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peculiarusername
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Re: MACHINE TRANSLATION NOTICE!

Mon Sep 11, 2017 10:49 am

Hi. I believe the marking of "machine translated", along with the rating, should be enough to inform the user.

I do take the take time to make machine translations after checking the sync is OK. Simply because a bad subtitle is better than no subtitle at all and because I know for certain that not everybody that could resync a subtitle for a particular release, would take the tame to do it. So this is my interpretation of giving out work into a community, I cover this technical part so somebody else could improve it.

I studied film and I'm from southamerica. Some material is practically impossible to get elsewhere. And certainly not everybody understands a second language. A rough translation it does have a cultural usefulness when you don't have another option... just like when you find and old celluloid film in bad condition you don't put it in the trash because the copy is bad: you value the fact that is the only copy.

A few days ago I did a machine translation of a few old german Sci-Fi movies. For someone that studies the genre, or even a plain fan of it, that rough translation does have a value. If I have the option, pursuing the best possible output, I do the translation from a close language; for example to italian from french, to swedish from german, to portuguese from spanish.

Yesterday some admin deleted an italian machine translation from a Christian Petzold movie that I did after I couldn't find it elsewhere. Today, two more in the same situation. "Akvanavty" (1979) is one of the few underwater Sci-Fi films. "Der Fall Gleiwitz" (1961) portraits the false flag attack that was used as an excuse for Germany to invade Poland, thus starting WWII. You see, both have an intrinsic historic value and the lack of subtitles at all, equals their status to "lost." Like the Alexandria Library. Gone.

So, if this is an open community, I can start a thread with the technical aspect done, so tomorrow the Michelangelo of translations can bless the human kind with subtleties. But until that moment, a rough translations DOES A LOT to put you in context and following the structure (something that a filmmaking or screenwriting student needs to analyze a film).

So, I understand the guidelines, but if an open community is about sharing knowledge, I'm afraid this guideline is contradicting this principle. I propose that admins at least check if the machine translated subtitle is the only one available in that particular language.

Kindly,

@argentronic

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SmallBrother
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Re: MACHINE TRANSLATION NOTICE!

Mon Sep 11, 2017 10:32 pm

There has already been a very lengthy discussion about machine translations, including the arguments you mention. It is a bit hard to find a reason to repeat the same things again, but maybe this could be a resume.

- The marking of "machine translated", along with the rating, should be enough to inform the user.
Reality is that uploaders often do not mark machine translations as such and downloaders overlook it. Not to mention API-controlled software lacking this option. Besides the fact that most subs are not rated at all, those ratings are and will always be a subjective opinion. Also, unfortunately, they are often used as expressing happiness (before using them) rather than quality (after using them). I have seen machine translations getting a 10/10 rating and a good subtitle getting a 1/10.

- Better a bad subtitle than no subtitle at all.
This is your opinion, but the majority of users think differently. They rather wait for a decent subtitle than dealing with a machine translation. They rather wait, even till eternity, than having the irritation and frustration that comes with a machine translation.

- Machine translations are not that bad.
They are. Typically, they vary from very bad to plainly useless. Untranslated words, html left-overs inside, twisted sentences, wrong translations(!) etc. etc. It depends a bit on the source. Some phrases may be translated more or less well enough. But in many cases the result is just incomprehensible, sometimes maybe possible to understand after some 'studying', but in subtitles, when watching a movie, there is just not enough time for that.

- You find and old celluloid film in bad condition: you value the fact that is the only copy.
True. But a machine translation is not "the only copy". It is a translation of an existing subtitle that can be made (again) any time, within a few mouse clicks and one or two minutes waiting time.

- The lack of subtitles at all, equals their status to "lost".
No. Same as above - it is not the only subtitle available. It is (maybe) the only available subtitle in that one given language. Nothing is lost. Unlike the Alexandria Library, it can be recovered any time in no time.

- Machine translations are a (first) step towards a decent subtitle.
I disagree. Correcting a machine translated subtitle is more time consuming with probably even a lesser result than making a subtitle from scratch. If a subtitler would like to start with a machine translation anyway, they will know how to do this. Making a subtitle for an average movie is roughly 15 hours work. Two minutes more shouldn't be a problem.

- OpenSubtitles,org is an open community.
Yes. But it is a community to provide subtitles, not work to do.

- At least check if the machine translated subtitle is the only one available.
We have considered (and done) that too. But still all the above applies.
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peculiarusername
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Re: MACHINE TRANSLATION NOTICE!

Tue Sep 12, 2017 8:36 am

Thanks for sitting there :)

I guess my opinion is biased by my own experience, as a student of filmmaking and before that as a sailor. In both circumstances all the people that surrounded me had a very different view on this matter. And this includes my geographical location. For the times I've been in Bolivia Perú or Brazil, a foreign language sub equals to none.

About the rating system and the way it is utilized, I had that same impression about how it seems to be used. By the way, with the "thanks" button I also noticed that, ugly and all, even the machine translations get thanked, while it is also true that my subs are rarely from mainstream movies.

Lastly, I'm left wandering why the "machine translation" checkbox is not replaced by a "give it up, erase this crap". ;) Just kidding.

Thanks again! very kind of you :)

GLevai
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Location: Budapest

Re: MACHINE TRANSLATION NOTICE!

Tue Dec 25, 2018 11:14 pm

I just thought, I'll pitch in my 2 cent worth of opinion. I'm a new member on this forum and I really do value all the efforts, that its management does for trying to provide quality translations to all whom are interested. But in this topic (or on this topic) I'm siding with the Argentinian fellow and let me explain to you all why, using my own example:

I'm a Hungarian dude, who lived in the US for over 20 years, so I have no complaints about my Hungarian and English. But just recently I discovered a really great German actress Felicitas Woll (Dresden, Crown for Izabell, Liebe Mauer, Berlin, Berlin, etc.) and I managed to find Subtitles for several of her movies in English, except for the 86 parts of TV series "Berlin, Berlin". Since I don't speak German at all, and I didn't feel like waiting for a miracle subtitles series of 86 till eternity, I decided to take things in my own hands and figured out how to do mass translation with Google Translate. (when I say "mass" I mean to do translations by episodes.)

And I translated all episodes of the first three seasons from German to English and already watched them all. (I couldn't do the 4th season because they're not done yet in German.)

My wife and I had a blast watching all 60 something episodes within a week. It is true, that the quality of the translation is sub par, way horrible, but as the Argentinian fellow said, a machine translated subtitles are still better than nothing. And I really mean it. Why?

1. Because the human brain is a wonderful but mysterious part of our body that can do miracles when it receives mixed signals from several receptors simultaneously: eye: the movie itself, ear: the tone of the actor's voice, the subtitles with the sense of puzzle, similar to this:

1 d6n't kn6w wh7 1'm n6t 3bl9 t6 r38d th1s t3xt.

2. Because I don't speak German, I am 59 year old and don't plan to learn German any time soon, and since we're talking about 86 episodes, the chances are, that no one will waste time on so many episodes to get translated to English any time soon. (1 episode is 20 min. long, so 3 episodes make up an hour, so roughly we're talking about 30 x 1 hour long movies, let's multiply it by 15 hours = 450 hours of hard labor.

When we started to watch the first few episodes, the sub par quality of the subtitles did bother us a bit, but as we proceeded to watch all sixty something, we completely forgot about the sub par quality of the machine translated subtitles, and we enjoyed the episodes like if we spoke German.

So, if it was up to me, I would not object to machine translated subtitles when it's about not a single 100 min. long movie but TV series, with several hundreds of hours.

I think, it would be easy to notify all movie viewers about the fact that any given subtitles were translated by machine by placing "MACHINE TRANSLATED" to be the very first subtitle right at the beginning of such movies, displayed for about 5 seconds at least.

By the way, I think, one reason of the bad quality that machine translators put out when it comes to subtitles file (.srt), because very often the original author of the subtitles puts a comma at the end of the 1st line, and that really messes up the grammar of an English sentence.

If I'll have time I will compare translations done with and without commas just to see whether I'm right.

So, here is my 64 thousand $ question: I (Google machine) created English subtitles for about 60 episodes of Berlin, Berlin, could I go ahead and upload them here, or I shouldn't bother because they will be deleted anyway?

Geza

GLevai
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Re: MACHINE TRANSLATION NOTICE!

Wed Dec 26, 2018 2:33 pm

I just realized, that machine translated subtitles can provide enough information ONLY for those folks who speak the language in question fluently or semi fluently, because they read sentences in images instead of word by word and translating them back to their native language.

Therefore I totally agree with those, who claim, that machine translated subtitles are worthless - Yes, they are but only for those folks who are still learning a language. But for those who speak fluently, it is only a minor inconvenience.

So, just because, a method is not usable by a certain group of folks, that doesn't mean, that that method should be outcast-ed totally because it DOES work for other group of folks.

The only thing is, that it is important, that the machine translated subtitles should be clearly marked, AND when someone does a search on a movie title, there should be checkbox there for "machine translated", meaning, that folks should have a freedom of choice to select it if it is OK to display machine translated results next to the ones that were translated by humans.

As far as the API called subtitles... this is really just a programming issue, folks in charge of this stuff should get together and decide how to distinguish human and non human translations and just use that standard that they came up with. Sooner or later everything will be machine translated, we all know that, unless all folks will speak the same language to keep it simple.

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oss
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Re: MACHINE TRANSLATION NOTICE!

Wed Dec 26, 2018 3:02 pm

GLevay, welcome to forum and thanks for nice feedback. I totally feel you, and you are in many ways right. On new site - www.opensubtitles.com - we will have possibility for VIP users download even better Machine translation than from google, we are working hard to get it - and it will be blast. So basically, we will have a lot languages which are supported to translate from and to:
English
German
French
Spanish
Portuguese
Italian
Dutch
Polish
Russian

and by the time more and more will be supported.

For your question - feel free to upload subtitles, just correctly mark them.

Thanks!

8Charlie
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Re: MACHINE TRANSLATION NOTICE!

Thu Jun 20, 2019 1:22 pm

Not here to convince anyone of anything. Just thought it would be good to give a different perspective.

It's easy to say that we only want the best transcriptions, because machine ones are not good enough, as a typical person that speaks one of the big/popular languages. Someone from an English-speaking country can of course dictate that machine translations are just unusable and shouldn't be on the website; they can just choose a different file.

As a Dutch user with a deaf partner, I have to say that this rule is horrible for others that are less fortunate (when it comes to subtitles). Movies and series that others have access to, even those that are years or decades old, don't have translations available. So when I want to watch a particular movie or show: that's fine, I'll find sutitles. My partner on the other hand, doesn't get to watch and understand much of anything.

In my opinion, we are just shutting out people with disabilities that don't speak English. I'm not mad with anyone, everyone and every platform have the right to make their own decisions.

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SmallBrother
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Re: MACHINE TRANSLATION NOTICE!

Thu Jun 20, 2019 2:31 pm

I understand what you are saying. Sometimes a decision is made and it turns out good for one and not so good for the other. Machine translations were banned because we got a massive amount of complaints from downloaders being disappointed and human translators being frustrated. A poll in the Dutch section of the forum shows that approx. 80% is totally against machine translations (see https://forum.opensubtitles.org/viewtop ... 31&t=14649 ).

We can ask ourselves if we don't want to give people with disabilities some advantages, despite what 'the majority' wants, just to be kind. Agreed, 'majority' is not holy. But pleading for machine translations for this reason doesn't make sense to me, because anybody can make a machine translation within one or two minutes.

There are some online services to do so, but for obvious reasons I don't want to promote them here. But if you want, send me a PM and I will give you some options - if you promise not to upload them ;-)
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oss
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Re: MACHINE TRANSLATION NOTICE!

Mon Jun 24, 2019 11:10 am

I think it is ok to offer machine translations but in different way - by default in search they should be disabled, so somebody who not specifically allow to search in Machine translated subtitles will be not affected at all.

8Charlie
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Re: MACHINE TRANSLATION NOTICE!

Sun Jun 30, 2019 9:26 pm

To be honest, I've noticed this majority vs. minority thinking quite often. I was shocked when I was in the US, and went to a theatre in NY and noticed that deaf people had to use a wonky machine next to their chair just to read some subtitles. These machines were horrible and either out-of-sync or dropped some sentences, or just wouldn't work. I spent 20 minutes running from between the top floor and the ground floor, trying to get it all to work.

In the end I just felt stupid and embarrased. All I wanted was to watch a movie with my partner, but apparently hearing people are so offended by the idea of watching a movie with captioning under it, that the deaf have to have a lesser eperience. We wouldn't want to dissatisfy or hinder the majority, of course.

This site is kind of doing the same thing. But in the end, we all get to make our won choices. It's not the end of the world, but there would be better ways of handling the situation.

I will take you up on your offer about the machine translations. I sometimes use subtitle cat, but it's pretty much ALWAYS out of slots/resources/over capacity. What I now do is split the subtitle file in max. 5000 character bits and run it one by one through Google Translate, then paste em all back together. Imagine doing that every time for a show, OR worse, a movie! So any tips on how to speed this up would be highly appreciated. I was thinking of BASH, bit it'd be a lot of work.

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oss
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Re: MACHINE TRANSLATION NOTICE!

Mon Jul 01, 2019 6:29 am

Hi,

he implemented automatic (AI) translation service on www.opensubtitles.com - check it out and we dont run out of capacity and it should be better than google translate.

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scooby007
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Re: MACHINE TRANSLATION NOTICE!

Mon Jul 01, 2019 5:33 pm

This site is kind of doing the same thing. But in the end, we all get to make our won choices. It's not the end of the world, but there would be better ways of handling the situation.
Sorry you feel that way. It’s not really the same. If you want machine translated subtitles, as oss said, you can download any subtitle you want from the opensubtitles.com site when it isn’t available in your language and use the site translator to download it for you in your preferred language from the existing subs. All we’re saying is not to upload that creation on the site under certain languages where some admins may delete them. Why would you want to anyway, as anyone can use that feature and download subs to their specific language immediately, it doesn’t need to be machine translated and stored on the site. This argument for machine translated subs would have some validity back in the day, but now that translate feature exists, it makes that argument null and void. Let's also consider the reality. People in your situation might be a minority, but let's also consider admins are also a minority.
Some highly active languages get up to 20-30 subtitles uploaded daily that have been uploaded with the wrong Imdb ID’s. If an admin doesn’t correct these ID’s, then searching for the said subtitles would yield no results through search, although a subtitle for that movie actually exists on the database. These fixes take personal time of the admins involved.

Certain language sections have completely banned machine translations as it causes fights between users and a lot of profanity and bad blood get’s thrown around. This costs an admin more time to deal with things he/she shouldn’t have to deal with. But I guess the internet brings out the best people to commune.
Admins don’t get paid to clean up the site or to sort out wrongly uploaded subtitles, and they certainly don’t get paid for diffusing situations and keeping peace and harmony on sites and preventing people from fighting or acting as their intermediaries. Admins do all this out of passion for not only their own needs, but also to help the wider subtitling community at large. By cutting down on machine translations means they get to use their own time more with their own families and general life, rather than being stuck on a site dealing with a lot of mess. Believe it or not, admins do have a personal life, too. This is their free time, not paid time.

Options for those that want machine translations:

1) Become an admin and deal with the above described situations on a daily basis, the cat fights, swearing and abuse and let’s see how long one lasts in this voluntary role just to appease the minority.

Or the simpler solution:

2) Do as SmallBrother suggested, download software to machine translate subtitles to your preferred language. Or do as oss suggested, use the features from the opensubtitles.com site to download existing subtitles automatically machine translated to your desired language.

I have no idea what you have been doing to copy and paste each line individually, but sounds like a Sisyphus task.
I'd recommend option 2 for a simpler life. Would only take a minute or two to do of your personel time.
That's my recommendation for the minority.
Although some admins actually allow machine translations in their administrated languages. The one's that don't, I guess they don't have the time to deal with them.

As far as Cinema’s are concerned, customers actually pay them for the service and the staff also get paid, too. Hence, shouldn’t be too hard for them to provide some kind of a Sunday service by offering a screen with captions. That’s beyond our control, though, and not our field of expertise. Maybe a world-wide petition is in order.

Finally, a big thank you to the over-looked minority, our dear admins. Without whom this site would most probably be disorganised and a mess. With no real help to the everyday general user.

IMHO: This is why I don't like machine translations, I'm sure some other admins would agree to the reasons.

I sincerely apologise if this post makes me come across rude, robust or sanctimonious in any way, that was not my intention. But the age old enemy is upon me, as hinted at in this post, and that is time.

Thank you for reading.

Sokpap
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Re: MACHINE TRANSLATION NOTICE!

Thu Jul 04, 2019 1:38 am

I disagree with you very much Okay automatic subtitles are not the best solution but in some cases they are quite useful and they help people I hope they do not make the mistake and delete them

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scooby007
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Re: MACHINE TRANSLATION NOTICE!

Thu Jul 04, 2019 2:26 pm

I disagree with you very much Okay automatic subtitles are not the best solution but in some cases they are quite useful and they help people I hope they do not make the mistake and delete them
There’s nothing to disagree about. The AI translation feature will remain available on the site. That means you can use any subtitle from another language and download it translated in your language automatically. All we said was not to reupload that download subtitle in the English/Dutch sections at least. Use them for your personal use by all means, if it benefits you. You don’t need to upload it back up. Anyone else that needs them can follow the same process of downloading the machine translation from existing subs. Search for the subs for that movie in all languages. If there is nothing available in your language, then download an existing sub through our AI option into your language and away you go. Simple.

KAILIYAT
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Re:

Thu Sep 26, 2019 12:58 am

Sounds like a sound plan, but as far as coding and restructuring of the site goes, I think it would be wise to get OS' input on this. He should be here later on in the my ip birthday wishes tneb evening. As for your suggestion.
If I get a special dispensation in the API I could even try to find a way to get a good source of subtitles to provide versioning, like addic7ed.
I don't think there is enough editers here for that to work? But who knows what the future holds.
OS is one of the best sites out there and it wants to offer good quality subtitles to the community at large. For this to happen, we implore all the uploaders of “Machine Translations” to clearly mark your subtitles as, “MACHINE TRANSLATION” followed by the release name in the "RELEASE NAME" field when uploading your subtitle. This way you can avoid getting harsh comments and it makes it easier for the Admins to spot the bad from the good.

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