I thought it might be usefull to think about a "Reference" or a "Comparison Chart" that helps the User to decide which rating he/she should give for a subtitle.
Obviously, a scale from 0 (very poor) to 10 (excellent) is pretty self-explanatory, but then I ask myself what makes a Subtitle to be rated "8" and not "6"?
Isn't this something that needs a certain kind of standard?
The chart considers 3 "technical" aspects. The subtitle will receive a disadvantage (negative points) for each type of flaw accordingly to its severeness. Discounting the total of these points from 10 will result in the subtitles final rating.
A) Timing: Do the subs show up at the correct time? or always a bit to late? or do they appear correctly on the beginning of the movie, but gradually shift away? (especially for sub assigned to an avi, which will be standard with the increasing use of SubDownloader).
B) Duration: Something I came across a lot. Mostly, the displaying time of a line is rather too short than too long. The best subs are no good if you don't have the time read them...
C) Text-Quality: Spelling/Orthography, OCR errors (e.g. the capital i instead of lower-case L, whitespaces and much more...), the width of a line (a subtitle line with 50 characters won't be displayed entirely), are there 3-liners that should be two-liners...?
Besides these three technical aspects, there should probably be something like an over-all impression (is the translation fine at all?, are some parts not translated, or is subtitle overloaded with too much word-for-word translation?)
This is just an idea and my chart is just an example, but I belive the rating will become more important in the futre so why not think about it now (if not already done so
)...On the other hand, a rating comparison chart must be kept simple...What ya think?
Cheers,
Gringo
PS: I for my part believe it is necessary to have a "confirmation" -messagebox when rating for a subtitle. My impression is that a lot of ratings are done unintentionally...