I’ll show you how to use YouTube to translate subtitles step-by-step. Subtitles for videos on YouTube (or “YouTube cc”) are a powerful learning tool for English language learners.
YouTube blocked? Click here to see the video.
Video Transcript:
Hey guys! This is a special video where I’m going to show you a cool feature on YouTube, and ask you if you have time to help other people who speak your native language learn English.
Some of you may know this already but YouTube has a feature that allows anyone, including you, to submit a translation of the subtitles. If you’ve used my subtitles, then you know that I create English subtitles for every video.
First, let me show you some of these features. Here’s my video on how to make the AH as in Bat vowel. And if you go over here, you can press the CC button to turn the subtitles off and on.
But if you click this gear for settings, you can then click on subtitles and you can see that there are four different languages here: the English, which I made and I put -RE here, so you know that that’s something I made. It’s not just the automatic captions. Then someone has contributed Portuguese, Russian, and Vietnamese caption files as well.
So you can select which language you would like to see the subtitles in. So a great way for you to not only work on your language skills but also help someone else whose English skills might not be as advanced as yours, is to create a translation of the captions.
Let me show you how to do that and how to keep track of them. YouTube has some pretty cool features and you may find that this becomes a fun hobby of yours.
Let’s say you find a video that you want to add captions to. This video is where I showed people my wedding photos from several years ago and it doesn’t have any contributed caption, translations.
So what you can do is you can go click on the Settings button and then click on ‘subtitles’ and then there’s an option to add subtitles. So when you click on that button, it opens another tab.
To start, you select the language that you want to add. Let’s say I’m going to add Spanish subtitles. You open it up and then it takes you to the page where you can watch the video and then you also see in the left-hand side here.
The English caption file which I’ve made and then there’s a place for you to translate each caption. So I could start typing in Spanish what I wanted to, what I thought was a good translation for this and so on. I won’t type the whole caption translation here. But when you’re done, you can delete it if you feel like you’ve messed up and you don’t want to save it. You can submit if you’re done and you’re ready and if you’re not, if you don’t have time to finish it all at once, it will save what you’ve typed into your drafts so it automatically saves every time you add something.
If you want, you can click credit my contribution, which I believe means that it will link back to you so that people can know who contributed these awesome translations.
To keep track of your translations, you can click on the ‘your contributions’ tab here in the left bar menu and you can see videos that you have submitted that you’re done with and then you can also see your drafts.
So this is where you can come back and edit if you don’t have time to finish all at once.
How many of you out there feel that your skills are good enough to do this? Please pick your favorite Rachel’s English video and see if there’s already a translation for your language there.
If not, start one. See what it feels like. Maybe it’s fun and you end up finishing and submitting it. I can’t wait to see how many translations we get in the next few weeks.
Think of the positive impact you’re going to have on somebody who needs that translation. One of the things I found to be really incredible about YouTube is that you can create something and put it out there and end up changing people’s lives.
It’s awesome! And I have no doubt that the translations on my videos are used. Maybe some of you have already contributed translations to my channel or videos on others’ channels. Awesome. You know what I’m talking about.
To everyone else, take a minute to play around with this powerful YouTube feature. That’s it and thanks so much for using Rachel’s English.
Video:
Hear the difference immediately.
Get the Top 3 Ways to Master the American Accent course absolutely free. Sign up today to unlock your American voice.
