As an editor, I would put:
“What are you doing here, Dark Lord?”
Problem solved
Of course they are not always so easy.
It’s true that there has to be a fine balance between faithfulness and clarity. Viewers have to understand what you’re talking about.
There are some, very rare instances, where people talk about themselves in the third person, and this is usually parents.
“Mom loves you a lot” (said by a mother to her child).
“Your King orders you to go, but you still refuse?” (said by the King himself)
As you know, I wholeheartedly agree with this. And thank you for your kind words, I know that you mean them.
Although I’ve been criticized by at least one couple of TE and CE, who told the CM “she is too keen on making them pretty”. Yeah, sure, I want them to be both faithful to the meaning (I’m very particular on this) and pretty, what’s wrong with that?
I think that my insistence on understandable subtitles came from my having started as an Other Language moderator. Even now, I often take both Italian moderation and English editing on the same show. And every time I see an English sentence which makes me scratch my head, I think from the point of view of my Italian subbers. Will they be able to understand immediately what is meant?
If the student doesn’t have good knowledge either of the source language or of the destination language, I think that trying to teach them how to make subtitles is useless.
You can’t translate if you don’t know the two languages. Period.
You should say “Study English some more, get your Proficiency and then come back, we’ll be waiting for you with open arms”.
We can’t teach the language in any academy.
It’s because of the entry test that we don’t have in the French academy, but you have your entry test.
Provided that the student has good basis, he entered the academy (entry test or first part passed) and can’t be refused or treated badly by his sensei.
I agree with Anna, I think you’re one of the easiest editors and meticulous one.
I don’t even know why you justify yourself. You must be blind or others didn’t give you good feedback or they never got to work with you or understand you. I can tell that after working with you on more than 1 project, old and new.
If you are an English sensei if one day it is built, I’d be at ease with the students. They will probably learn a lot.
You know very well of that incident when they accused me of making subtitles “too pretty”.
I’d love to teach editing, but see, if I have to instruct Chinese-English or Korean-English translators, I’d have to know Chinese or Korean, which I don’t. Even for editing, how could I know if the translation is good and faithful to the meaning to begin with?
Unless there were two of us, one a TE who would tell them about correct translation, and THEN I could pass and talk about putting it in better English.
I don’t know how this could work in practice. Because it would be as if I were judging the TE’s English. Or we could… I don’t know, make it clear that the TE won’t enter at all the matters of English grammar or syntax etc. and will only make sure the meaning is correct?
I don’t know… It’s a bit delicate.
I will have to disagree with you here. People skills are very important for the job of a CM, Moderator, Editor, etc. An Editor with lousy people skills, no matter how proficient she/he is in translating/editing, is a lousy Editor in my book. Especially if they are unable or unwilling to explain why they made that particular decision in that particular sub. This way they refuse to teach others what they know and they refuse to learn something they themselves might not know yet.
None of us work in a vacuum. We all work in a team, with more or less contact with other team members, depending on our role in the team. Bad atmosphere in the team has the power to significantly downgrade the quality of editing, the final product. Not to mention that it severely demotivates other team members not directly involved in that particular task in the project.
We have to take both technical and people skills when assessing how good a volunteer is. They are equally important.
I understand what you’re saying. I don’t have much time to spare normally so doing something like this is rare for me. I use to spend more time online meeting bad and good people, but that period of time have passed. I much prefer speaking to people face to face to be honest.
I still have my book I needed to write. I was just very excited and happy about this new show so I volunteered. Now that had fallen through I’ll just go back to writing the book.
My spidey senses are telling me it might have something to do with what @yuukiayazawa wrote about people thinking they own the subtitle and that you shouldn’t change it “just” to make it pretty. Excuse me to all those ignoramuses, but making it “pretty” is the difference whether I’ll continue translating the episode today or if I will temporarily quit and return to it god knows when. OL Mods get tired of dubious or overly complicated subs and that affects the speed of their translation. Not to mention the overall amount of work they will do that week on Viki.
I actually have multiples in the work, mostly romance.
Currently I’m focusing on my tragedy romance novel. It’s about a girl who came from a rich family, never received the same love her grandfather shown to her twin brother. After witnessing her mother being murdered at a young age, she was subsequently saved by her mother’s acquaintance. She thought he was a kidnapper so when she tried to get away from him she jumped off the bridge.
She built herself up with the help of criminal organization trying to go straight and eventually come head to head with her family’s business.
I can’t reveal much else, don’t want to spoil the fun in between
I don’t know the thoughts of the person who said it (it was the Chief Editor and the Translation Editor talking to the Channel Manager), but I assumed it to mean
“The subtitle was not grammatically wrong as such, there was no mistake in the meaning, it was just a bit awkward, so she didn’t need to change it”. Something like that.
I often change perfectly correct sentences to avoid things like repetition, unwanted alliteration, too have sequence of adjectives, to make negative into positive and passive into active (if it helps understand more quickly in half a second or so), and even to avoid an abrupt ending of the sentence.
And of course I intervene, sometimes drastically, when I see Korean word order.
Here is a lengthy but interesting conversation about this, where Korean T.Editors dislike my proposal to change the word order to turn it into proper English because they feel we should keep the structure of the source language.
It’s explained extensively, including the context, in that discussion.
Another example of Korean word order: From your husband’s car after the accident he’s the man who tried to take the loan documents.
EDITED: He’s the man who tried to take the loan documents from your husband’s car after the accident.
For me personally a pretty sub is the one you can read quickly and you instinctively know what it means. As opposed to reading the sub several times carefully and you are still not 100% certain of its full meaning.
