A couple weeks ago, YouTube added support for subtitles in videos.
I have had a lot of fun playing with the feature, adding captions to my Every Monday Matters videos.
Today I had an idea. It was one of those ideas that is clearly either genius or insanity.
I decided to run my English captions through Google Translate to provide different languages.
For now, the subtitles can be viewed in English, Spanish, French, German and Russian (my personal favorite!). I was really tempted to translate them into all of the several dozen languages Google Translate supports, but decided before I put too much time and effort into this project, I need some sort of reassurance that the translations Google provides are at least somewhat understandable.
To put it mildly, I’m skeptical.
However, if the captions are intelligible, it would be well worth the effort to run the captions through Google Translate for each YouTube video.
Unfortunately, I don’t speak any language other than English and Derekandrickgibberish.
This is where you can help.
If you speak English and Spanish, French, German or Russian, please watch a video or two with the captions and let me know how they are.
Do they make sense at all?
Do they fit what I’m actually saying?
How funny is the sentence structure?
All your base are belong to us?
According to FeedBurner, this blog regularly receives visits from folks who don’t speak English as their first language, and I think that’s really cool (although the why and how is beyond me).
Anything I can do to make myself more accessible to those visitors, I’d like to do.
For more information about captions, visit the help page on YouTube.
Also note that, I think, the video must be playing before you can enable captions or change the language.