 Welcome back to my YouTube channel. This is Daniel Russell here for today's video. I want to talk once more about the topic of subtitles and stuff you can do by adding foreign language subtitles to your video content up on YouTube. Now, why is this something you might want to do? So when we're talking about subtitles or captions in the world of YouTube, there are really two different types of subtitles. The first type of subtitle is something called an auto-generated subtitle. So if you upload a video to YouTube like the way I'm going to be uploading this video to YouTube, after a certain period, sometimes it takes as long as 24 hours, sometimes it takes a few hours, you're going to see if you click into subtitles, auto-generated subtitles. Now what those are is basically YouTube has at its disposal a lot of computing power. And when it's bringing your video content into its processing workflow, it's also running it through a speech to text recognition algorithm that's going to take the words you're saying and automatically add text, and then all it has to do is automatically adding subtitles. Now I've done a few videos recently on how to do this using Cade and Live. In other words, if you actually want to do this at the pre-upload to YouTube stage at the pre-distribution stage, you can also use a open source, completely free speech to text editor to automatically decipher what you're saying and automatically add subtitles. So the truth is, you don't even need YouTube in order to avail of this pretty cool technology. Even if you're uploading your videos to Vimeo, your corporate website, or just some other website, you're able to today avail of this powerful tech for free, which is pretty cool. Now the auto-translated subtitles are basically as follows. When you have one manual or human-generated subtitle on YouTube, you're going to get the option to automatically translate from that starting subtitle file to different languages. Now remember I said there's two types of subtitles on YouTube, one being auto-generated subtitles and the second being subtitles that are human created. Now you can create your own subtitles on YouTube in one of a few ways. You can go through a video you've uploaded. You can add your subtitles or you can upload a finished subtitle file in the SRT format, which contains the subtitles you want to appear on your videos alongside the timestamps and YouTube will parse that and know when to display the subtitles. So if you've gone to that stage of adding a manual or human-generated subtitles, you're able to add automatic captions in order to allow people who speak a different language to be able to understand your content. Now it's true that there is such thing as auto-translate on YouTube. That's a future that's currently being rolled out by YouTube on mobile devices. Auto-translate allows users to take an original subtitle file and run that through an automatic translation algorithm and they'll have that caption display in their local language. Now the difference between the two is actually pretty minimal. If you're using the auto-translate capability on YouTube as a creator, my belief or impression because the translation process happens pretty much instantly is that you're actually using the same translation engine as YouTube uses to auto-translate subtitles. The idea behind auto-translating subtitles is that you can do a very good first pass and if you know the language you're able to go into it in more detail. Now another advantage of adding translated subtitles is a lot of your YouTube viewers may not realize that auto-translate is even a feature on YouTube because it's as I said currently only being rolled out on mobile. They may never have gone into subtitle options and seen there was an option that they could automatically translate your subtitles into their native language. So creating a few different subtitle files in different languages is kind of a way of making it easy for your viewers being like hey there are subtitles in Arabic, there are subtitles in Russian. Now one final question before I show how to do it because it's really pretty quick is do viewers know that these were machine generated machine translated subtitles? The answer is no. Once you create a subtitle file in Arabic or Russian or Dutch even if you are using the auto-translate functionality to create it, it's going to look to your viewer as if you actually know those languages or hired someone who knows those languages and actually created human source subtitles. So just be aware that I wouldn't say it's misleading but it has the potential to be a little bit misleading if a native speaker expects native quality subtitles and they get machine translated subtitles which are always going to have a bit of errors but the idea from YouTube's perspective is if we start from one machine generated subtitle the auto-translated subtitles will be good enough and that's why in my opinion this is just speculation YouTube will not allow you to create machine translated subtitles if you don't have one human source subtitle. In other words you can't combine auto-generated subtitles and auto-translated subtitles to get to a foreign language. Now I know that was a lot of information that is a little bit confusing but that is basically how subtitles and translations currently work on YouTube. Now to take this from theory to practicality this is the last video I uploaded to this YouTube channel of me eating hummus and drinking beer and finding lots of good coffee in the old city of Jerusalem. Now I did add subtitles to this video in places where it was kind of hard to hear me so it's not a complete subtitle but I can it's actually most of my commentary has been subtitled. So you can see when I click into subtitles on the left of my video editor I have video subtitles and I have my subtitles in English. Now I can edit these subtitles or download the subtitle file or do just about anything with them. Now if I want to roll out a translated version of the subtitle I simply need to click on add language. Now of course if you're going to be doing this it kind of makes sense to think well what languages might be helpful for attracting more people to this content. I'm going to go for Hebrew and Arabic because it's a video about me checking out places in the old city of Jerusalem and the two major languages that's going to be relevant for are Hebrew and Arabic. Now once you get to the stage of being adding auto translated subtitles you can also add video descriptions in those foreign languages and that's there is no functionality I think for automatically doing that but let's start the process anyway let's start let us start with Arabic so I'm going to click on add language I'm going to click on Arabic and now we have Arabic is appeared here and we have two things where we can click on add one of them is title and description and one of them is subtitles so in title and description as you can see that there's a human source translation and this is where you're supposed to add your translated version now it's not actually mandatory to do this in other words you can actually just add foreign captions and not add an accompanying title and description in that language but if you're if you're adding foreign subtitles to try increase the amount of people viewing your content it would make a lot of sense to also roll out translated titles and descriptions let's just do subtitles for this one and I'm going to click on add in subtitles and now you can see there is a button called auto translate and if you hover on the about text it says translated subtitles from the original video language either auto generated or manually added to the chosen language now I generally don't get that option when I have no manually generated subtitles so it the text sounds as if you can use both but in my experience so far it hasn't appeared in videos unless I actually add a human subtitle so I'm going to click on auto translate here and now you can see at all the different times timestamps in literally one second it's automatically translated my captions into Arabic and I can just click on publish and that's going to add these captions so you can see it's a super quick process literally takes two seconds I'm going to do the same for Hebrew ad language uh Hebrew now the good the cool thing about this workflow of course is that if you do um if you do speak that language you're translating into you can do auto translate just to like get a quick start on the subtitles um and then you can just like fix them manually here by like clearing up typos or etc etc but it'll still be a lot quicker than doing those subtitles from scratch I'm going to click on publish as well for Hebrew subtitles for this video I'm going to give it a second to do its thing and now if I click into this video on YouTube I'm going to just pause the video for a second and you can see if we click on our cogwheel we click into subtitles we have Arabic and Hebrew as well as English um availability of subtitles so that's how it can be done it only takes a few seconds if you do want to go to more effort of really really improving those translated subtitles as I said you can fix the auto translated subs you can add your own title and description and this would be a great way to open up the possibility of people in different countries who speak different languages being able to watch understand and engage with your video content on YouTube hope this video was useful if you do want to get more video content from me do please feel free to subscribe to this YouTube channel