I was surprised to find this out. I guess they decided to stop pretending and passing off MTL as human translations. Moving from zero to 0.1% in my understanding of Chinese and I can tell that viki.com subtitles are crap for Chinese dramas. It is a shame that an actual company is using MTL that is worse than crap. It explains why they reject new translator applications
If you think that viki.com is bad you should check out the official subtitles for films. A lot of the time they don't even pretend to translate what's actually being spoken! For extra points check out the subtitles for Hong Kong cinema, it's mind blowing how off they can be.
Hahaha.. i'm glad that some of them took my advice and milk the money from them by using mtl #dontmindmei'mjustfarmingnuffieshere
If you look at it another way, you can they won't even let off the MTL websites. They just want to scrape everything for themselves and not give anyone else a source of livelihood. Too disgusting.
Can't blame them much Ignorance is bliss. If you can't smell, someone might sell you shit as incense and carry it with you as perfume.
I use to consume a lotof TVB dramas before they simply fell off the cliff when all their stars fled to Mainland China for the dough lol. I didnt notice it then but after watching movies later it was damn obvious... Dramafever subs were usually preferred since they used professionals. Someone pointed out how the subtitles for Final Fantasy were crap in the 90s. It turned a powerful emotional scene into a comedic one
Ai-chan can attest to this being true. Ai-chan once applied for a translator job once. They gave Ai-chan a 2 minute transcript of a movie to translate. Ai-chan translated to the best of Ai-chan's ability, but after a week, they said, "I'm sorry but we have chosen to go with another translator." But when the actual movie came out, Ai-chan was really pissed because the subtitle for that section was so wrong, it might as well be machine translated. Sure, the words were there, but the meaning was completely off.
They simply want to pay peanuts. Even Youku was using MTL for their English subtitles on their YouTube channel. I was looking forward to watching the drama but the subtitles felt very off, so I looked into it What a joke. It is one thing if a small business does that but when such large companies do it, it is just pathetic
Yeah, that's probably it. At first they seemed to be interested, but when Ai-chan gave them the quote for Ai-chan's services, they took a week to answer before saying they got someone else. Ai-chan's quote was even slightly lower than the standard rate for freelance translation.
It happened to me too with one Chines YouTube channel. I saw a website that offered over 40 episodes for a $250 donation they got the job over me. I am not surprised. The website seems to be dead now, which is also not a surprise They also had a kickstarter By the way, it was CN drama that rejected me. https://cdramabase.com/completed-subbing-projects/ https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cdramabase/translating-chinese-tv-series?lang=ja https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cdramabase/translating-chinese-tv-series?lang=en I dont get why kickstarter thinks I am Japanese all of a sudden
The Hong Kong films were the worst of the bunch. They were mandated to have both Chinese and English subtitles for all the films. So what happened is that the Chinese is a rough translation of what's said on the screen and the English was often... not even that. They were often worked on by people who weren't English speakers so it sometimes would feel that they were translating a completely different script. That sucks, but it doesn't surprise me one bit. This kind of thing is why I tend to be pretty forgiving when it comes to fan translations.
In a way, I'm glad I didn't know a lick of Chinese as a kid and didn't have to suffer through the butchered translations. Just the other day, I saw 独步 translated as "one step" and could pull my hair out, lol. I'd be bald if I watched those subs again.
Things like that still happen to this day. One of the 3DS Fire Emblem games had a complete hackjob of a localization. Never played it (don't like strategy games) but what I've seen makes it seems like they tried to give everything this ironic, self-aware vibe that just doesn't work.
It's sad. Even good translations can lose meaning if you don't understand the context. I watched a Taiwanese drama, Love and Pi. A song was used in Episode 1 and the final episode. It seemed that that it was important. The transcribers didn't mention it. It turns out to be a politically charged song and very important. Basically equivalent to a Civil Rights anthem