YouTube breaches language barriers by offering auto translation of subtitles

Written on 2nd November 2008                                                                                                              3 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

YouTube is making some serious efforts to breach the language barriers we Europeans face on a daily basis. I’d love to watch some interesting Italian documentary on YouTube, yet my knowledge of the Italian language is limited to the words needed for ordering food or drinks. The Google-owned video giant now offers a solution.

If the person who has uploaded a video also added captions, YouTube adds real-time machine translation. From the YouTube blog:

To get a translation for your preferred language, move the mouse over the bottom-right arrow, and then over the small triangle next to the CC (or subtitle) icon, to see the captions menu. Click on the “Translate…” button and then you will be given a choice of many different languages.

The machine translation is far from perfect and you’ll have to make an effort to understand what the Italian man is saying. Yet it’s a good first step which might inspire YouTube users to translate more videos.

captions, language, subtitles, translation, World Languages, youtube

3 Comments »

Good news if you have a hard time with English, YouTube offers subtitles

Written on 28th August 2008                                                                                                              2 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

English has always been the language to go when reaching out to as many Western Internet users as possible. Well, it’s even better now since YouTube offers a subtitle feature. So here’s an example. What about Top Gear in French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish? Just click CC on the video page.

Good news for anybody who has a hard time with English. When taking my experiences on several conferences in account, I realize this is a problem that several web professionals face. So start-ups, when you upload your introduction or promo movies, make sure you include some French, German, Italian, and Spanish captions as well.

languages, subtitles, youtube

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Subtlety in Subtitles

Written on 12th August 2008                                                                                                              4 COMMENTS
Tessa Sterkenburg,

Almost all the movies that I watch are in English. There must be an enormous amount of brilliant movies made in other languages, but I don’t know about them. Because of the language, these movies often don’t get reviewed by international journalists and are therefore not known by the larger public. Some producers, including some of the famous Bollywood filmmakers are even starting to produce their movies in English.

There is another solution: subtitles.

TVsubtitles.net is a site that enables you to find subtitles for most popular TV Shows and movies. Just download a subtitles file and install a DirectShow filter for Windows Media Player (called DirectVobSub), and if you have subtitles for movies or TV Shows that are not on the site yet, you’ll be able to upload them.

Subtitles are available in several languages including English, German, Portuguese, Turkish, Russian and Arabic. Most subtitles currently available are for English language shows, and it would be great if more English subtitles would become available for foreign language shows.

There are no subtitles for Indian movies and TV shows yet. While we wait, we count on Buffalax:

buffalax, movies, subtitles

4 Comments »