Eevergreen5

• Student

• Interest

- Web subbing (web subtitling)
- Language

ViiKii (/viːkiː/ or /viki/) is a community-powered translation and subtitling platform for streaming video where its community of contributors choose international videos of their interests and collaboratively put multilingual subtitles to eliminate language barrier for global audience. The name "ViiKii" is a portmanteau of the words video and wiki (a type of collaborative Web site).

For viewers, ViiKii overlays user-generated subtitles on top of streaming video from various content sites such as YouTube, MySpace, Yahoo, etc. to let the audience watch international videos with subtitles written in their own language.

For contributors, ViiKii overlays interactive collaboration window on top of streaming video from content sites. Through the collaboration window, any registered user can participate in subtitling with a click of a button while watching a video. This collaboration is accelerated by the fact that a single contributor does not have to translate an entire video clip all alone since the unit of contribution is just a sentence. Translations are refined and improved while going through the hands of multiple contributors and reviewers. Whenever users want to make their own adjustments or additions, they can do so with a click of a button. ViiKii platform also preserves the history of every change made by each contributor to the sentence level.

History

ViiKii was started by Jiwon Moon in her Harvard dorm room in 2007. The founder’s blog states that at first, it was meant to be a language learning tool that came out of her own needs for learning English, but evolved into a language and cultural exchange platform that leverages international videos from around the world.

ViiKii community seems to have been growing steadily since its beta launch in September 2008. According to Viikii admin, as of July 1, 2009, ViiKii community has produced a total of 15M translated words for 30,000 international videos. It also says that the community produced 3.5M translated words for one month during June 2009.

ViiKii technically supports more than 198 languages. Among the 198 languages, 32 languages have active community of regular translators who spend more than a couple hours a week to make subtitles in those languages. Among others, the most intense collaboration ever happened on ViiKii is around a popular Korean drama, Boys Before Flowers. An episode of the series was translated into more than 25 languages within 24 hours of being aired in Korea.

Nature of ViiKii

ViiKii Community

ViiKii is a global community of fan-subbers and fans for international video content. While the fan-subbers contribute subtitles on ViiKii, the fans, as audience, watch the fan-subbers' works. ViiKii estimates that the ratio of contributors to entire audience is 0.2%~0.4%.

Fansubbers on ViiKii

ViiKii has a reputation management system that records all the contribution histories of its users. Each line of subtitle that is translated by fansubbers are recorded in ViiKii data base, which serves as evidence of their works. Fansubber's reputation is grounded by the statistic records provided by ViiKii.

See Also

• Fansubs
• Subtitling
• Wikipedia
• Web_2.0
• Collective_intelligence

External links

• Official ViiKii website
• The founder's blog
• viikii-wikipedia project