YouTube video makers now have the ability to add closed captioning to their videos. The new option can make it easier for viewers to understand foreign videos as well as people who have trouble hearing.

Adding subtitles to your videos is pretty easy, all you need to do is upload a closed caption file using YouTube’s “Captions and Subtitles” menu which is located on the editing page. YouTube can support over 120 different languages, and you’re welcome to upload captions in as many of them as you want for your video. Captions are activated in videos by clicking on the menu button at the bottom right hand corner of the video player.

The goal of the new captions according to the YouTube blog is to “tighten the YouTube community by bringing together international users from different cultures.” The addition of the subtitles certainly will make more videos accessible to different cultures. While before I may have not watched a French video because I don’t understand the language very well, if the video has subtitles I might be more inclined to give it a try.

While subtitles are great, they also take a pretty substantial amount of time to write up, especially if you have a lengthy video. It will be interesting to see how many YouTube video creators take the time to create subtitles for their videos.

Creating those subtitles also kind of requires that YOU know how to write out what you’re saying in a foreign language…subtitles will be limited to the languages that their creators speak, which could be pretty limited.

I’d like to see YouTube get to a point where you could upload one subtitle file in your native language, and then that one file could be translated into any other language a viewer wanted to see the video in. while it undoubtedly wouldn’t be perfect, foreign viewers could get a decent idea for what was going on with a simple translation, and it would certainly be faster than creating a new file for each language.

What do you think about YouTube adding captions? Will you watch more foreign videos now if the offer captions?

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Entry was posted on Sunday, August 31st, 2008 at 4:44 am under YouTube.

Read more entries by Emily Price.
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