Everything You Need to Know About Auto-translated Captions and Video Transcripts

As a YouTube content creator, you’d always want to expand your viewer base. However, what happens when you want your channel to appeal to non-English language speakers? Also, what do you do to make your channel popular among people who have hearing difficulties? The answers to these questions lie in YouTube video transcripts and auto-translated captions.

In this article, we’ll tell you everything you need to know about auto-translated captions and video transcripts on YouTube. So, if you’re a content creator who wants to know how you can use these features to your advantage, read on.

What are auto-translated captions? And how are video transcripts involved in them?

Imagine this – you create content exclusively in English and have amassed quite a following in English-speaking countries. However, now, you want to target audiences in non-English speaking countries. This presents a challenge, as well as an opportunity.

In this scenario, you can’t possibly change the language in which you’re creating your videos, i.e. English, right? But what you can do is use YouTube’s auto-translate feature to provide translated captions in your target audiences’ languages. For instance, you want your videos to be watched by audiences in Spain and Russia. So, what you need to do is translate your video captions into the Spanish and Russian languages.

To use the auto-translate feature, you’ll need a caption file that contains the transcription for the original video. So, if you’re creating content in English, you’ll need the English transcription, which will have the audio content in written form. Once you have this file, all you need to do is upload it and choose the auto-translate option to translate the caption file into your preferred language(s).

There are various ways you can employ to get the original caption files – you can go down the DIY route, get it made by a professional captioning service, or use YouTube’s auto-generated captions. We recommend steering clear of YouTube’s auto-generated captions and transcriptions as they’re still a long way from being perfect.

Benefits of auto-translated captions and video transcripts

So, now that you know how auto-translated captions and video transcripts work on YouTube, it’s time to look at their benefits in detail:

• Auto-translated captions can be used to target audiences around the globe: For YouTubers who want their content to be viewed globally, there’s nothing better than the auto-translated captions feature. Apart from benefiting YouTubers, who can enjoy greater viewership and more income from YouTube, the feature is also advantageous for end-users. Quite simply, end-users can watch more varied content, especially if content creators in their respective countries aren’t very creative.
• Makes YouTube videos easier to consume for people with hearing issues: People who suffer from hearing conditions have mostly had to live life without YouTube, as the majority of content depends on audio to make sense. However, in recent times, many YouTube channels have opted to use transcription and translation features, which have made them accessible to people with hearing difficulties and disabilities.
• Boosts search engine optimization (SEO): Search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo can’t recognize audio. However, when you transcribe a video, the audio is converted into text, which search engines can recognize. So, if you want to improve your YouTube video SEO, transcribing is a great option. Of course, for it to work, the transcripts have to be inclusive of target keywords, which you can find out by conducting keyword research.

Conclusion

So, that was everything you needed to know about auto-translated captions and video transcripts for your YouTube content. Before we bid you goodbye and pull the curtains down on this post, we’d like to encourage you to try out YTpals – a software tool you can use to get free YouTube subscribers. You can also use YTpals to get free YouTube views, likes, and more.