should take their time, as with time they would get faster anyway.
I had that too, but was lucky enough that there was always someone to reach out from the translators, who would give me feedback about it, and some changed it because they realised that for the â3rdâ languages it could be misleading. Because while translating they had a mental picture in mind, but they realised that the subtitle sometimes didnât carry the meaning, they thought it would deliver.
Other things that irritate me are often the usage of US dollar, while it is talked about won, or renminbi ⊠I never understand why when a drama/movie plays in Korea you would use US dollar in the subtitles, when itâs about the Korean currency.
There could be a lot to talk about the quality of subs. I often hear from others that they are not watching in their native language, German, but stay with the English subtitles, because they canât handle it, when the subs are lacking. I actually do the same. Then I am asking myself that as well, for whom do we sub? Are viewers just accepting the lacking subs, for better something than nothing. Or, they donât care about better subs for whatever reason, or do they actually not use them either âŠ?
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I am lazy so I like to leave the original currency. I have heard it is viki who wants us to create fake viki dollars.
For larger sums like tens of billions of won, I write in parentheses around how much it is in dollars based on the dayâs currency conversions. I know on some teams they will convert all the native currency into target language currency and use some kind of conversion.
The won is a weaker currency than the dollar so about 100 million won is not 100,000 USD but 87,000 ish. Euro is stronger than the dollar. 20 Euros are about 30 dollars (based on the yesstyle discussion).
The rule of thumb for renminbi is divide it by 7 to get USD.
I think for these reasons viki prefers fake viki dollars and euros. 1,000 won is always one fake viki dollar (even though the won was stronger than the dollar in the 80s. I tracked the currency conversion for reply 1988) or 1 fake viki euro.
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It depends on whoâs subtitle you edit, or how your moderators oppinion is about it. If the subber is protectiv about the subs, then you will get a taste, because you are âstealingâ their subs. Which I find nonsense, since minor mistakes or typos could easily be corrected by themselves, but then again, they say I wonât read my subs a second time. So I do not get those âfast typersâ have a problem with the edit work of others since it is needed. When they take the risk that there are mistakes in the subtitles, okay. But shouldnât they accept that another person will fix it?
But it is one think to have some mistakes, in an episode or in a part of 10 minutes run, but how about in every 1 to 2 lines?
And I may talk here about translating from English to German, two languages that are way more similar, than Korean and [quote=âirmar, post:7, topic:15607â]
For instance, some subbers make a child speak in the same language as a company president as a young cosmopolitan clubber, as a peasant ahjumma.
[/quote]
We would say that is already high-level subbing, I would be happy, if they would master the honorifcs only. I remember, I had a lot of fun once subbing the lines of an old lady ranting, I put all those old words in her mouth my granny would have used.[quote=âirmar, post:7, topic:15607â]
My goal is subtitles as close in meaning
[/quote]
Dito, here. First the meaning, second the possibility for the viewer to take that subtitle in in the amount of time it is segmented.
Me too, I will translate metaphors âpicture-likeâ it was used in the sentence and only look for a substitute, if that metaphors is totally not working in my native language. But I will add a note if necessary.
Oh, donât remind me, I saw subtitles in German throughout the drama with the informally âduâ being used for you since âŠ
The informally you is tranlated into âduâ, but the formally you should be translated to âSieâ. In historical it is yet another level. And yes no emperor will say âokay or yepâ, unless it is a real slapstick comedy.[quote=âirmar, post:7, topic:15607â]
I donât assume anything.
[/quote]
I do neither, and I also am not a fan, when subtitlers give two options for the viewer, as why would there be a part of a dialog be in brackets. Itâs not a thought, itâs not that the character says two different things. So why? I will always go for one line that fits the situation the best.
(Oops, midnight, I need to hurry a bit ⊠Would have to add more but will leave it at that.)
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I always try to keep the won f.e., in the drama My Name Is Kim Sam Soon, there is the infamous amout about 50 milllion won, which becomes later a dogâs name. So this joke and the repeated talk about that amount would totally get lost in translation, when I would use dollar/euro.
That viki wants it this way, is a first for me and I am here now for about 7 years and yes the amount in the original language will never change, but you never know what will happen at the stock market âŠ
By âproductivityâ, I donât mean âquantityâ.
Re: money conversion.
I think they should put everything in won and then each language can put their own currency in parenthesis - including the English.
Because it makes zero sense to have dollars in a European or a Middle Eastern country or whatever.
Sometimes I have to convert dollars in won first, in order to eliminate the dollars and put the won and euros on my subtitle. (The fact that dollars are usually lazily converted by taking off three zeros helps in this) But I would be happier if the Ko-En subbers and English editors had left the won in the first place.
Generally, Ko-En subbers often only think of the English audience and seem to forget about us Other Language subbers who have no use for references to US stuff.
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You are a good editor and it shows the way you are so concern with certain issues here. The biggest disadvantage you have in my opinion is not having enough German subbers in your team and the ones you do have, have grammatical errors issue, Iâm guessing.
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This is why I try to get the Koreanisms across whenever possible. Won over dollar 119 and 112 over 911. I also am not sure how to subtitle this eighth grader? Should I write second form middle schooler??
Today I felt I need to study more Korean (chinese characters) because I am lost in some subtitles of Chinese drama 
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I see that point different, if I would watch a Norwegian movie for instance, I would like the usage of the original Norwegian kroner and not get it converted into Euros, just because I am living in Germany. Norway doesnât have no Euro. I would want to stay with the local currecy. So I would take away the pound from the Brits, ⊠I do add for those interested under the dialog how much the money is, most of the time, were in the English subtitle you rarely get offered the original amount.
Well even an old movie goes with a title âFĂŒr eine Handvoll Dollarsâ, in America it did run with "A Fistful of Dollar ". Would it made have sense to name it "- A Handful of D-Mark " that would be the currency back then in Germany, so what if the currency you translated it in getâs changed? So now you would have changed it into âA Handful of Euroâ. That wouldnât make sense to me âŠ
I think on this topic we will not find a consensus.
I do that with Oppa and Ahjumma at time, if itâs kind of repeatedly in use, with explaining, at times I replace it at a person were itâs only a one time usage and an adaquat replacement is possible.
What is sometime hard to translate, the part about âare you talking informally to me?â? For an editor what do you do, when the dialog is used with the informal âduâ, because someone thought itâs about working buddies and now, one of them feel disrespected that the other one is dropping from formal to informal, but the subber is already at informal and now you could only get to the point of writing in an offensive manner, with indignities ⊠Or go back all the way to put the form of address prior to this dialog.
It would be nice though if everyone could enjoy the dramas/movies here in their native language.