Watch Your Language
The process and perils of translating foreign content for global audiences.
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Sheree Miller has pretty much given up on American television.
For their efforts, top contributors get a free Viki subscription.
It was just horrible, the wait, Miller recalls.
Viki was born in 2007 as ViiKii.net, a project by three college students at Harvard and Stanford.
The sites name combined the words video and Wiki, reflecting a desire to translate videos using crowdsourced contributions.
Meredith says volunteers have been able to finish English subtitles as quickly as two to three hours.
And Im thinking,Sure, you’re free to get it with mistakes, she says.
We are not in a race.
In a sense, though, they are.
But management always ultimately agreed that those contributors were too valuable because of the quality of their work.
Thats why tension creeps in when volunteers get pushed to complete their contributions faster.
If a team displayed a pattern of being too slow with their subtitles, Viki would speak up.
Miller gets frustrated when Viki staffers reach out to tell her that volunteers should be moving faster.
Most of the people I know who contribute to Viki are not stay-at-home moms, she says.
They have full-time jobs as nurses and techs and all kinds of things.
Miller sees these perks as nice gestures of recognition.
The same goes for content that arrives on Viki with premade segments and subtitles.
She specializes in segmenting, which involves cutting videos into the clips that subtitlers fill in.
We dont want people thinking that was our work, she explains, because it was not done well.
Volunteer frustrations hit a flash point in September 2019, when Viki introduced a robot into its workforce.
Outraged volunteers who felt that the machines work was subpartranslated a strike notice into 12 languages.
Another warned, Remember that we are the reason why Viki exists today as it is.
But the trust was broken, says Semidey.
She also saw several well-known contributors quit over conflicts with Viki staff or other volunteers.
Were actively engaged with a mixture of contributors to further improve tools and workflows.
Meanwhile, Vikis overall contributor numbers continue to grow.
But we have dozens and dozens of other languages on Viki.
Thats why they need us, the volunteer adds.
For now, we are useful because we are better qualified in all the languages of the world.
