YouTube Captions. Translate to Dozens of Languages Automagically?

May 12, 2022 / in How To, Video / by Jason Terry

Watch this video on YouTube | Subscribe to the Blue Gurus YouTube channel

Hello friends! I was working with a client recently and he had a really interesting request. We had created a “How To” video that was a step-by-step video on how to use his product. We created the video with captions, and of course they were in English. He was wondering if there was a way to automatically translate the captions into other languages. Why? Because his customers are using his product all over the world, and it would be nice for them to be able to follow along with the video and be able to read the steps in their own language.

I knew that YouTube could translate captions to other languages automatically… and that was the right answer. But we had a little bit of work to do before we could take advantage of that feature of YouTube.

In this video, I show you every step from creating the instructional video, transcribing it using a service like HappyScribe.co to generate a subtitles file, adding the native language captions to the video and importing the subtitles file to create all the captions quickly. Then I show you how the end user turns on Closed Captions to see the text, and then clicks the Settings icon (the gear icon) to auto-translate the captions to their own language. It’s actually kind of amazing. You can watch my video in Spanish if you like. Or German. Or a few dozen other languages. Enjoy!