YouTube has announced that it is expanding support for its automatic captioning service for six European languages.

YouTube’s automatically translated captions are now available in German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Dutch.

Avid YouTube viewers may recall that this closed captioning feature was only available in English when it was first launched in 2009. Since then, YouTube has generated automatic captions for English, Japanese, Korean and Spanish.

“Captions are important to make sure everyone—including deaf, hard-of-hearing, and viewers who speak other languages—can enjoy videos on YouTube,” according to the Official YouTube Blog.

“Now in 10 languages, automatic captions are an important first step in the path toward high-quality captions for the 72 hours of video people upload per minute. As automatic captions will have some errors, creators also have several tools to improve the quality of their captions. Automatic captions can be a starting point, where creators can then download them for editing, or edit them in-line on YouTube. Creators can also upload plain-text transcripts in these languages, and the same technology will generate automatically-synchronized captions.”

For those looking for more information on Internet video captioning, the blog Caption Action 2 has gathered links of guidelines and tools to make free or low-cost captions for videos.

By Alex Dupont
Marketing Communications Specialist
Language Translation Inc.

See Also

• Machine or automated translation, as used in automatic captions, may have some errors
  Machine translation in itself is not good enough if you require a translation of publishable quality.
• YouTube adds more automatically translated language captions to videos by Tom Cheredar
  YouTube rolled out an update to its captions feature today that allows you to automatically translate video captions, meaning you?re no longer restricted to watching content produced specifically for your primary language.