YouTube expands feature that lets you watch videos in multiple languages

YouTube wants videos to reach more people, no matter what language they speak. In a blog post on Thursday, the video site said it was expanding the ability for creators to add multilingual audio to videos, which means people will have the option to watch many videos dubbed in their language. main.

“Whether it’s chess tutorials, a historical documentary about Rome, or a series of investigations into ghost hunting in Italy, we can’t wait to see our creators continue to embrace this feature in their own content, and for our viewers to discover videos from international channels,” YouTube said in the post.

YouTube has been testing the feature with a small group of creators, including Mr. Beast, over the past year. In testing, videos dubbed into multiple languages ​​saw a 15% increase in watch time due to views in a video’s non-primary language, YouTube said. On average, people watched over 2 million hours of dubbed video per day in January alone.

To try out the feature, creators can add different audio tracks through YouTube’s subtitle editor tool when uploading a video. Creators can also update existing content in their catalog through this tool.

Viewers can click on the video settings at the bottom right, then Audio Track, which opens up other audio tracks in different languages. “We want this to be a seamless experience,” YouTube said in the post, “so that content defaults to viewers’ preferred language and users can search for multilingual content through translated video titles and descriptions.” .