Alternate Language Subtitles for YouTube videos

I am writing a post on translating the first eBook into Chinese and so started to use the auto-generated English Subtitles from the YouTube Shorts videos and downloaded the timed captions text in .sbv format, that I pasted into a Google Spreadsheet and used formula =GoogleTranslate (Text, Source language, Destination language) and setup a Spreadsheet to do this.

I was pleased with the result and was able to quickly, through a multi-step process create timed translations that I could upload into the video.

I would add a new language (Chinese) then download the english transcript and open it in Notepad++ and then paste it in the Google Sheets spreadsheet where the lines would auto translate, then I’d take the column with timestamps and translated text & paste it back into Notepad++, where I would save the file and then upload that file for the new language I’d created in YouTube Studio in contents section.

Not a particularly onerous process but long and slightly tedious, so I’d do it in batches.

I looked at the numbers and there are 64 videos 62 YouTube Shorts to add languages to:

Dutch French German Indonesian Italian Japanese Korean Portuguese Spanish Vietnamese Turkish Arabic Swahili Khmer, I already have Chinese.

It was taking, on average about 3 minutes to add the 14 languages to a YouTube Shorts video.

Easier method in YouTube

I then thought I’d do a bit of research (belatedly) and found that there is a method to auto-create the translations. It will not do it with YouTube auto-generated subtitles, but you can download that file and upload it again and then it will do the auto-generation into the languages of your choice.

C for captions

Another thing I learned from I think the video above , if you are watching a YouTube video and type ‘C’ then captions will be turned on. I texted that to Zoe, it may help with her video watching.

End Comment

A bit of a Duh!!! moment. can now add lots of languages to subtitles a lot more quickly than the original method. I’ll do it for all of the texts

Putting subtitles in videos is quite easy, getting the Manuscript translated is a single upload in Google Translate using the document button, where my concern is at the moment is in doing the comments in the script and the diagrams. I’ve yet to figure a method for doing this with all the scripts in the text.