Why Translate YouTube Videos into New Languages?
The benefits should be obvious. You get to increase your audience, by having people from all around the world watching your content. This allows for your audience to grow exponentially, which would otherwise only be possible through severe marketing investment. It helps customers to understand your product, services, and or views. Not to mention, you also get to toy with international SEO strategies. This gives you the chance to market products in countries where the keywords you use are trending. They might be trending one day in England, the next week in Italy and then next month, in Singapore.
And of course, you also help those who are deaf or hard of hearing to follow along wit your videos too. People with good hearing might want to turn the volume down and just put your video on in the background, catching glimpses of the subtitles to follow along.
So, How to Translate YouTube Videos into New Languages?
It’s very simple, you need to first click on the CC icon that is currently at the bottom right of the video frame in the YouTube player. You will first see a message that says the subtitles are auto-generated in English, but then it will give you an option to go into settings. Click on the settings and it should give you an options button. Click on the options where you can select the font, size, opacity, color, and edge style of the text.
You can also click on the auto-translate option which is something that uses the Google translate option from their normal search engine service. You can then get the transcript that you get shown and put it into the Google Translate service. So if you have a German video, the auto-translate will first show the speech in German, copy and paste it into the translate service on Google and you can then take the translation in another language, back into YouTube. Paste them in and there you will have translated the video.
Uploading a file
So far we have talked about translating videos that already exist on your channel, but what about brand new videos? This could be easier in some ways but it might not in others. If you are bilingual then you can translate your video in real-time. So you can go to any spot on the timeline, such as 00:05 where the video begins and you start talking, and then from sentence to sentence you can translate into any language you know.
- Go to the video manager page.
- Next to the video, you can see a translation button. It’s a good idea to firstly, make your video private so no one can see your captions while you are working on them. (you’re very likely to make errors, so you don’t want this to be seen.)
- Then you can select the subtitles table in the video.
- Then just click on ‘add new subtitles and select the language you are going to be translating into.
- When you are done, upload the file.
Hire a translator
Make things easier and just hire a translator. There are lots of translators on websites like Fiverr, where you can hire freelancers from a range of different backgrounds. It’s important that they are bilingual, so you can communicate with them clearly about what you would like in terms of their service. They may also be able to give you a particular kind of translation, such as the ability to change words or sentences into slang or terms and phrases that are going to be better understood than a conventional word-for-word translation.
Ask your audience
Many large channels have a worldwide viewership, which gives them the opportunity to get translations done for free. This is something that happens on large music or artist channels. You can ask your audience if they could translate your video into their native language, so more people from their country can view and understand your content. Obviously, this involves trust. So you should also ask someone to check over the translation to see if it’s accurate. This means you need to be in contact with multiple people in all the different languages you want to translate your video into. It can be the best option if you don’t have a lot of money to spend on translating, Google Translate isn’t working or you simply have so much content that it would be too time-consuming to do yourself.
