YouTube has gone to great lengths to help creators make their content available to viewers around the globe, regardless of language. Their auto-captioning and translation feature was a start, and last September the video site took things to a new level, letting creators enlist the help of friends for caption translation. This week they’ve announced a new ‘Request translation’ feature that lets creators connect directly with translation vendors and pay to have their captions translated by professionals.
YouTube Product Manager Jeff Chin writes on the YouTube Creator blog, “When you request a translation for your captions in YouTube, we’ll display a list of vendors along with their estimated pricing and delivery date so you can easily compare. We’ve initially collaborated with two companies, Gengo and Translated.net, to make their services available to you and to streamline the ordering process.”
Note that before you can request a translation you’ll have to add a caption track to your video. You can find out how to do that in the video below or on the Gengo website.
Once you’ve done that, you’re ready to elicit the help of a professional translation service. Go to the Video Manager and select ‘Captions’ from the Edit drop down menu next to the video you’d like translated. If you’ve uploaded a caption track you’ll see a ‘Request translation’ button, as in the image below. Click on it to compare prices and estimated delivery dates.
Chin suggests using YouTube Analytics to help you decide which languages to translate your videos into. ”YouTube Analytics can show you the top geographies viewing your video, so you can choose the languages spoken in these countries.”
Do you think you’ll be using YouTube’s new ‘Request translation’ feature?
Image credit: Jirsak via shutterstock.com
Megan O’Neill is the resident web video expert here at Social Times. Megan covers everything from the latest viral videos to online video news and tips, and has a passion for bizarre, original and revolutionary content and ideas.
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
YouTube wants to help you make your videos available to everyone in the world, no matter what language they speak. To that end, today they’ve 
Path has announced that they will be supporting new languages by crowdsourcing the translation using Smartling. This allows users to sign up and edit the languages available for Path and submit translations themselves. This is similar to what Twitter did and is probably one of the coolest (and cost effective ways) to spread your app out for more users to use.
