In September 2020, YouTube discontinued its community translations feature.
The wildly popular video-sharing search engine YouTube, the second most popular website in the world, is now testing an automatic translation feature which will enable users to scroll through searches in their native language. YouTube will tap into Google Translate to provide live automatic translations.
Google Translate is an ever-popular translation tool designed by Google, the parent company of YouTube. Currently, Google Translate supports translation for 109 languages.
Read on to learn why automatic translations can help your business expand overseas.
Automatic translations replace community captions
Last September YouTube discontinued community captions, citing user abuse. Google announced that the community captions feature was “rarely used and had problems with spam/abuse”.
Spam comments and abuse would certainly be two misuses of their YouTube comments section that any company with a business account on YouTube would be keen to avoid.
Spam only serves to obscure real engagement, while abuse on a business platform reflects badly on the moderators of the account – who may not have the time to review and remove abuse – or simply your business might not have the resources to appoint moderators with the time to regularly review comments.
YouTube’s automated translations will instead be generated by the artificial intelligence of Google Translate to provide an appropriate translation.
Why You Should go DIY…
While YouTube will provide closed caption translations via AI, businesses have the power and control available to edit and upload their own translations manually. This is preferable to relying on Google Translate-generated translations which at times can be inaccurate or inauthentic.
Instead, to ensure your videos sound like native and natural language in the countries you have expanded into, it is worth engaging the services of an experienced native-speaking translator.
The benefits of uploading translations to YouTube
Accurate subtitles allow a larger audience to engage with and understand your videos that are recorded in a language they don’t speak. Additionally, rather than creating new videos for new territories with YouTube captions, which can be time consuming and expensive, you can simply provide an accurate translation to allow you to repurpose your content, which you have already sunk resources into.
Whether you are simply adding foreign language translations to your native YouTube channel to widen the reach of your content, or you plan to add captions to your existing videos and set up a new channel in an overseas market, YouTube captions allow your business to engage with your audiences in an authentic manner.
Furthermore, subtitles enable deaf viewers to understand your content, which is why the discontinuation of YouTube’s community captions angered many in the deaf community, including YouTube content creators.
How to upload translations to YouTube
Adding captions to a YouTube video is relatively easy to do, so there’s nothing to put you off uploading your very own translations to your YouTube videos!
Step by step guide:
- Go to your creator studio
- Click edit on video
- Click Subtitles/CC
- Click on language
- Click actions, download as .srt
- Open file in notepad
- Edit the text, take note of timings
- Save as an .srt file when ready
- Go to the subtitles menu
- Click add new subtitles
- Choose upload a file and select your file
Why use a language translation agency to provide video translations
If you need assistance with creating translations for your YouTube videos, we can help.
As experienced translators across almost 20 years and thousands of clients, we understand what makes a great subtitle translation. We discussed the issue of poor translation before in movie subtitling previously. As we write in the article above, context is everything. Even recently, many with knowledge of the Korean language have complained that the subtle context of the worldwide smash hit Squid Game, made in South Korea, has lost been lost in translation, due to poor subtitling of dialogue on streaming platforms.
On the other hand, you can rely on our translators to understand and convey in translation all the nuances of the messages you want to get across in your video content, whether that’s marketing campaign messaging, technical product information or something else entirely.
As we have an extensive network of translators around the world, we can nail the intent of your original message for two reasons. Firstly, we have native translators that live and breathe the language you need your content translated into. They don’t only speak the language, they are highly educated and fluent, so they speak it every day and understand your target audience.
Secondly, our translators are subject matter experts, so they can translate your video content with confidence. Our team includes experts in marketing, engineering and legal services translations, as well as many other sectors.
Let’s solve your translation challenge together
Contact us today to discuss your project in more detail. You can also request an instant quote and our experienced project managers will be in touch with you quickly.
We’d be delighted to call your organisation one of our clients, as we’ve worked with some of the biggest brands in the world from Coca-Cola and Disney to Microsoft.
