In order to be a part of the team, I had to audition by submitting two one-liners to the sub team leader. The first one was taken from a scene from My Love Another Star and the other from some other drama. The line in MLFAS was relatively easy to understand but I don't think I did a great job translating it to English. The second was quite difficult. It was the audio from a news report and had all kinds of words I had never heard in my life. I sent in both of my attempts and the kind-hearted lady let me be a part of the team. I was sooo excited. I got to work right after that. For my first episode I wrote over 100 subtitles. I was so proud of myself. After the subs were done, I watched the part that I subtitled over and over smiling like an idiot.
Fortunately for me, there is a very hardworking volunteer who adds Korean subtitles as soon as the drama is segmented. For the segments I can't fully understand from just listening, I can attempt to translate by reading. I just have to try my best and hope to last until the final episode without being kicked off the team because of poor quality work.
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| My lovely subtitle |
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| My Korean Subtitles Badge . ONLY 1000 more?? ㅋㅋㅋ |
What I Have Learned/Confirmed From Adding Subtitles
1. I can understand a lot more than I thought
2. My vocabulary is very limited
Even though I can understand quite a bit, there is even more that I can't understand. I read somewhere that during the intermediate stage of studying a language, one should focus a lot on vocabulary. I think that is true. I know a fair set of grammar patterns but they become fairly useless if I don't know the vocabulary to go along with them.
3. Many words can be guessed from context
4. Context is key for pronouns
Korean allows for the regular omission of pronouns in sentences. Due to this, 먹었어 could be I/You/He/She/They ate. If you don't pay attention to what is going on in a scene, you could use the wrong pronoun. Unfortunately I fell victim to this once but never again.
4. Subbers donate a lot of their time
5. A lot of Korean does not translate very well into English
6. Translation is an art
On the subbing manager's page she had this posted
"In evaluating a translation from Korean into English, certain
general rules can be set out although perhaps not everyone will agree
with all of them:
1. Grammatically correct Korean is to be translated by grammatically correct English.
2. Plain Korean sentences should be represented by plain English sentences.
3. Complex Korean sentences are to be translated by complex English sentences.
4. Ordinary, everyday Korean vocabulary is to be translated by ordinary, everyday English vocabulary; abstruse or high-level abstract vocabulary by terms of a similar level
5. Natural-feeling modern Korean prose should be translated into natural-feeling English prose. Excentricity of style should be indicated by excentricity of style. One Korean paragraph should usually be represented by one English paragraph
6. A lively narrative style must be translated by a lively narrative style. A plodding style demands a plodding style.
7. Every word found in the original should be respected and be represented in some way in the translation, although the great difference between the languages means that there can be no such thing as a ‘word-for-word’ translation.
--Brother Anthony of Taize . Translating Korean fiction into English: theory and practice
I think that these rules are great but they require a lot of practice to follow them and always be able to produce natural sounding sentences.
7. A lot of the subtitles on Viki must not be completely accurate if they let somebody like me on a subbing team. LOL
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