@DatDudeCee:
I am sorry, but pretty much all your arguments are either irrelevant or already discussed. One more time, I will try to make some things clear.
1. I agree that translating machines have improved a lot. But "improved" is relative. Still I see many 'twisted' sentences or even completely wrong translations. Obviously this happens more easily with sentences being split into multiple sequences, which is typical for subtitles. On top of that, the translation of a machine will never be as good as a human translation. Think about it: a machine translation will not be able to understand context, will not be able to watch the video, etc. So it will not know if "you" is singular, plural or the polite form. It will not know if "I'm fine" means "I'm not ill" or "I don't want another drink".
2. But even if the translation would be perfect, subtitling is not only translating. It also importantly involves technical aspects. Although translating machines have evolved in translating, they still don't have a clue about subtitling. It's a beginners mistake to think that a good translation means a good subtitle.
3. Hundreds of downloads doesn't mean the subs are good. Maybe it means that hundreds of people were disappointed.
4. Your Dutch subs for The Outfit had several 'bad' markings and several 'upset' comments, within only a few hours in the early morning (NL time). Trust me, that doesn't happen a lot and only with pretty good reasons.
5.
As appeared later, a (pretty good) human subtitler (not to be confused with translator!) was already busy with making subs for The Outfit. Thank god I removed your machine translation on sight, otherwise the majority of the downloads would have gone to the poor quality machine translation, instead of to the high quality human subtitles, and so frustrating this human subtitler big time, if not driving him to completely give up finishing his work.
6. You are saying
in a topic in the Dutch section "Of course I would only suggest doing this for the "Not-So-Popular" movies and TV Series that don't get a lot of buzz as the Skilled Uploaders/Transcribers usually dont bother with those." Then why are you uploading for The Outfit, which is pretty recent and pretty popular?
7. If you are a beginner, and you never made a good full subtitle from scratch, how can you know that correcting a machine translation is faster? I did both, and ironically, I found that fixing up a machine translation to high quality, meaning following all subtitling guidelines, DOES take more time. On top of that, it is very likely that some left-overs are still overseen. In other words: fixing up a machine translation a little bit will leave you with poor quality. Fixing it up to the max will cost MORE time and be of a LESSER result.
8. The argument that 'first version' machine translated subtitles can be corrected doesn't make sense. Within that same logic, you could upload subs with only the first half of the movie and stating it's easier and faster to add the second half instead of making the entire subs. The idea is that downloaders can use the subtitles provided to watch a movie or tv-show, NOT to provide a work-in-progress medium.
Etc. etc.
So yes, I am afraid we will continue to disagree.
@Scooby007:
First of all, I don't remember things as you describe in your four criteria. I do remember machine translations are officially banned site-wide, but the final decision to delete or not would be left to the individual admin. See the first post of this topic.
2: The translation isn't complete jibber-jabber rubbish. In other words, when checking from "show preview" the text makes no coherent sense at all.
The problem with this is that "complete jibber-jabber rubbish" is pretty subjective. On top of that, translation machines HAVE evolved pretty much, so it will never anymore be "complete jibber-jabber rubbish" like it used to be. In that sense the evolution of translation machines is a disadvantage, because a quick look at the preview will not so easily anymore point out a machine translation, but actually watching the whole movie or tv-show WILL. So this 'preview-method' cannot and should not be one of the criteria.
3: Some attempt has been made to clean the subtitle as best as possible.
It is impossible to draw this line. What is
"some attempt" and
"as best as possible"? Is it enough if someone removes all the "ah" and "hm-mm" and song lyrics? And if someone spends 20 hours on fixing things up, the subs may be close to perfect. Is it then still a machine translation?
He said machine translations put off actual translators, but actual translators in my opinion ain't going to be wasting their time translating series subs that aren't popular or in demand anyway. Highly unlikely.
I know for a fact that some subtitlers WILL and HAVE put time and energy in subtitling old or not very popular movies and tv-shows. I am one of them
![Wink ;-)](./images/smilies/icon_wink.gif)
and I know a couple more. That being said, of course my statement is valid much more for popular and recent movies and tv-shows. I know in the Dutch section a couple of (very good) subtitlers who went flying up the wall, because a (fixed up) machine translation was uploaded while they were not even half way with subtitling the same movie. Some subtitlers literally gave up on translating their favorite tv-show.
While I am not a great fan of machine translations at all, I must admit that I have allowed (fixed up) machine translations for oldies, assuming a decent subtitle will never come.
Ironically, most machine translations which are uploaded are for very recent, very popular movies and tv-shows. Actually, this is how I recognize the latest blockbusters
![Smile :)](./images/smilies/icon_smile.gif)