A few weeks ago, one of our Contributors reported some unusual activity in a few of our channels. After connecting with our internal teams we now know that to help meet Viki’s increasing viewer demand for Spanish and French subtitles, instructions were given to complete Spanish and/or French subtitles for channels that had episodes that remained at 0% Spanish or French subtitles for longer than 3 months.
During their review, the team discovered that in addition to Spanish and French team inactivity, there appeared to be no Channel Manager activity as well. They elected to carry out the subtitling without any prior notification and would like to apologize for these subtitles happening without any prior notification.
Please be assured that every one of these is still available to the community for subtitling in other languages. The Spanish and French subtitles remain available for editing as well if you are looking for those opportunities. There are also no plans to review older titles that remain at 0% in any languages other than Spanish and French.
Lastly, we wanted to share a recent development regarding bulk delete permissions. Due to an unexpected incident related to the above, the Viki Operations team will need to retain sole permissions to bulk delete. That said, if you are the Channel Manager for one of the older titles that was recently affected, and you are unable to edit the Spanish or French subtitles as they are, you have the option of sending a private message to our Operations team at “fsl_viki” for guidance on how to proceed.
Thank you for your patience as we navigate these new waters to ensure Viki’s back catalog is fully available to our ever-expanding base of Spanish and French speaking viewers.
How come WE the French are inactive ? Far from it, WE are still here and active on our projects, we make sure to finish them as quickly as possible. I was impacted by Romnel on a series “Legend of Concubinage”, we moved forward on the project and the bot translated 35 episodes, These subtitles are unpleasant to read but too bad, they will stay like that and the viewers will be warned. This has impacted many projects, WE French volunteers have a life and going from translation to editing all at once for our translators is unfortunate. To say that WE are inactive is even sadder…
And also, the CMs are not even warned? I think you should improve your communication to avoid this kind of “unforeseen event”
I hope it was a mistake on your part, we will see what happens next.
Have a nice day,
RumblEnzo (CM, French moderator/editor/translator)
There’s no way I’m correcting the unauthorised subtitles your team made for ‘investiture of the gods’. These subtitles are bad and I’m not going to waste my time correcting them when my team was not inactive and we were following the English team’s editing step by step. The only solution that suits me is for the subtitles to be deleted after each new English edition. Obviously, this won’t be allowed unless we go through a complicated procedure. I’m not going to impose that on the drama’s CM. Unlike the others, I’m not going to warn viewers that these subtitles are made by viki, they’ll just stay ugly and that’s all. It’s not my problem any more.
What a “pleasant” answer. No discussion anymore ? It’s a statement ?
Well, this “info” is interesting. If I’ve well read, you’ve sent your viki staff to work on channels where : 1.it’s been more that 3 months that there are still episodes at 0%, 2.the team is inactive, 3.the CM is inactive.
On my project “Are you the one”, let’s check : 1.yes, it’s been 3 months that we’ve started to sub (4 episodes were not subtitled…), 2.no, our team was active and we were translating 3 episodes per week, 3.yes, when you sent your staff the CM was inactive since 2 months (but she’s active nowadays and doesn’t bother to answer me on this problem). Maybe, a better check of those projects could help.
Our team was on the last week to complete the project. “Thanks” to your help it was faster but the quality is not there. We will let “your work” on it for all viewers and will not delete nor edit it.
So, your statement here means that we have 3 months to finish a project before you “kindly want to help us” ? What about some old projects still not subtitled ? No “help” ? What about small teams, is it a reasonable period of time to translate ? So every project here are timed to 3 months ?
Alors là, faut voir > 3 mois après mise en ligne du 1e ep ou 3 mois après le début officiel des traductions dans cette langue ou 3 mois après le CM choisi ? Faut qu’on ai des précisions.
Quand tu prends le projet deux mois après sa sortie et qu’il y a deux saisons… C’est foutu d’avance. Les membres de l’équipe apprécient qu’on les qualifie d’inactives avec tout le travail de grande qualité qu’elles ont fourni ! La plupart ont suivi la formation de la NSSA fr et je n’ai jamais eu de co-équipières aussi motivées et impliquées dans le projet.
Ensuite, rien ne vous empêchait de communiquer avec nous. La pilule aurait été moins amère. Mais nous empêchait de recourir à un traducteur automatique pour nous remplacer par le votre, c’est un peu abusé.
Et rappelez aussi à Romnel, vos propres directives concernant le découpage des noms, des sauts de lignes… Sans compter que parfois quand une phrase est découpée en plusieurs segments, il est de bon ton de les remettre dans l’ordre de la phrase traduite et non de celle d’origine.
Vous m’avez profondément déçue, non par ce qui c’est passé mais par votre silence et votre réponse laconique, cela a tout de l’attitude toxique d’un pervers narcissique qui vous blesse et qui vous dit que c’est de votre faute. On est bien loin du viki des débuts.
Je laisse le soin de traduire cette réponse par Romnel.
I feel so sad to read your message. As far as I know, some very active projects have been affected, and I find this terrible for all of us. We give our time and energy out of passion and love for Asian entertainment. Personally, I have always done this for Viki and the French viewers, but also, as a moderator, for all the people with whom I share projects.
This issue with “bots” and presubs feels like a betrayal. To address dissatisfaction, you prioritize speed over quality. But what kind of quality? The presubs are just a disaster.
As the French team, we lose the joy of translating. We have to rework everything because it is such a mess. This takes an enormous amount of energy and effort, and little by little, no contributor will want to continue. I think some viewers will also leave as we go, because they’ll find this kind of subtitle quality elsewhere… for free.
And now, on top of that, Romnel comes to ruin our work… all the things we have done with passion and dedication.
Personally, I think you are making the wrong choice, and I admit that I feel disappointed.
J’aime beaucoup ton dernier paragraphe. Ça résume parfaitement ce que j’ai ressenti en lisant le message de viki.
Doit-on encore continuer à se fatiguer comme ça et à se prendre la tête pour trouver le meilleur mot ou la meilleure traduction ? En ce qui me concerne, maintenant, depuis cette affaire, c’est non. (Déjà la première fois, il y a quelques années, c’était mal passé.) Les traductions de m**de leur conviennent, alors…
C’est bien, Viki, vous allez voir lentement disparaître deux de vos plus anciennes traductrices françaises, mais bon, je pense que vous vous en moquez. Cherchez un peu, vous trouverez qui est l’autre.
The French community is “inactive”? How funny when we read this update from August, Summer subathon wrap-up:
“German emerged as the most popular subtitled language, followed by French and then Italian .”
Well, good job, Viki, you’re losing the most part of your French community who provided good subtitles to your platform all these years. If it was your goal, you have succeeded.
Good luck finding people who will want to fix the mess you made.
If you are so eager to have your content subtitled in French, why, like many proposed, don’t you do a separate language called “Viki automated French subtitles” that you can delete when the real French subtitles are ready ? I say real for a reason. I don’t know who you hire to do the French subs, but it’s not quality French, it’s missing words, full of stupid mistakes, very often doesn’t render the idea at all. The spelling of the names changes from one episode to the other, the tu/vous sometimes change from a segment to the next in the same episode.
You are disrespecting contributors who work hard to put quality French subtitles on older content and to viewers who will have to endure awful subtitles.
Although I’m not a part of the French community and I probably should stay out of this… I have to say that you are making it really hard to keep great people from French, Spanish and Portuguese communities with all the changes. Shows come in French, Spanish and Portuguese subtitles that are really strange in some cases and now you are going in and working on shows that has a team. Would it not be a good idea to ask for example the French moderator about their progress before stepping in? If the French moderator of the show is active even though the CM might not be. It would be so sad if we lost really great people because they feel unseen (I would if I where them), I know Viki is a company but still the thing I love about Viki is the community spirit please don’t hurt that.
Once again, you’ve failed to identify inactive channels. None of your selection criteria apply to the channel I was moderating.
Next time, it would be fairer to take into account the date from which all episodes were released to OL.
Why does the CM activity have an impact on other languages? What are these absurd new rules?
Good luck to them understanding those horrible subtitles. I don’t understand how you can enjoy a drama when the characters make basic grammatical mistakes when speaking.
Wait, like the Spanish community is INACTIVE? That’s not the truth, we are all very active waiting for subtitling projects to arrive, but oh surprise! they already come with subtitles in our language! it’s really horrible that they say that about us knowing that even to get the role of language moderator is very complicated to get because of the amount of ACTIVE contributors there are.
Sincerely it is a disgust to read this, neither of the two communities are INACTIVE as you say.
When you read between the lines, this is what this paragraph means:
Since Bulk Delete function has nothing to do with VikiBot’s activity, Viki decided to stop any CM from deleting the autotranslations.
Even if a CM asks for bulk deletion, this will not actually be done (“guidance on how to proceed”) and Viki wants volunteers to edit that bot garbage.
So, if Viki decides to drop 74 episodes of a Chinese drama within 3 weeks, and the Spanish/French team doesn’t manage to translate the last 15 episodes within 3 months, Viki will now automatically unleash the bot?
Well, if I were in the shoes of the French and Spanish teams, I think I would think thrice before starting to translate any such drama. Actually, I probably wouldn’t even start it.
They don’t have that info automatically in their system. So they can’t program the bot accordingly. All they have is the time stamp when they themselves published the video.
S’il y a une autre fois, je lâche l’affaire. Cette fois, après la précédente, me semble déjà suffisante pour en faire de moins en moins. Mais comme on dit, jamais deux sans trois.
My community is not (for now) affected by this, but as a contributor of this big and active community I must say that this notice of yours is totally wrong on all levels. Once again, Viki is going back to the dark side of being rude and disrespectful towards the contributors.
It’s already clear that you want to keep both money and the contributors but let me tell you that this is not the right way to do it. Maybe in the next year, you will be able to make a very clear statement about what you really want with this platform. If you want a streaming platform based on volunteering, then go back to the old way of working and let the contributors do their job (because they can offer both decent speed and much better quality than you). You want money and the viewers, then just announce that the contributors of the pre-subbed languages are not needed anymore and that’s it. It’s really not a joke that the editing is much more time-consuming than subbing, especially if the subtitles are not so good or actually very bad.
A third situation could be that you want your pre-subbed language staff and contributors to coexist, but for this, you must have a proper discussion with these communities and listen to their requests. Stop interfering in their activity without any previous consultation. Just think that one day you are at your job and suddenly one is starting doing your tasks without having any notice from anyone from the company; what would you do in this situation? how would you feel having your work being done by someone else without knowing why they are doing that? are you on the verge of being fired from the company? or is the company thinking you are doing a poor job but they still don’t want to fire you so they decided to bring someone else to do your job (but without telling you about it, which is absolutely absurd)?
Don’t forget that you are in this very high position among the global streaming services only thanks to the contributors (previously called ”volunteers”) and we are still here doing so much for nothing; we just love Asian entertainment and this activity but this doesn’t mean it gives you the right to do whatever you think with us.
Do you want the community to fully understand you? Then the solution is simple: come and have real and permanent communication with us. I saw some improvement over the past months through Brenda’s presence which is by far one of the greatest community staff since I joined Viki, but I didn’t expect Viki to make such a big backstep with this (not so) new situation.
There’s still a chance if you really care about the community. It’s just that you need to be more communicative and transparent with your intentions.
Chers amis, mon pauvre cerveau est épuisé après avoir tellement travaillé pour Viki. Des jours, des nuits et combien de dimanches et de jours fériés ? Avec cette histoire de bot toute récente, il a reçu tellement de cortisol, l’hormone du stress, qu’il n’a même plus la force de traduire. J’ai été tellement choquée de ne pas avoir été prévenue ! J’ai été tellement déçue par ce manque de considération et de reconnaissance ! Pour moi, certes, mais surtout pour mes fidèles collègues et les spectateurs qui nous suivaient.
Quoi ? Nous étions inactives ? Après avoir repris “Operation Special Warfare” le 23 octobre, nous l’avons terminé le 11 décembre. 35 épisodes en 50 jours, soit 5 épisodes/semaine. Notre CM @cerejacult est inactive ? C’est pourtant l’une des plus actives et impliquées sur Viki !
J’ai eu la chance de faire partie d’équipes d’exception qui essayaient de nouvelles méthodes de fonctionnement pour que Viki propose de meilleurs services à ses viewers.
“Reset” (15 épisodes - CM @grace_senpai91) avec une merveilleuse équipe. Un épisode par jour !
“My Marvellous Fable” (15 épisodes - CM @xialongne) avec une super équipe. 15 épisodes en UNE semaine !!
“Exploration Method of Love” (22 épisodes - CM @xialongne) avec une équipe remarquable pour tenir la distance et les délais. 22 épisodes en 11 jours !!!
Pourquoi vous ne m’avez pas contactée pour qu’on s’organise au mieux ?
Là, je suis vraiment déçue et complètement démotivée. Mes chères et formidables collègues traductrices sont écœurées d’avoir été si peu considérées pour leur travail remarquable (en quantité et en qualité). Tout cela est désolant. Choquant. Déprimant.
Viki, vous êtes une entreprise et je comprends pleinement les difficultés que vous pouvez rencontrer dans cet environnement hautement concurrentiel, mais vous avez encore la chance d’avoir des bénévoles passionnés qui s’impliquent pour vous. Cela ne vous coûte absolument rien ! Ne les chassez pas de cette façon. Cela ne correspond pas du tout à ce formidable respect que l’on retrouve dans toutes les séries asiatiques dont vous êtes les chantres. S’il vous plaît…
Blueforest (en pause/strike de modération française pendant trois mois)
that’s worse.