I watch an educational YouTube channel that’s in Dutch, and until a few days ago, its content was closed-captioned into English. In this video, they tell the viewers (in English) that their sponsor will no longer be paying for professional captioning, and they ask the viewers to come to their aid. Several users have said in the comments that they’ll be more than happy to help.
How will that work, though? Does YouTube allow anyone with permission to close-caption a video, in a Wikipedia sort of way? Or if user SexyDutchLady captions the videos in English, do I have to go to her channel to see the captioned video?
YouTube makes rough transcriptions already. I just visited someone else’s channel, hit the ellipsis under the right hand corner of the video and selected “Open Transcript”. An auto-generated transcription appears. If it’s just someone talking, it’s very good, but lacking in punctuation.
When I open one of my own videos, the same place has “Add Translations”. When I click, it shows me a smaller player window with the title “Manage subtitles and closed captions: English” with the choices “Upload a File”, “Transcribed and Auto-Sync” or “Create New Subtitles or CC”.
And below the player is a link that says: Share a link to contribute to this video
The captions are sent to the owner of the channel, who then has final approval. Generally speaking, they’ll watch their video once with the proposed captions, make sure it’s competently done and nothing was sneaked in, and then approve it.
What I am unsure about is if there is a button anywhere to click, or if the owner of the video has to send you a link to be able to propose captions. I do know that you get to use YouTube’s caption editor, and that it will let you use the automatic subtitles as a foundation. I do believe it will also let you just translate existing subtitles, keeping the time information the same. And it will definitely show a transcript which you can edit.
I have added captions to my own videos, but I have never had anyone submit them to me, so I can’t really answer it.
If you’d like to test, here is one of my videos. I had YouTube auto-generate captions and turned on “Community Contributions”. It starts with an introduction so it should be pretty easy to work on.
