Easy professional translations for YouTube video captioning

This quick-tip is about an extension to YouTube's captioning service. It's relevant to bloggers who focus strongly on videos as a complement to their blog content.

In Septemeber 2012, YouTube introduced a feature that let you or your friend translate the captions of videos (that you own) into additional languages.

Now they've partnered with some professional translation firms so you can get a quote, order, receive and pay for professional translation - all within YouTube / Google.    So you don't have to worry about whether your friend's high-school Spanish is really good enough for your international audience!

The first step to doing this is uploading a transcript file for your video. Something to bear in mind if you do this:  If SEO matters for your blog, then you probably don't want to put the transcript into both YouTube and the blog, because that would create duplicate content.

Translations - and better translations

The translations widget now offers you - and your readers - a way to make better translations.    More details here.   Key thing to remember:  if your readers offer suggestions, you have to approve them.    So if you're the sort of blog who encourages this, make sure you keep on top of the approvals.

I've also found that by getting the gadget code from Translate, I'm offered the chance to track translations using Analytics.   I'm not sure if this is an improvement over the standard widget or not, ie whether it perhaps picks up my code itself.  Suspect not though, 'cos part of installing the gadget-code from Google involved adding their meta-tag to my template.