How do I caption my YouTube video in a foreign language or add subtitles in a second language?
It looks really complicated but it's just lots of different ways to do the same job.
I'm going to show you a way that avoids a lot of typing if you're adding closed
captions in another different language. Hello I'm Neil Mossey and I'm a development
producer helping high achieving creators and performers just like you
to get ideas out of your head and out into the world here on YouTube to make the world happier.
And it is quite literally the WORLD today if I can translate my videos into other
languages then we're... transcontinental. Now this is a really important disclaimer.
This video is about YouTube subtitles and closed captions.
It's not about putting foreign language translations on screen like this.
But the way that I'm going to show you will give you a transcript which will give you the text
of the words that you can take into an edit if you're putting them on screen like this.
You probably know this already but to turn the subtitles on in YouTube,
you can just hit the letter C on your keyboard. Or click the icon at the bottom of the video.
Or press the CC icon on a mobile device. And you can choose the language by
clicking the cog on the desktop player. Or the three dots on a mobile device,
and choosing the captions language there. I've subtitled this video so you can see
how it looks [HELLO!] So let's dive into YouTube Studio.
This is my YouTube Studio dashboard. If I hit "content" it's this video here:
"How to make a banner" and I'll scroll down to the subtitles tab on the left hand side.
And this is the video subtitles page for this video, and luckily as if by magic there's
already a set of subtitles there waiting for us. If you want to take the text from the video to
do the translation separately, there's a couple of ways.
If you click on the three dots menu here, next to edit, one of the options is download.
If I click on that it gives you the original format and these are different
subtitles files that have the timings actually embedded in that file.
But don't worry there's a much easier way to do this.
If you click on "edit" you can see the subtitles laid out and timed for this video,
and if I click on "edit as text" this is the transcript for this video.
So all we'd have to do is select all and I'm going to right click on that and choose copy.
Then we can go into a word processing program and hit paste and there's the transcript!
So I could translate it here or send that to a translator if someone's doing that for me.
But I'm going to show you a much easier way to do this, that we
get YouTube to translate this video for us. Now don't worry if you don't already have a
set of subtitles for your video. I've made a whole other video:
it's on screen now and in the description. I walk you through the entire process
and if you follow the steps in that video you should end up with a complete set of subtitles
for your video like this. Let's just also check a
couple of things before we get started. If you click on settings on the left hand side and
then choose "upload defaults" and then advanced settings, this is where we set the default video
language for all of our videos on our channel. You can change the language on each video that
you make, but this way makes it easier to just set the default for every video.
So I've set those to English and now we're going to check the video language on the video page.
If we go up to details and then scroll down below your description and your thumbnails right at
the bottom there's a menu called "show more" and underneath the tags you can see this section here:
language subtitles and closed captions. Now this has changed recently and these
boxes have been blank on pretty much nearly all my videos that I've uploaded.
I like to make sure these are set to English so that the language is set
to English on the subtitles page. Finally this is where we can add
a second language to our YouTube video. It's funny I worked a very long time ago
for CNN and they always trained you not to use the word foreign because
your foreign is someone else's "Home". So we're going to add a second language.
These are all the languages that YouTube recognizes... look at that list.
What do you think? I think I'll go for German, and you can see
that there are three different types of German. I'm going to just choose the regular German.
It's like that with English, that you can have English for Canada, India, Ireland...
I don't know why but I've got a funny feeling that just sticking with the regular English
makes it more available to people. I don't know if that's true or not.
And then we have two options here on that row: there's a title and description but
we're going to go to subtitles and "ADD". And it gives me three options: I can either
upload a file... you can type manually, and actually manually set the subtitles to your video.
The option I'm going to choose, because I'm lazy, is auto translate.
And incredibly, instantly YouTube has translated my entire video into German!
Now I don't know the quality of this translation and if you are translating to a second language,
chances are you probably know that second language.
You can completely change or alter any one of these captions.
What's great about this... I've only just noticed this... but it's got the
original English caption above the translation. This will be where you can make any changes... any
stylistic or translation changes that you want. Now I've not spoken German for about 18 years so
I'm just gonna hit "publish" and the other feature that we have here is to
add the title and description. My schoolboy German really is
not up to the job of translating this, so thankfully google comes into its own again.
If I copy the English title and then go to translate.google.com I can paste that title here
and we can choose the language in this pull down menu.
So let's choose German and this is the automatic translation.
Again, you won't have to do this if you already know the second language that you're translating
to, but I don't so I'm going to copy that. And then I'll paste it into the box and I can
even do the same with the description. And there it is!
That's my description in German! So then I hit publish.
I now have a title, description and a full set of subtitles in German, so if I wanted to
tweak or correct or finesse any of that wording, I can by just clicking on edit.
And you can change things here. I can even extract a transcript of
this translation by clicking on "edit as text". It's all there, so you could select that and
copy it and send it if you needed to use those words somewhere else.
I am now going to do this for as many languages as possible on THIS video, so if you click on the
cog at the bottom of this video or on the three dots at the top of this video if you're watching
on a mobile, you'll see how many different languages I was able to change this video into.
But is this video helping? Why not leave a comment
to say hi or ask any questions. I'm sure someone will be able to help,
and why not leave a thumbs up button? It will help someone else find this
video and right here is what YouTube thinks you should be watching next!