How to translate ANY YouTube video on your channel - EASY CAPTIONS!

If you want to add subtitles or closed captions to your YouTube videos in another language... this video is for you! I translate my YouTube video into 10 foreign languages in under 10 minutes. We explore how the auto captioning works in YouTube subtitles, and how to change the CC captions from English into any language you want. Step by step this fast tutorial shows how to use the add language feature to your YouTube video.

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TRANSCRIPT: (CLICK PLAY ON THE VIDEO ABOVE)

THIS IS THE TRANSCRIPT - CLICK PLAY ON THE VIDEO ABOVE!

Hello, did you know that you can translate your precious YouTube videos into any language, pretty much automatically? 

People around the world can use auto-translate to get captions in their own preferred language, and a lot of these show up in my viewing figures and analytics. 

But we can actually translate the video for them and the title and the description. 

This is something I've been experimenting with. 

I don't know if this leads to more views or more of the right views or how it even affects my viewing durations. 

I just think if I can make my YouTube video more easily available, then once more people around the world get to see it, that's more views, surely. 

And surely, that's a good thing?

Maybe you want to translate your YouTube video into one language. 

Here's how you do it. 

You can follow along with me step by step, but just to show you how easy this is, I am going to translate this YouTube video into 10 languages in under 10 minutes. 

Okay, challenge accepted. 

Before we start, let me show you where we are doing this. 

Go into studio.youtube.com, go into the video you want to translate, just click on the pen icon here to edit it.

I'm translating this video 'how to make a Google account.' 

We'll click on 'subtitles' on the tab on the left-hand side here, and that opens up this menu. 

Hopefully, YouTube has already made automatic subtitles for your video. 

If it hasn't, you're really unlucky. 

But if the audio is poor or if it detects a couple of languages, it sometimes doesn't work. The auto-generated captions are usually really good and accurate, but sometimes it's wrong. 

Sometimes it puts blanks in where it thinks there are swear words, even if there are no swear words, which doesn't help search. 

It spells my name wrong and brand names wrong, which also doesn't help search. 

And there's no punctuation, so I edited them. 

It's really easy. I just copied the text, and I told Chat GPT to punctuate it. 

Or you can do that yourself, and I corrected it. 

When you hit save, it creates this set of English subtitles. 

I'm using THIS to create my foreign language translations, but you can use the automatic captions if you want.

The only other thing we need to get ready is to open another window and go to translate.google.com, and we'll use this for the title and description. 

Are you ready? 

Let's start the clock. 

The first thing I need to do is hit 'add language,' and these are all the languages they have. 

They even have—is it here? Klingon! Yeah, they have Klingon from Star Trek. 

I don't know if I've understood that correctly. 

I'm going to go for something a bit more obvious first. 

Let's go for French, and I'm going to go just for the plain French, not the different flavoured French there. 

So I hit 'add,' and then all I need to do—I'm going to do this 10 times—is hit 'auto translate.' And can you see, it has already instantly translated it into French, and you can see the original English subtitle above each one, so if you wanted to change it or check it or tweak it, if you know the language, that's really useful. 

All the timings are there. 

All I need to do is hit 'publish,' and it's done.

Now, we need to translate the title and description, and this is really straightforward because my English title is on the left-hand side, so I'd copy that. 

So, select it, and then I'll hit 'control C' or 'command C,' and then on Google translate, on the right-hand side, I will try and find French on the list here, and then I'll paste my English here. 

But I'm going to put the title and the description together so it translates it in one go. And then, we'll paste it over in the two separate ways. 

So, I'll go back to my description, and I'll just hit 'command A' or 'control A' to select all, then 'control C' or 'command C,' and go back to Google Translate, and then I will paste it underneath the title so that means it's going to translate it all in one chunk. 

And then, at the bottom here, it's done it instantly. 

I hit the copy button, copy translation, go back to the YouTube page, and then I'll paste it in the description. 

And then obviously, we've got the title at the top here, so I'll delete that, cut it, and paste it up here in title. 

And it's got... something's wrong, that's because there's a return key in there. 

So, I'll delete that so it's all on one line, and then I'll hit 'publish.' 

That's one language done. That was pretty fast because I was explaining it. Let's do the next one quicker.

We'll go for German. 

So, I'll scroll down to German, and then I'll hit the 'add' button, hit 'auto translate,' it's done, hit 'publish.' 

Oh, I wait for it to save. 

And then over in Google Translate, I've already got the title and the description so I can now put in German. 

Instead of looking for it on the list, I'm going to type in German, and there it is. And now I can hit the copy button, and then I'll paste it into the title and the description. 

So, I’ll paste it into the description, find the title, cut that so it's all nice and tidy, and then I'll paste it in the title and click 'publish.' 

That's two languages. 

I did that in one minute. 

Let's see if we can go faster.

Spanish. 

Let’s find... 'SP.' I can type in 'Sp' for Spanish. 

That jumps me to it. 

Hit 'add,' then 'auto translate.' 

I'm going to get quicker each time. 

Hit 'publish.' 

And then we'll add the title and description. 

Go back to Google Translate, change the language to Spanish, type in Spanish, and then hit 'copy

And then paste. 

And then I will just move the... copy over the title and then hit 'publish.' 

I think that was probably a bit slower. 

Let's go quicker.

Portuguese. P-O-R, and then I'll hit 'add,' 'auto translate,' publish. 

You can see how quickly you can translate these things. 

And then I'll hit 'add,' go back to Google Translate, change this to Portuguese, and then copy. 

Go back to the YouTube video, paste, and then cut the title out and paste it in the title box. 

Next one I'll do is Italian. 

These, I mean, I've just chosen these languages randomly. 

Hit 'auto translate,' publish.

And then title and description. 

Now, look, I know that Google's translation probably might be dodgy in places. 

It won't be perfect. 

It won't be the same as getting a human translator to get all the nuances. There'll be misunderstandings in there. 

But generally, I'm hoping that putting the subtitles in will be better than not having the subtitles. 

Let's go for Japanese. 

Hey, put it in the description, put in what languages you would put in, especially if I miss any. 

Let's have a shout out for your favourite language. 

Japanese. Now look at this. It does Japanese. 

Look at that. 

Publish. 

Sorry, I'm against the clock, and then I'll go title and description. 

Change the language here to Japanese, hit 'copy,' and then paste. 

Now it's a good job that I've got an exclamation mark there because I know that's the title. I don't even know if there are exclamation marks in the Japanese language, so forgive me if I'm creating any faux pas or any international incidents. It really is inadvertent. 

So, we'll go for Korean now. Korean is a beautiful language, isn't it? Visually beautiful. 

I really, really like the look of Korean. And then we'll go to Google Translate, choose Korean from the list.

Now, look, I've put in a couple of edits. 

It's not for time. 

They were just where I messed up the window. 

And I'll cut that and paste it there, hit 'publish.' 

And then let's go for what should we go for next? 

Arabic. 

Add language. Arabic. Add subtitles. 

This is a pretty language as well, isn't it? I wish I could write Arabic. 

I hit 'publish.' And then we can go to Google Translate. Don't need to wait for it, just go Arabic. Hit 'copy,' and then hit 'edit title and description.' 

Now, obviously, sometimes it will leave your hashtags intact, and other times it will actually translate them into the language, oh I hit the wrong one there. 

I don't want Chinese Singapore. 

I was going for Danish. 

That's completely the wrong continent. 

Should we just do it anyway? Let's just do it anyway. Auto translate. Hello, Singapore! You've got a translation as well. You've got a translation! You've got a translation! 

Will it be on here, though? 

Chinese Singapore. 

Should we have a look? Chinese. Oh no, it's just got 'CH.' 

Let's go Chinese (simplified). 

Copy and paste. 

And then paste. 

Publish.

I don't know if you can see, I'll just pause the timer. 

Uh, there was some missing even though we did them, and it's just a little glitch. 

It has actually done. Look, they've reappeared. 

They've reappeared. So, don't worry if they disappear because they do tend to reappear. 

Let's go for the final two. 

Go for Danish and auto translate. Publish. 

And then go to Google Translate, change this pull-down menu here, type in Danish, and we can copy-paste-paste-paste. T

here. 

And then finally, we'll go for Dutch. 

Where's Dutch? 

Add language. Dutch. And then we'll go auto translate, publish. 

There. 

Now, come on. 

That's not too bad, is it? T

hat's not too shabby for someone who only did French, German, and Latin at school. 

I think that’s... that is pretty good, I think.

Look, I hope this speed translation is helping you. 

If you have any questions or maybe you have some insights or some things that you do with the translation that might help us, please say hi in the comments. 

It would be lovely to hear from you. 

And as ever, thank you for hitting the thumbs up or the Subscribe button. 

It means the world to me, but it also really helps me to keep this channel going. 

So thank you. 

And right here are all my other YouTube Creator tips and tricks. 

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