Well the website and forum is now running on the new host, so let’s hope nothing melts down again. In the meantime, I THINK the forum is stable enough now to have a post about the new subtitle section. I meant to have this done a long time ago, but it’s only just now that some of the major problems with the forum and hosting have been ironed out (I hope).
Subtitles are probably the most major area I’ve completely failed to manage properly because I’ve gotten bogged down with organizing and reviewing everything. It’s not that I don’t care about them, quite the opposite. I want to get as many subtitles up as possible and I hope to someday have Accursed Farms videos be the most-translated machinima videos out there. However, I also want to have some standards for them as well.
Having a forum section devoted to subtitles solves a LOT of problems involved with me managing subtitles in the past:
1. You won’t have to wait on me to approve subtitles in order to see them. This is a good thing, since if I get busy with work or whatever, I often don’t have time to manage subtitles. While the first subtitles that go up in the forums may not be the most accurate, if some people can’t hear or understand English very well, then subtitles that are only 80% accurate are far better than none at all. While it’s still going to be a slow process for me approving “official” subtitles hosted on the site, from now on, you can always go to the forums and see the most recent user-submitted subtitles as they’re created.
2. This will lead to more accurate and polished subtitles overall. Moving subtitle development to the forums means they’ll effectively be “crowdsourced.” Instead of just myself and maybe one or two other people looking at them, everyone can view the subtitles and suggest revisions to them. In short, everyone can now be an editor, for better or worse.
3. I don’t have to decide who works on what now. A problem I used to face a lot trying to manage the subtitles is I would receive multiple offers from people offering to transcribe or translate the episodes and I would have no clue as to who the best person to pick was. Now, you guys get to decide. If someone rushes out subtitles for an episode that are thoroughly flawed, that won’t last long against someone who takes a little longer and does a much better job. I plan to let all future subtitles “cook” in the forums for a little while before approving any more official ones, so hopefully any errors can be ironed out. This goes double for foreign languages since I can’t judge how accurate a translation might be, but other people who speak the language can.
4. This frees up some more time for me. I do think it’s necessary for me to personally review all the English subtitles for accuracy, because my annunciation isn’t always the best. Sometimes people think I say “and” instead of “then” or “if” instead of “is,” etc. I’ll be the ultimate authority on the correct words being spoken in the videos. Beyond that, I think it will work better if viewers proofread everything else. Proper punctuation, formatting, spelling, timing, etc. are all things that can be better handled by viewers. Even the “official” subtitles that are currently up on the site could probably use some help. So if you spot problems with ANY subtitles, now you can submit your corrections in the forums and eventually they’ll get reviewed and hopefully approved. I think everyone would prefer I spent more time making new videos than editing subtitles.
Right now the subtitles section of the forums have been launched with sub-forums for every language that I remember receiving offers for. This will make things easier organization-wise. New languages can be added as people volunteer to translate them. If your language isn’t listed, just post your subtitles in “Other Languages” for now and if there are enough posts it will get its own section later on. You are welcome to chat in your native language in the different forum sections as that will likely make communication easier.
* * * Be sure to check out the guidelines for submitting subtitles listed in the forums as this will expedite your submissions getting approved. * * *
Anyway, I encourage people who are interested to submit or edit subtitles in the forums. The process will be a bit chaotic, but I think eventually it will all get sorted out. There are some 40-50 videos made and many new ones coming this year. I’d like as many people to be able to enjoy them as possible and subtitles will go a long way towards making that happen.
