Information Madness

Google keeps experimenting its translation service on its different products. Whether its a Google talk, Google docs or Google Friends Connect. Google tries to make people from different countries talk with each other without the language barrier. The recent experiment is Youtube closed captioning.

YouTube has turned on the ability to add full closed captions to videos for quite some time now but they have recently introduced an interesting feature called Transcribe Audio and Translate Captions. What this does is enables the auto caption for the "English" language videos and then allows you to translate automatically using its Google Translate feature on the fly.

Here is how it works..

Click in the bottom right, then click the arrow by the “CC”. It looks like this:

Choose “Translate…” and then just select a language to translate the captions into. As you know Google translate supports English To hindi translation, you can select Hindi as your translation language.

and in just a few seconds, you can watch my video and read the subtitles in Hindi.

Translation isn't perfect and its definitely not accurate. It might mean completely different from what's being said but at least non english people can get vague idea about the video in question.

This currently works only from English to any other language. It does't support the other way around.

Give it a try..