03 November 2008

YouTube launches "auto translate" feature

In recent months, YouTube has tried hard to make its videos universally accessible to all its users - no matter what language they speak. In August, for example, bigmouthmedia reported that YouTube were adding captions and subtitles to YouTube videos to help users reach a wider audience. This has been a great success but demand for different language translations generally outstripped what was actually available.

This looks set to change, however, as YouTube now offers an "auto translate" feature. Through the tool, Google Translate, adds real-time translation to any caption. So now, if you want to watch a German video in English, you can do so at the click of the magic 'auto translate' button.

The boundary breaking potential that this new feature offers users has got many industry analysts excited. Gone are the days when users were prevented from enjoying certain online videos because they were hindered by language. This new feature will make videos watchable - or, technically, readable - to almost everybody.

YouTube are still in the early stages of this development, however, as machine translation is not perfect and the company acknowledges this quite freely. However, we all know how popular watching online videos online has become and this feature has the potential to revolutionise global user experience, so shouldn't be underestimated.

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