YouTube creators using the Community Contributions tool to get fan-translated subtitles for their videos still see fairly limited impact outside of audiences who speak their language because of the title and description of videos still being in that language, but a newly announced update to the tool is set to allow creators to recruit fans to translate their titles and descriptions, helping them to reach more potential viewers than ever before. Using this new feature, creators can have would-be viewers outside of their linguistic circle discover and enjoy their content just as easily as videos that were made in their own native language.
While some YouTubers can be international sensations despite the relative lack of translated content, such as musicians and game streamers, this new feature of the Community Contributions tool could be a game changer for a large number of creators in the YouTube community. Viewers that would not have found their content before can now give them a look, so long as a multilingual fan is willing to contribute a translation for their video, description, and title. In a blog post about the new feature, Google even included the story of one such YouTube, science vlogger Alex Dainis. According to Dainis, YouTube’s translation tools are the only reason she’s able to share the science that she loves on a worldwide scale.
To say that the crowdsourced translation tools have been a success thus far would be a bit of an understatement; according to Google, some 900,000 individual contributors have helped their favorite YouTubers reach across language barriers to bring their content to new audiences. Fan translations across the internet have a long and storied history, of which YouTube is only a small part. This new tool will help that part to become a bit bigger, and will doubtlessly help a number of worthy YouTubers achieve international stardom. It should be noted that YouTube videos that are captioned automatically can make the translation process easier, but right now, Google’s bots are far from able to do the translating themselves because of the subtle nuances of language that may be present in video format that something like Google Translate, being text-based, wouldn’t have to worry about. Even so, one of the best things about Community Contributions is that it’s easy for creators to enable, implement, and moderate, which means that reaching any linguistic group that your audience may happen to consist of is a matter of just a few clicks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHvA8e1eCxc