Viki's standards being low af

[irmar]

By pretty do you mean the good pretty where it make sense or the incoherent flowery pretty?

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.

Improving English subtitles AFTER they have been created

What I say the community seems to be against is when people want to change the subtitle because they feel it sounds better, when in fact it’s merely their own preference of expression (prettier as it may be) and the subtitle already sounds natural and is accurate and complete.

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.

Improving English subtitles AFTER they have been created

“Respect the native language patterns as much as we can” What about respecting the target language as well? Here is a sentence from an episode I’m working on right now: “Because of the numerous obstacles you’ve created, it’s hard to get over them.” Obviously someone was trying to be respectful to the structure of Korean here. I would change it to: "You have created so many obstacles that now it’s hard to get over them. " and Whenever I go to Seoul, of all the words we’ve spoken, I only …

[yuukiayazawa]

“Whenever I go to Seoul, of all the words we’ve spoken,
I only see your smiling face.”

??What?? Can you explain what the situation is here?

If it’s mean what I think and the person is recalling it then I would put something like:

“Whenever I return to Seoul, of all the things we’ve said, I can only see your smiling face.”

A lot of time though English will just shorten it to: “Whenever I return to Seoul, I can only recall your smile.”

[piranna]

Is this a drama plot?
Is this an English book?
If you intend to publish your book or have a profile somewhere…

[yuukiayazawa]

Any book can become a drama plot. It is an English book. I don’t have a profile for it.

[irmar]

?What?? Can you explain what the situation is here?

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.

[yuukiayazawa]

The sentence is not clear unless you read the discussion then, doesn’t that defeat the purpose of getting the meaning across?

With the sentence alone I had to ponder whether or not the person was still in a relationship.

[bozoli]

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.

[yuukiayazawa]

OMG I totally agree. If you read it once and you go ‘what did I just read?’ it’s a problem imho.