YouTube’s automatic captions are now available in six additional European languages: German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Dutch, Google announced today.
As you may remember, this closed captioning feature was only available in English upon launch in 2009. Since then, YouTube has also started to support Japanese, Korean and Spanish.
With the languages it added today, YouTube’s coverage of European demand is now quite broad. Yet, it is worth keeping in mind that we are talking about automatic captions, and the result is still far from perfect, although it will likely improve over time.
In the meantime, Google points out that content owners can also 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.”
To see those captions in your preferred language, all you have to do is to click the closed caption button on any video that makes this feature available. According to YouTube, it already offers around 200 million videos with automatic and human-created captions.
Image credit: Ethan Miller / Getty Images
Get the TNW newsletter
Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.