I have been in very popular online shows where the Chief Editor had to release even when our editing wasn’t 100% done, there were about 10-15 sentences which had to be researched and pondered on and discussed between us.
What we told the OL moderators was this:
“We are releasing now, so that your subbers can start the translation. We hope to have the editing done before you get to edit, so that when you edit it will be the finished English version. But in case you are so quick that your edit is over before we finalize our changes, we’ll send you the Post Release edits as soon as possible”
And I send those, as promised, within a couple of days. With exact timing, before version and edited version, everything to make it easy for them to find the exact place of the subtitle just by doing a CTRL+F search on Bulk Editor.
HOWEVER. Sometimes a moderator complains about those post-release edits, saying it’s bothersome.
I remember once an episode like this. I wasn’t in the English team, I was Greek moderator. And there were post-release changes. On Team Discussion, I thanked the English editors for letting us know about those changes, because truthfully those sentences had me scratching my head when I edited the Greek but now they finally made sense. I also thanked them for their commitment to excellence.
However, the Spanish moderator was extremely pissed off and said “Maybe it’s okay for the slow languages, but for us the quick languages, this is extra work” and so on.
I got very pissed off myself, for this “slow languages/quick languages”. From that day I pushed my team to be the very first language to finish - after the Spanish, of course. And we did succeed. At times we were second (after the Spanish), at times we were third (after Spanish and Portuguese), but never below that. And I made it a point of posting on TD to announce it, the moment the Greek edit was complete.
Okay, I was young (on Viki, not in real life!) and childish, this was a few years ago, I had just started as a moderator. Today I would never do such a thing, I now feel secure here, I don’t have to prove anything to anybody. But at that time I felt she was belittling me and all the others who didn’t have 30 people in their team - I had only 6.
Sorry for the digression. But even now, when I’m in the English team, I hear some complaints about post-release edits. We release more quickly than we’d like to for THEIR sake, because of THEIR sub-whiners, who are the loudest - but still they are not satisfied. That’s why some other editors say “who cares, what the hell, we’ll wait to release when we’re completely ready”.
Of course I know that this is not the situation in old interminable Chinese dramas. On the contrary, there are Chinese dramas which OL have started to translate without them being edited because they understood that the English editing would have to wait for months or years. I recently happened to work in two of them, as an Italian subber trainer. (Suddenly This Summer and Waiting for You). It was sometimes extremely hard to understand what was being said, the translation was so bad it gave me a headache. At some point maybe somebody will go back to them and edit the English, but do you think they will bother keeping a list of all the relevant changes of 30 plus episodes? And if they do, that the OL editors will go back and painstakingly visit every episode, search for the exact subtitle to change it? No way! We both know this won’t happen. (Those two dramas were so boring and draggy that I wanted to throw a party when my work on them was over).
To come back to what you wrote…
The AI can adjust without complaining because it’s a machine. If you tell it to work 24/7 it has no choice but do it. But humans will complain.
