Hello and welcome to Mr Tompkins Ed Tech.
In this video I’ve taken a bit of a departure from my normal content and will instead be
looking at a really useful tool to help fellow YouTube creators reach a wider audience.
I have recently had an influx of fellow creators as subscribers, showing stalwart support and
solidarity by sitting through some of my scintillating maths videos.
Whilst I commend their tenacity I thought I would to make something they might actually
find useful.
So this is a video tutorial to help YouTubers create better subtitles both in their home
language, and to translate these into other common languages on YouTube.
So why would you want to create subtitles for your videos?
Firstly, it Improves SEO – studies have show that videos with closed captions rank
more highly than videos without, with a lifetime added benefit of around 8% additional views.
Secondly, they make your video more accessible.
There are 36 million people in the US who are deaf or hard of hearing and around 5%
of the total world population have some degree of hearing loss.
Making your own captions ensures that they are accurate, legible and synced with the
video, giving users a better experience, and giving you more views and watchtime.
English speaking countries make up less than half of YouTube’s total users, so translating
your captions into other languages will expose your content to a whole new audience.
Also, multilingual subtitles will be indexed for search in each language you include, further
improving your SEO.
Thirdly, Captions let your audience watch your content in more places.
80% of people watching videos with captions turned on don’t actually have a hearing
problem – they just have the sound down due to where they happen to be viewing.
In the office, on a train, in a library, or with a sleeping baby in their arms.
Providing captions gives viewers the opportunity to enjoy your content in noisy environments
or when its not appropriate to have the sound turned on.
This is one of my recent videos.
It’s been doing quite well, and perhaps I can give it even more of a push by adding
captions.
Lets edit the video, and then go to the Subtitles/CC tab.
Personally, I usually script my videos first, and if you also have a script in a word document
or notepad or something, you can click the “add new subtitles or CC” button, choose
your home language and the “transcribe and auto-sync”.
You can then cut and paste your script into the video transcript box and press “set
timings”.
YouTube will take a few minutes to process this and pair up your script with the video.
If you don’t have a script, then no problem.
You can easily polish up the autogenerated one made by YouTube.
YouTube does a pretty good job with autogenerating subtitles – most of the words are correctly
identified, and it is mostly in sync with the video.
But the lack of any punctuation, the rolling text style and the occasional mistakes make
it harder to read than manually created subtitles.
That said, it is a great starting point for creating your own subtitles if you don’t
have a script ready to use.
Select the “English (automatic)” subtitles and then “edit”.
You can then go through, add capitalisation and punctuation and correct any misheard words.
You probably want to do this even if you uploaded your own script, because unless you are a
robot you will have deviated a bit from the plan anyway.
Run it through and check the timings are ok.
Now we have cleaned up the English Subtitles, we can now easily convert them to different
languages.
I’m using a tool called “Subtitle Edit”, which you can get for free from the website
http://nikse.dk.
Download and install on your pc.
“Subtitle Edit” can do lots of cool things to make your subtitles more professional looking,
but we are just going to be using the translation feature today.
First, lets download our English subtitles we’ve already made in youtube as an *.srt
file, and then open them up in “Subtitle edit”.
Click the Open icon and locate your downloaded .srt file.
Once it has opened, click on the “Auto-translate” menu and select “Translate (powered by google)”.
Select the language you want to translate your subtitles to.
I’m going to choose dutch to start with.
Press “Translate” and it will take a few seconds to work it’s way through.
Once done, click “ok”, and then tap the save icon.
You’ll notice that it automatically appends a language id to the file name – in this
case NL for The Netherlands.
Done.
If you want to do another language, load the original .srt file again, and rinse and repeat.
I’m going to make German subtitles this time.
Done.
It’s very easy to make as many as you like.
Google translate has over 100 to choose from, although some are obviously going to be a
lot more in demand than others.
This graph shows the number of users from various countries – so you can see from
this that Portuguese and Russian might be a good choice.
You should bare in mind though that some countries like Germany have a lot of home generated
content, and might not be so keen to watch subtitled videos.
Some smaller countries like the Netherlands and Sweden are much more used to watching
content with subtitles and you might find that these will disproportionately watch your content.
Have a look at your own analytics and try to figure out who’s watching you content
and from where.
Ok, now we have generated the subtitles we need to re-upload these to YouTube.
So back to the edit screen.
Tap “add new subtitles or CC”, type in the name, in this case “dutch”, click
“upload a file”, then “choose file”, and locate your translated subtitles.
Click “upload” and then “publish”.
That’s it.
We now have our Dutch subtitles as well as English.
I’ll just go through the process again for “german”, and obviously you can do this
again and again for whichever languages you choose to create.
Now google translate is far from perfect and I’m sure there will be quite a few errors
with the translations.
Make sure you have “community contributions” turned on, and perhaps one of your viewers
might help correct some of these for you.
Playing my video back, I can now choose between the various subtitles, they will display much
better than the YouTube autogenerated subs and there will now be plenty of extra key
words in other languages to add to the video’s SEO, increasing its visibility and hopefully
its watch time too.
If you have enjoyed this video, please give it a thumbs up, and if you are new to my channel,
please consider subscribing.
The button is just there, it just takes a moment and it will help me a lot.
Thanks for watching and I hope to see you again soon.
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