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Parlez-vous français?
Yeah, me neither.
I have a lot of subscribers that don't speak English.
I mean, let's face it.
Something like 29% of the world's population, doesn't
speak English.
I only speak English.
So I wondered
how I could communicate with 71% of the people who don't?
After a lot of research, I realized the solution was right in front on me.
YouTube Closed Captioning.
Closed Captioning, or "CC", was originally developed for the hearing impaired.
A broadcast, like a TV show, would have an embedded signal that contained a text track, or caption.
or caption.
People who were hearing impaired had special equipment connected to their TV.
This equipment would decode the signal, and show the words of what was being said
the bottom of the screen.
It's pretty cool, and opened up a whole new world to the hearing impaired.
Then someone got bright and realized
they could add captions to a movie or show in other languages and have a much
wider distribution. It's also a hell of a lot cheaper, than having to voice over
the movie again in twelve different languages.
Well, YouTube has an enhancement that allows you to do closed captioning
When you upload your video, YouTube attempts to make close
captioned text track
for your video.
The translation they do is obviously computer based, and can end up really wacky.
BUT, cmon!
Kudos to YouTube for doing this, it
opens close captioning
for any video in a variety of languages.
All it takes a just a little more work.
BUT FIRST,
let me make a couple things really clear. ONE: The method I show you here is not the only method.
It's how I do it, given the very small amount of time I have available. TWO:
The translation into other languages is nowhere near perfect.
To do that, I would have to involve one person for every single language that I wanted
to translate my video to.
What I wanted to figure out was:
How do I translate my videos to many other languages,
so others could get an idea of what I was talking about,
do it without having to rely on an army of people,
do it in a reasonable amount of time,
and be able to show you how to do it.
And with that said,
here's what I currently do.
Here's an episode I uploaded awhile back that I'll use as an example.
Notice the little CC icon at the bottom? That's for captions, and when I click on it,
I get the YouTube caption manager.
You'll see on the right that YouTube has created automatic captions for me in English.
If I click on that, I get to see what YouTube attempted to do.
The time makers are on the left, and what is said is on the right.
If you look at this,
you might imagine that I didn't say:
"We really gotta work on this fail staying. Skeet shoot some footage unloaded on your
computer, even though it looked awesome on your camera, nineteen c
apple cats."
At 00, what I said was: "We really gotta work on this focus thing."
Then At 0:11 and 0:16 I said: "You shoot some footage and load it to your computer.
Even though it looked awesome on your camera, now you see it's out of focus."
Now, you can make fun of YouTube for all this translation all you want,
but here's what's really cool
First, notice there are those sound looking things on the video when it's playing
That indicates the closed captions are YouTube's automatic translation.
Not cool?
Okay.
How about as I play the video, it highlights the text
on the right in bold.
Still not cool?
Okay. How about this?
I can click on any of the text on the right,
and fix it!
Now that's cool!
It shows me
what was there with a strikethrough, and what I changed it to.
So, I just march through the video and correct what I said while I listen to it.
And when I'm done, I click, well, done.
And here's what I've got.
i have the corrected english that i just edited.
And, I have the original YouTube automatic caption.
Now I can do my translation, because the English text is corrected.
So, I click on the English version I corrected, and click on the download button.
I'm using Windows right now, so it asks me what I want to do.
I tell it to open this in Notepad.
And I get this big pile of junk.
Don't freak out, the good part is coming!
Now I select all this junk and copy it to the clipboard.
Now I go find Google translate.
And, I paste it into the left box.
Awesome! I can read this stuff now!
I pick what language I want to translate to, in this case Chinese
And BAM! I've translated my text into Chinese! Next scroll to the
bottom of the translated text on the right, and click on this little icon.
That's the select all text icon.
Now copy that to the clipboard.
Go back to notepad, select all the text, and paste the Chinese translated text
Pick SAVE AS, make sure the Encoding down below is UNICODE,
and name the file CHINESE.SBV.
Click save and you'll get a file like this.
Just so you don't get lost here, an SBV file is what YouTube recognizes as a closed
captioning file.
The UNICODE selection is so we don't lose all the special characters in the language,
like those Chinese symbols.
OK, now we have a Chinese translation.
How about French?
Go back to Google translate, and pick French!
BAM!
Do the same thing.
Select all the French text, using the icon at the bottom. Replace the notepad text you have open,
and save it as FRENCH.SBV.
Just do that for each language you'd like to offer
in your video.
Now let's go back to our YouTube video.
Click on the upload caption file or transcript button.
Select the Chinese file you made.
Now YouTube wants to know what type of file it is.
Select Caption file, which includes time codes. That's what all those numbers were
in the transcript.
Now tell YouTube what language it is.
Since you're uploading Chinese, select the Chinese language.
Now click on the upload button.
Check it out! Now you have a Chinese translation for your video!
So, click on the Upload caption file button again. Upload your French translation file.
Choose the "caption file" button again, tell YouTube it's a French translation.
and click upload!
Now you've got Chinese and French captions for your video.
If you want to see how this works,
go over to the video on the left and click on the CC button
to bring up the captions menu and
select a language.
Here I am with Chinese captioning at the bottom.
And here I am with French captioning at the bottom.
So just pick one or more languages you want to make available to your audience and load
them up.
I tested this in 15 different languages on my last episode,
The Story of Continuity, and it took me about 30 minutes to figure it out.
I'm sure I will get this down to 15 minutes as I get better at it.
Also, I checked with a few of my non-English subscribers, and although the translation isn't
totally right, at least they can understand now what is being said.
This may seem like a lot of extra work when I describe it
but I think putting in an extra 15 to 30 minutes into my workflow,
is small price to pay to be able to communicate
with the world!
I hope this helps, and
thanks for watching!
If you look at this, you might imagine that I didn't say the following:
"We really gotta work on this fail staying. Skeet shoot some footage unloaded
on your computer,
even though it looked awesome on your camera, nineteen c it's out apple cats.
What the (bleep)?"