“When music is being played during a scene with no dialogue, segments are often created, but left empty. To help the viewing experience, we recommend placing musical notes within the empty segment.” From “How to Subtitle Music on viki”
subtitle " captions displayed at the bottom of a movie or television screen that translate or transcribe the dialogue or narrative." Oxford dictionary
The recommendation is an oxymoron because a music note is neither a translation nor a transcription of dialogue.
What kind of viewer prefers to watch videos with non-subtitles? Isn’t viki recommending that we volunteers deceive the viewer into thinking subtitling is complete when the OST is not yet subbed?
What is the difference between putting a music note in and putting a period or an html break into a segment so that subtitles appear 100% but are not. But It is against viki subtitling guidelines to put a punctuation mark or html into a segment to build up one’s contribution count.
Viki’s long standing contribution rules state explicitly:
" * No inappropriate subtitling, which may include but is not limited to:
*** * Adding only HTML or punctuation marks into an empty segment."
Consistent with this guideline, when someone put in punctuation marks and nothing more into segments, viki staff removed that subber’s right to contribute, removed the “subtitles” and removed QC status.
The % completion was intended to inform volunteer subtitlers which part/ episode still needed work. It was never intended to entice viewers into thinking subtitles were complete when the subtitles were NOT complete. Does this viki recommendation explain why paid subbers often put in nonsense lyrics and garble up English lyrics, because anything in a segment is better than leaving a segment blank?
An experienced volunteer editor/moderator/subber, who shall remain anonymous, said with respect to the latest genius recommendation, "Is viki going crazy?
It’s literally just so that English hits the 100% mark. And I’m assuming it’s because viewers otherwise complain.
Honestly, they should just remove the percentage already. Have annotation “Complete” for anything that’s 95% and above. “In progress” for anything else which has been started.
@bozoli
Bravo! I second your proposal.
Many years ago a brilliant Korean to English subtitler who coincidentally was a professor in a British university wrote that it was a matter of luck if we were able to complete every episode with more than 97% accurate subtitles because there were often incomprehensible things being said – either incomprehensible because what was said was too complex technically, or could not be clearly heard, or was in dialect which was not recognizable. Because I respected that viki volunteer so much, when I edited K drama, if the subtitles were 97% or more complete (in an hour drama that means up to 20 subs out of 700 or so lines might be missing or a bit “off”), I released the English subtitles for subbing in other languages. Why? Because I knew that for most “other languages” viki was one of the few, if not only places where other langauge viewers could watch K drama subbed in their language, and I felt to make them wait for 100% completion in English was too harsh. At one point in viki history, subtitles in any language could only be locked if the completion rate was 95%.
When they say “music being played”, do they mean song (OST) or just background music?
That would also be absurd, of course, because in that case there should be no segment. But why do they call it “music” rather than “song”? I read the whole guideline and it’s confusingly worded.
But the reply to my question was further down, in the Q and A. Yes, they DID mean only music with no words (absurd, since we are not talking about captions for the hard of hearing and deaf).
But then they include songs as well.
Q: What if the music has lyrics? Should I place musical notes (♫♫) in the empty segment while I work on finding the translation for the lyrics?
A: If you aren’t able to provide the translated lyrics immediately, you can add the two musical notes first, and then replace them once the lyrics are ready to be added into the segment(s).