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**** Linguistic Team Guidelines ****

Ray

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61

Monday, March 26th 2012, 8:53am

The initial guidelines were developed internationally within LTI, using two (if not more) industry standard subtitle guidelines as a starting point. The bookmarks for those standards are in another browser, so I'll add them here once I'm better able to get to them (After the PoO translate-a-thon is over).

From there, we looked at various aspects of the topics covered by these standards and, with much help from LTI participants (transcribers, translators, proofreaders, coordinators, etc.), we adjusted them to our very specific needs for completeness, clarity, globally supportive timings, etc.. It took several voice chat meetings to hammer out the entirety of what was finally released as the original LTI Guidelines and we've been allowing direct, multiple language team experience to help us make fine-tuning adjustments ever since. In other words, when one team brings up a topic for review, we open up the question to all of LTI to see how that issue affects other languages and then work to arrive at the best approach for overall improvement.
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Di Anna

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Date of registration: Jun 12th 2011

Language Team: ENGLISH

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62

Monday, March 26th 2012, 2:47pm

To Mr. HoneyB,
"There are no dumb questions," of course. ;) This I learned in Teach 101. :tonguer: Most guidelines were decided upon before I joined the Team, but to add to what SweetG and my other Sweet B have replied, it has been through consistent team collaboration that we've attempted to set the best options for our English subtitles, always with input from translators who are present at collaborations. The idea of 'standards' for language makes me wonder about things like whose standards, whose rules? :rolleyes: Nothing could be less 'standard' or scientific than our language, unless the language is mathematical. I think the idea is to find a best commonality among linguistic team members--all with his or her own degree of language expertise and cultural diversity, along with any 'standards' and research that exist or come our way, realizing all the while that we can never have a perfect set of 'standards' since language is, first and foremost, imperfect.

My favorite quote is from Cool Hand Luke ( 1968 ): "What we have here is a failure to communicate." ^^

But we keep trying...
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Di
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georgyvlad

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63

Tuesday, March 27th 2012, 12:54pm

Hi folks,

I don't like the removing of the comma at the end of a subtitle. Here is why:

- while it gives me a natural pause, it also leads me on to expect a continuation
- once we remove the comma, we break the grammar of the full/continuous text (which can be useful as a full transcript or as an aid to the deaf independently from the video); since we are focusing on subtitles, maybe this is not too important
- when someone refragments (aka timeshifts) the original transcript, he won't realize that a removed comma has to be added back again when it isn't the end of the subtitle anymore
- removing of the comma is an easily automatable task that can be done at the very end (I can easily create another tool for final touch up like this). We should still keep a copy of the text, including commas, for the purpose of having a grammatically correct continuous text
- remembering to remove trailing commas is yet another thing we ask new transcribers to learn (when not really necessary because of easy automation)
- the removed comma is forever lost in helping with semantic interpretation (for translators, who might not even have the comma at the end, anyway, after translation)
- I like and miss commas :-)

Georgy.
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georgyvlad

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64

Tuesday, March 27th 2012, 12:59pm

"crammed" above should have been grammar (thank my phone for the typo)
Note: I updated the original post now (it bothered me so much)
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Fikcija

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65

Tuesday, March 27th 2012, 10:48pm

May I ask why was it decided not to add commas at the end of the line in the first place? My inner perfectionism rejects the idea naturally, I see no reason for that. If it's supposed to be there in a sentence, it's supposed to be there. So among the practical issues it causes, I also simply fail to understand the reason of removing it.

(This is the previously mentioned Oksana, hello there :wave: )
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Ray

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66

Sunday, April 1st 2012, 3:07am

I think the primary agreements were that it would remove one possible distraction for the viewer (the mind dwelling for too long on the demanded 'pause' instead of focusing solely on reading/absorbing the next string that appears), while also providing one more character 'space' to fit in the occasional long string that required that.
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michaelycus

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67

Saturday, May 5th 2012, 2:54pm

I like the idea of removing commas from the end of line. My impression is that it makes the line clear, confortable and easier to read.
(And here comes a huge 'but'...)

BUT...

When comma is not used in transcription we can't use the subtitles in tools like Google Translation Toolkit. The GTT sometimes get 'lost in translation' because of it.
I know that some teams use this tool. The brazilian sometimes use it.

We had a discussion about that in the brazilian team. I was a strong supporter of removing commas... I still think we don't need in translations.
But in transcription I think is necessary. :)
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Di Anna

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68

Saturday, May 5th 2012, 6:53pm

About those commas

I think we should transcribe and proofread for the benefit of our translators. Except for the hearing-impaired, English-speaking people will listen to the video more than read the subtitles on the screen, and they should be able to deal with commas at the ends of lines. Michael makes an excellent point that I have not heard before. The tools we use (Google, etc) are not perfect and sometimes we'll need to simply pick the best option available to us at the present time. If that means adding commas to accommodate these tools, I think we should do it.

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Fikcija

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69

Sunday, May 6th 2012, 8:37pm

I know my point of view is probably clear already, but I'll add to it...

This might be my well known perfectionism speaking, but I am all for NOT removing the commas. For one thing, I see no reason to do so. Also, I am one of those people who will ALWAYS notice them missing (in my own language at least) and that really does disturb the perception. That feeling "there was something wrong with that sentence", which is really bad when watching something (and not reading), because you can't always go back and re-check what it was. I fail to see how a comma present would be something distracting. If it's meant to be there, it should be there. They are there for a reason after all, not just to look pretty :)
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nomada

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70

Monday, May 7th 2012, 8:59am

I am leaving all the comas in their places, while transcribing/timeshifting. I'll past this thread to Julie and MrB since they seem to be the only English proofers that might have missed it, and we are ready to go. Ahh!! we might need to correct this guideline in the wiki too. Any other considerations on this? Are we keeping all other guidelines on ";" ":" "-" "..." and ": )" as it is now? ("smileys at the end of strings" would be a nice meta-communicative improvement :ahaha: )

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