There are much more viewers than subbers on Viki, so the chances are great that some will complain. However, maybe there are a lot of viewers on Viki who would also like to volunteer as subber, but they don’t know where to start or they don’t know what to expect, since the subbing progress isn’t transparant at all.
The smart people might find the way to the Project Finder, only to see a bunch of variety shows, show highlights and original content. Those shows aren’t popular at all with most of the more experienced subbers, so for a newbie subber it’s of little use to start working there if she wants to improve. So then she would go to a show she likes and see if subs are needed. But the process of subbing she cannot see at all.
Most of the language moderators will lock the episodes as soon as the team has completed subbing and nowadays most new drama’s are designated channels, which are automaticly locked for anyone not belonging to the team. So new and curious people cannot go into subbing editor anymore to explore and see if it would be somethng for them. Of course, some of them would start subbing right away, because they don’t know any better. That’s why I also think it’s good to lock the episodes, however it does make everything much more ‘mysterious’ for potentially interested new volunteers.
Let’s say a new Vikian who has contirbuted zero subs yet sees an interesting show from 2015. She notices that the subs in her native language aren’t complete yet, but they are working on it. She can tell, because 2 days ago the episode was 28% done and now it’s 69%. She likes to help contributing, but she has no idea how many people are already working in the team. Maybe the moderator is doing everything on her own and can use any help, or maybe there is already a team working hard but they got delayed a little. Maybe the moderator already has 1 or 2 newbies on the team and prefers no new subbers anymore to be able to explain everything properly.
There are only two ways to become a subber: Either get recruited by a language mod or send a message to a mod that you’d like to help subbing in her team. Some mods posts on their profile they are recruiting but you wouldn’t see it unless you visit their profile.
I don’t know for other languages, but for Dutch about 95% of the subbers don’t volunteer but get recruited by a moderator. And if I know that a user is Dutch, but she has zero subs, I’m not gonna ask her to participate in a project, since I don’t know if she is interested in subbing or just wants to be a viewer.
Of course, I know here on Viki discussions is the 'Want to subtitle? Let people know! disuccision where people can say they want to sub. If I were new here, I wouldn’t want to use that discussion, because then I would feel obliged to take any project they offered. Even if I didn’t like it, cause I said I wanted to help, didn’t I? I’d rather pick the show I want to contribute to or have a moderator tell me, ‘I have these 3 shows for you, are you interested in one of these?’
In the list of volunteers every video, you see the users who contributed the most. That is very interesting if you’re one of them, but for the rest of the people it doesn’t matter much. I think it would be much better if there were to be put a list of every (officially added) subber categorized under their respective languages. So, if you would want to see all the French subbers for a show subbed in Arabic, English and French, you’d go to ‘French subbers’ and a list with all the subbers would appear.
This will also give mods of other channels the chance to see if the subbers they want to recruit aren’t already too busy.If such a list would exist, the moderator can easily see whether subber A is already working on two projects or on five, and thus mods can decide to recruit someone who’s only busy with one project now.
Some people just say yes to any project they get offered and because of that their older projects get neglected and might even get abondoned over time.
This became a longer post than I thought and I don’t think I really gave a solution to the problem (is that really possible?), so I’ll do a TL:DR here.
- I think the step for new Vikians to become subbers will become smaller if the subbing progress is made more transparent. ( I don’t exactly how though)
- It would be better if all the subbers of a certain show were listed in the subtitiling team under their respective languages. So that moderators could recruit subbers for their team better.