YouTube is working on a new feature for its platform, that will be able to automatically translate video titles, captions, video descriptions, and more to the native language. In the first phase, the feature is available for translation of English to Portuguese on both, web and phone applications of YouTube. Many YouTube viewers search for certain videos in their native language and they end up getting videos that are not always relevant. After fully updating the new feature, users searching for specific video content in their native language will see results even from popular channels with translated titles.
Currently, YouTube does show results in regional or local languages when users search with English text but their relevancy is questionable. As of now, the new feature is in the testing phase, and only selected users have access to it. YouTube may add more languages in its automatic translation feature in the coming days, though the platform’s parent company Alphabet has not yet shared the complete details officially. The new feature will bring a pop-up window for translation on both, the web interface and the mobile app. The company is using Google Translation Artificial Intelligence for providing the feature to its millions of users all across the globe. The new feature is a server-side update and users on the web platform will need a Google Translate extension which can be installed from the Google Chrome Store.
Once the platform gets a full feature update, the users will get a pop-up if they start searching for anything in their local language. If the user taps or clicks on the pop-up, it will automatically translate the video title and description to the user’s native language. Moreover, YouTube is providing automatic caption in more languages for the videos. This feature may not look very promising to native English-speaking people, but it will be very helpful for the large percentage of the non-English speaking two billion users, who are active on the platform each month.
In September 2020, the online video platform took down community captions citing abuse and spamming. The community captions have helped users to contribute a translation for the video titles or write the description or closed caption, and subtitles for any video of YouTube. Hence the captions were not available for all of the video and users had to completely rely on the content creators for manually uploaded captions. The new feature will fix this problem for the users, but the company has mentioned that the platform will not disable the auto-generated captions.
YouTube already provides an option to have automatic captions for any video, however, the captions are not always accurate when content creators are speaking in regional languages. Many users in countries such as Japan or South Korea rely a lot on community caption. But manually putting captions for a long video consumes a lot of time and effort. YouTube also provides a third-party translation service but it comes at a higher price than many content creators, who don’t purchase even though it has a subscription-based policy. Now, with the new automatic translation feature, such content creators will not face a language barrier and the users will get help while scrolling through videos. Google Translate supports 109 languages and the company may use the same technology for its YouTube platform.
