So what are captions and how can you make use of them? Different types of captionsĬaptions are text overlays that help your viewers read what is being said in the video. Including captions also benefits your search engine rankings: closed captions can act as metadata for your channel, once your channel is verified. Adding captions to your video is an easy step you can take to reach some of the 360 million users who have hearing-related difficulties, for example, or who may only know your language as a second language who may prefer to have your content in written as well as audio form.

It is therefore imperative that your content is as accessible as possible. which mean it reaches 95 percent of the internet, worldwide. It has versions available in 91 different countries and in 80 different languages. Not only is YouTube the second most visited website in existence (behind only Facebook), but also only 15.8 percent of YouTube’s visitors are American. YouTube is by far the most popular hub for viewing a large variety of videos online. Why add captions and subtitles to your videos?.You can check out the new auto-translate caption feature in the embedded video below. It’s worth noting that YouTube does let video creators improve upon erroneous translations, so they should improve for popular videos over time. Asian language translations (Japanese, Russian), however, weren’t as useful, but that could be because of the particular videos I chose.

Personally, I’ve found that the feature works really well for thoroughly written captions translated from most European languages to English. And as of today, YouTube has added another six languages, including German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Dutch. The feature was previously offered to English, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish captions. You don’t need to determine the original language of the video.

Then you’ll have to click the button again to toggle on the translated captions. To activate a translation, users need to click the “CC” button along the bottom of the YouTube video player and select the default desired language. The new feature will work on any video that already has closed caption translations of spoken dialog.

Youtube automatic captions not working