YouTube Expands Translation Tools For Video Captions To 300+ Languages

YouTube just announced that it is now making it easier for video creators to translate their video captions to more than 300 languages by integrating the YouTube Video Manager with the Google Translator Toolkit. It’s important to note that these are not the automatic caption translations that YouTube currently makes available for about 50 languages. Instead, users who want to support captions in languages currently not supported by the automatic tools (or who prefer hand-crafted translations over the sometimes odd machine translations) will have to do the work themselves or invite others to help them.

As 70 percent of YouTube viewers are now outside of the U.S., says Google, being able to more easily reach international audiences is becoming increasingly important for video creators (but also for YouTube itself) and these tools are meant to help YouTube’s videographers reach this audience.

Because of its integration with the Translator Toolkit, Google’s tool for helping translators collaborate and do their work faster, these manual translations should be relatively easy to create. To get started, users who want to translate their videos need to create a caption track first. After that, they will be able to start translating these captions using the new “request translation” feature in the YouTube Video Manager. For languages supported by the YouTube automatic translation feature, Google will provide a first draft of the translation.

One nice feature here is that users can watch the video in the editor as they work on the translation. This gives the text more context and should make the translator’s life a bit easier.