Youtube Videos Become More Accessible – Auto-Translate Captions in Multiple Languages

One strategy in making your videos more accessible to a wider audience may be to include captions and subtitles in multiple languages with your video.  Adding captions and subtitles to your videos not only make your video accessible to those with hearing impairments, but adding them in multiple languages can help to drive additional traffic from non-English speakers and international audiences.

Last month, we wrote  a beta feature in Dailymotion that allows users to add subtitles, with support for multiple languages, to web videos.  Youtube has gone one step further.  If you recall, back in late August, Youtube already released a new feature that allowed users to include captions with youtube videos.  On Saturday, Youtube announced on their blog that they have added a new auto-translation feature to any captions uploaded.  Using Google’s Translate service, the captions can be auto-translated in multiple languages.

To use the new feature, mouse over the arrow in the bottom right of the player and then choose the CC option to see the captions menu.  Once you do, you will see the default language and the ability to “translated” the captions.  Once you click on “translate,” you will be able to choose from 35  different languages.

I haven’t had too much time to play with this feature, but being that I have seen what the auto-translation does to my blog (see the right rail for other languages), it is clear to me that their may be some odd translations.  It would be nice if Google added a suggestions feature to the captions that are auto translated from users who are multilingual and can help to further translate more difficult words, slang, etc…  If anyone finds a comedic example, please let us know so we can share.

About the Author - Mark R Robertson
Mark Robertson is the Founder and Creator of ReelSEO.com. Mark has had extensive experience in online marketing, particularly in Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Local Search, Video Marketing, and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). You can follow Mark on Twitter @markrrobertson