hi, @deadliftdiva_548 . i truly appreciate the warm wishes. i’ve only been here a blip compared to you and so many others but i hope you see what an special community this still is. i can’t think of any other place where members have developed such truly unique skills through their shared love of asian entertainment while building connections with others from almost every corner of the world(!!!)
i hope you will find your way back one day. until then, sending you the best of luck and good wishes. be well!
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[quote=“brendas, post:34, topic:48018”]
this means collaborating with our fellow teams to inform you in advance of a feature, functionality or change that you might be impacted by, provide you with insight into why an item was chosen (perhaps over something else), give you more context as to why that solution was chosen (maybe the other solution would have caused X to break), allow you to submit feedback on an iteration, and sharing quickly if/when something goes wrong.[/quote]
viki started out as an experiment in “crowd sourced subtitling”. From the very start in 2008, the non-producing audience started whining about the speed of subtitling. In the early days, viewers waited days, weeks or months, until there were enough competent subbers working on a title for nearly completely subbed episodes. As viki became more popular and more volunteers learned about the fun of subbing, the wait for subtitles dropped to a matter of about day to sometimes 3-4 hours for complete subbing of an episode. This drop in the wait time did not stop the whining.
The paying customer complained and threatened to leave to another site with instantaneous subbing. If the customer is in the Americas and the content owner is not a member of the Kocowa consortium which provides it’s own English, Spanish, and Portuguese subtites, there seems to be no other subscription streaming site with a variety of immediately available subtitled current Korean drama. So if the customer complains, so what? Viu produces English content rapidly but is not available in the Americas! Pirate sites which are free and available globally take their content from Viu as well as the Kocowa members and from viki. Nevertheless, afraid of losing the whiner’s subscription fees, viki adopted the policy of pre-subbing of all new to viki Korean dramas.
Nearly simultaneously, apparently because editing of English is seen as an obstacle to rapid subbing in languages other than English, channel managers are told the the subtitles may not be edited or that the subtitles have already been edited. To heck with quality control.
The “no editing” is like the fable of the Emperor’s New Clothes. Rather than bear any implied criticism when a pre-subbed subtitle is edited, viki simply informs the channel manager that no editing of English is allowed/required as “the staff will do it.”
I don’t think there was any collaboration with any volunteer, much less any advance notice regarding the decision and the reasons for it that all on-air K drama and old titles new to viki would be subbed and segmented by viki paid subbers or the content provider’s subtitlers so that no volunteer was needed to sub from Korean to English. Nor was there any collaboration which led to the decision to inform channel managers that paid subtitlers would edit their own work.
Impact of the decisions. These decisions make it nearly impossible for new volunteers who wish to subtitle from Korean to English to become QCs because there is nothing for them to do or for existing QCs to renew. The decision increased the difficulty of segmenters to become QC or to renew their status.
There has been no official statement of the policies. We have learned of the policy when newly appointed channel managers are told the content is “pre-subbed” and in increasingly more often cases, no editing of English will be allowed.
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Why have you put part of your post in a non-wrap format? It’s a bit difficult to read.
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I’ve noticed @mirjam_465 reply to a post in the Segue Cafe is the same. They may have been affected by the updates to Discussions in February.
Many post, pre-update, that has links such as gifts, or videos, are now not visible. Maybe because they were wrapped upon input, such as, not entering on a separate line. At any rate, this occurred after the February update to Discussions specifically.
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Ah, you mean that survey? I don’t know why that happened. I just copied the questions from the post above and then it turned out like that.
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@irmar
I didn’t format my post not to wrap properly. When I created the post it looked fine in the draft but as soon as I posted it, part of it wrapped and part of it didn’t. I must have hit some secret html key combination to cause that to happen.
When I removed the rest of Brendas’ thread with deadlift diva, which I didn’t ever intend to include in my post, my post magically wrapped.
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Yes it’s fine now. I let you know because it is important information, and it would be a pity that people would be discouraged to read it.
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Format didn’t stop me reading it, where there’s a will, there’s a way… except in fighting someone larger than we volunteers are.
I think I should take this moment to say thank you, Connie, for all your hard work and to the brilliant volunteers of the Korean language side for the long years I have spent watching in awe great dramas with great translations and attention that great dramas really deserve. I have spent my time except for a couple projects on the Chinese to English front here, but still enjoy what are definitely still volunteer work…and clearly not the work of machines. 
My respects, always.
Diva
and now to return to not reading discussions again…
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