By Tat Banerjee
The basic steps to translate a YouTube video are:
- Download the video to your computer.
- Upload the video into an AI transcription service.
- Get the transcript in an *.srt file.
- Translate the transcript using an AI translation service.
- Embed the translation into your video.
You should only translate videos that you expect a good Return On Investment from — so you have a good feeling this video will work in a different language.
First, and this goes without saying, please translate your own YouTube videos. Why? Because of copyright. If it is not your property, please do not steal from other content creators. Fair use is of course good, but this blog post is for content creators who are looking to translate their own videos in YouTube.
In this post we’ll cover how to download a video from YouTube, then we add a transcript and then translate the video. This is done so you can try this at home yourself.
First we need to find a video to download. We will use a video from the VideoTranslator YouTube Channel, specifically this video shown below.
Note — This video does not have any speech — the idea is we will add some as part of this tutorial.
Download the video from YouTube
Ok — now we have a video, we can download it. Obviously we already have the files as it’s our own channel, but this step is shown so you can follow along in this tutorial.
Go to this website — https://ytmp3.cc. We like it because it is nice and simple, but be warned it is spammy! If you Google around, there are many other options too.
Download the video and now you have the asset.
Upload the video into an AI transcription platform
We are using VideoTranslator for this. Create a new item and upload the video as below.
Add a transcript to the video or export the transcript from YouTube
As this video did not have any narration we did not use the AI transcriber. Instead, we manually added in the captions into an *.srt file. This is shown below.
You can see we are simply typing in the text and it can be seen on the video — thisis visible on the last line, “As before the scanners…”.
Once complete, you can download the *.srt, which is provided here so you can see what it looks like.
With the subtitles file a *.srt we can upload this into YouTube as shown below and the video will now have subtitles.
Note — If you used a video with narration, after the AI transcription process please click the “Download SRT” button to export the transcript from the YouTube video.
Translate the YouTube video into Hindi
Now we want to translate the video into Hindi. How can we do this? Click Action -> Translate and select Hindi.
Here we are translating the subtitles file using the AI. Once the AI has finished it will look like below.
Hard code the Hindi subtitles into the finished asset using Auto-Overlay
Click Action -> Auto-Overlay and we chose black text with a yellow background for the video below.
Credit: BecomingHuman By: Tat Banerjee
