Last updated on July 30th, 2024
If you’re trying to up your game with video marketing on YouTube or other platforms, you really have got to understand that social media, YouTube, it’s international. It’s not just America, not just the UK, not just English, because it’s the entire world.
So you really want to understand how to do multilingual properties on YouTube, Facebook, etc. We’ve got an expert here, Brett Snelgrove, who’s worked for some amazing companies. Now he’s helping you specifically today to tell you about the new YouTube feature that enables you to put in audio tracks (or dubbing, if you like) so your viewers can hear videos in their native languages. This is going to be a big trend, don’t miss it.
SPECIAL GUEST:
– Brett Snelgrove – LinkedIn
HOST: The VidAction Podcast is hosted by:
– Dane Golden, YouTube Consultant
VidAction.tv | LinkedIn | YouTube
TRANSCRIPTION
Dane Golden:
If you’re trying to up your game with video marketing on YouTube or other platforms, you really have got to understand that social media, YouTube, it’s international. It’s not just America, not just the UK, not just English, because it’s the entire world.
So you really want to understand how to do multilingual properties on YouTube, Facebook, etc. We’ve got an expert here, Brett Snelgrove, who’s worked for some amazing companies. Now he’s helping you specifically today. Brett Snelgrove. Welcome to the VidAction Podcast.
Brett Snelgrove:
Thank you. Great to be here. Great to always chat to you, Dane.
Dane Golden:
It’s been a long time since we’ve chatted face-to-face. Brett, please tell us what you do.
Brett Snelgrove:
Okay, so I have been working for probably over 10 years primarily in the media and entertainment space doing digital video. So AVOD video, social video. I’m a strategic leader in the space and social media and digital video.
Dane Golden:
Can we say some of those big brand names you’ve worked before?
Brett Snelgrove:
Sure. I’ve worked at BBC Studios. I’ve worked at Sony Pictures Entertainment. I’ve also worked at a, previously, at a company called BuzzMyVideos, which was a creator management company. I was the first employee for that one. That was a startup that was a really interesting experience and got my start in this whole field.
Dane Golden:
So let’s talk about what is your first tip, if you want to make sure you’re taking advantage and supporting your viewers globally with YouTube.
Brett Snelgrove:
Okay, so I think the thing about multi-language, what I call multi-language localization, is that it is one of the hot topics that are happening right now this year. I’ve already seen in the past couple of weeks so many companies releasing updates and reports and articles on the topic. We’ve seen previously the release on YouTube, you could do multi-language metadata and captions.
Now they’ve added audio as well. Mr. Beast himself, who’s the number one YouTuber out there, has now, instead of running a whole bunch of multi-language channels, he’s now consolidating everything into one channel where he has multi-language audio available. So he’s been able…
Dane Golden:
Okay. OK, I’m – I’m going to stop you right there because that’s a ton of really good info. You’ve just gotten started, but a lot of people are, are just learning this for the first time. So I’m going to recap what you said is that there used to be the ability, for instance, if you, like you said, the metadata, the titles, the thumbnails, the tags, that type of stuff.
You could say, great, I want this in English, this in French, let’s say. Right? And same video. But you get that description and title in other things. So people, if they wanted, to watch it. And also there’s always been the ability to upload captions in other languages, and there’s an automated translating service.
But now there’s this new option. Now is this open to all people, big channels, partner channels, who?
Brett Snelgrove:
It is, it’s slowly getting rolled out. There’s, because there’s captions and metadata. And there’s about 40 languages going to be supported with the audio function. It’s still being rolled out. They’re still making it available to different levels of creators and also them bringing in third party vendors as well to be able to work with it.
But it is a game changer to be able to have dynamically served audio. So what that means is, and the reason why I love this so much is because you can leverage your existing video library, go back and do a mass optimization across it, just like you would do optimization of like titles and thumbnails and all this.
Language optimization, in my opinion, is going to be the next big thing that people are going to do because it means that if someone has their YouTube setting, their language setting set to French, German, Spanish, whatever it is, if you have that language available in your metadata, in your captions, in your audio, it will automatically, dynamically serve it up to that audience. So you’ve got one video that can service multiple languages.
Dane Golden:
Okay, so, and I’ve worked with channels and creators and businesses that have had, you know, you have one channel in English, one in French, one in Spanish, one in German, one in Italian… and sometimes it used, this used to happen, that you used to get tagged for multiple duplicate content. So you’d upload this one, and then on the other channel you have it in Italian, and they said, “Hey, sorry, this is the exact same thing. You can’t do that” And we were afraid that they were going to give us some major strikes, so we actually stopped doing as much international stuff because we were concerned that the algorithm was dinging us with these multiple duplicative content issues. And so it might be for like a multinational business, like an automaker or somebody like that that has, or somebody like Uber that has business all around the world that they essentially make the same videos but want to make them accessible to different countries. What I hear you saying now is that you can upload, it’s the same video, but a duplicate audio.
Brett Snelgrove:
Yeah.
Dane Golden:
And if I am, if I have my settings so that let’s say I’m watching everything in Spanish, that that Spanish will pop up, that I’m a native Spanish speaker, Spanish will happen by default. Is that what you’re saying?
Brett Snelgrove:
That’s what I’m saying. So if you had it set to Spanish, your video is natively uploaded in English, but you’ve got Spanish metadata in there, they’ll see title descriptions if you translated it. They will, if you’ve got the audio uploaded, that will automatically switch for you. Just think about it in terms, of you go to Netflix, you go watch a TV show a movie, you have all those language options for you.
Imagine being able to do that on YouTube yourself. And I think it’s applicable for people who want to reach an international audience. But also we all live in multicultural countries now. So like the US for example, 15% of the population there speak Spanish. German is the most popular language in Europe. French is the second most studied language in the world.
Like there is a lot of reasons why it can be valuable to you to be able to reach new audiences that you may not be reaching, or to be able to connect with them more deeply because you are making the effort to make that language available to them.
Dane Golden:
Now I want to dive just a little bit deeper into this because, hey, I’m American. We don’t know any other languages. We don’t know where other countries are. We don’t know, you know anything other than the globe, and not so sure we know too much about ourselves either. Everyone speaks English here, it’s no big deal. I’m American. Everyone should learn to speak English. Maybe if you want to grow your business or grow your channel, that may not be true. Apparently there’s this whole other world outside of America, right? I mean, even in America, people may be watching in other languages, but not everyone in the United States focuses on those extra features that are at the bottom of the YouTube player that show subtitles or toggle languages. Just, just talk about that remedially for a minute. What, what is that little stuff down there?
Brett Snelgrove:
Sure. So in every YouTube video you have the option to be able to toggle captions. Either people might have already seen auto-generated captions that can appear. So you can select one of them, or you can upload your own caption file, in English or in other languages. It’s fantastic because it’s another layer of metadata that tells the platform what your video is about, so it has a greater understanding and knows who better to serve it to.
I would say nowadays there’s a lot more stats coming out to support the fact that people are using captions a lot. 70% of Gen Z are watching videos with captions, either because they’re out and about or on their phone or things like that. 20% of the globe are hard of hearing. Like there is a lot of information out there about supporting why it’s a great way to make your content truly accessible. So a lot of people might think, look, maybe this isn’t for us, but I can promise you, even if you were to put captions into your, into your videos, and even if you only put English in there, you would see an uptick.
Start putting in more languages in there. You’re going to see more and more of an uptick, and you’re going to be discovering these new audiences that you can be reaching.
Dane Golden:
So YouTube, once you upload a video, even if you do nothing at all YouTube will, if you, let’s say you’re doing it in English, YouTube will manually caption your video. Now, you don’t always see it unless you click that little caption button at the bottom. In the US it’s cc, but the browser in other countries, it looks like different icons, but it’s down at the bottom, whatever country you’re in, there’s some other symbolism that, that is that little captions thing. But then there’s that gear where you can click on any language and it takes that English and it transcribes it automatically, so it automatically transcribed it in English, then it transcribes it into any of these other languages based on Google Translate, essentially. But what I hear you saying, which I also know to be true, is that you don’t have to rely on. Google’s somewhat quirky translation because I have a different English accent than you do, for instance. And sometimes we’re saying maybe a technical word or a new word, which is maybe the most important word in a video, but it doesn’t get transcribed, right, because it’s not a… but that’s the word you want people to know. So when you upload that manual transcription, it actually gets translated better because you’ve done a manual transcription.
Brett Snelgrove:
Exactly, exactly, and for the reasons that you’re describing. The auto translates pretty good from what I’ve seen, because it has to do it at scale and has to be able to do it in some auto way. I think the barriers to entry now to be able to do it yourself and get it up there, are less and less and less, and the technology is improving every single day.
Like if you look at the progress of generative AI this year, I can’t even fathom where we are going to get to by the end of the year. It’s moving and leaps and bounds every single month in every area.
Dane Golden:
And the transcribing of human natural language is one of those ways.
Brett Snelgrove:
Absolutely, like YouTube are investing in that. Facebook are investing in it heavily for not just video, but multi, multiple different areas where they see real value to be able to deliver language at scale.
Dane Golden:
So how do I know if this feature’s been enabled in my YouTube account?
Brett Snelgrove:
So I think…
Dane Golden:
and is it on an individual video?
Brett Snelgrove:
You, if you go into the Creator Studio, I believe you will probably need to have passed the initial threshold and be part of the partner program. But if you go to the Creator Studio, the section there called subtitles, you can go into there and you can add in other subtitles files as well.
And that’s where it’s also, if you’ve got dubbed audio features available, you can access it there. You can also see being able to include your metadata and other different languages as well. And I’ve done this piece of work before and had other vendors work with us on that to be able to do that on mass then, to be able to go in and do the updating. So you can do it manually yourself, you can work with a vendor to it. If you’ve got a lot of videos, I would suggest speaking to a vendor, see if they have a tool or an API that can help you to be able to get it uploaded and get it there on all those videos on your channel.
Dane Golden:
So yeah, you’re talking about someone who, who might do this for you. So what I hear you saying is that you want to upload a WAV file or a MP3 or something like that. That’s a duplicate audio, but in that language that you may not even have ever spoken. How do I one, how do, how do I get that? You said a vendor.
Let’s, let’s give out some names of vendors. Do you have any affiliate codes, by the way? Or maybe I should get some.
Brett Snelgrove:
I don’t have any affiliate codes. I try and be quite agnostic. I have spoken to a lot of different kind of vendors who are out there and they’re all doing different things at different levels and have different levels of USP, but I would say that…
Dane Golden:
Let’s name some of them.
Brett Snelgrove:
There’s…
Dane Golden:
Let’s name some.
Brett Snelgrove:
– a company called PaperCup who is based here out of London. They are great for factual news-based content. There’s vendors like Air.io or AirTech who are based in Toronto. They, they do translation, captioning dub work. There’s Unilingo have been around for a long while in the space. They’ve done translation work for like Mr. Beast. They are very experienced in the space. And more and more, the more I talk about this topic, the more vendors I find. I would say people are really interested in finding out more. You can go to find me on LinkedIn. I’ve got numerous different posts on the topic, and in some of them I’m listing off who some of those vendors are.
Dane Golden:
And let me, let me reintroduce you. Brett Snelgrove. He’s worked for some of the biggest media brands that you know. BBC, Sony, others, right? It’s Sony, right? And you can find him on LinkedIn. What is that? URL,
Brett Snelgrove:
So you, if you just search for Brett Snelgrove on LinkedIn, it’s pretty easy to find me. You’ll see me as the strategic leader in social media and digital video,
Dane Golden:
S-N-E-L-G-R-O-V-E.
Brett Snelgrove:
Correct. That’s it.
Dane Golden:
Okay, great. And. I’m going to introduce myself here. My name’s Dane Golden. This is the VidAction Podcast, which we’ll put out on audio and video on my VidActionTV YouTube channel. My business’s name, VidAction.tv, where we help you up your game on YouTube, both organically and with YouTube ads.
So back to our topic. There are a number of these terms. Now we even actually need to define a difference because when you said translation, In some ways, it used to be that you were just doing this with the text. Now you actually have to do it with the voice. Is this a specific person? Is this an AI voice?
This that’s doing this? Is there a…
a Can you drop it in something? It becomes another language and the timing is right? How does that all work?
Brett Snelgrove:
It’s very interesting because each vendor do it differently. So most of them at the moment are still using real people, real voices to do it. More and more progress around AI. The most, I think there’s, the best way people are approaching it is bridging the gap between recording someone, to then be able to generate an AI voice from, because the biggest thing AI has difficulty doing is getting inflection, emotion and things like that.
And there’s companies like Deep Dub and Flawless that are trying to work on this for higher end of people who are companies like Sony who want to be able to dub stuff in other languages for cinema and television and stuff like that. Like there’s so much work going on in this space. My advice to…
Dane Golden:
that’s right. It’s really dubbing. It’s really dubbing, right?
Brett Snelgrove:
It’s, it’s absolutely dubbing and my advice to people is do your research. Even before you do your research, work out your priorities. What do you want to achieve? Do your research. There’s plenty of companies out there. Go and speak to them. One of the key things you need is at least two levels of Quality Control or QC. So whoever’s doing it need to be checking it, and then someone else needs to be checking it as well, just to make sure it is a hundred percent accurate.
Because if you are dealing in a language you have no familiarity with, you want to make sure you’re putting it out there, and you are really confident in the level of translation.
Dane Golden:
And there used to be the ability to crowdsource like printed translations what I’m, I’m, now I’m losing captions in another language, like, and you could crowdsource it and someone of your viewer wants to volunteer one, and you’re like, great. Except it also could have said something like, and hey, don’t, don’t click on Nick Nimmin, click on Dane Golden, because I’m Dane Golden and I’m awesome.
Brett Snelgrove:
Exactly. And I think the price points are coming down more and more. I think it’s becoming more and more accessible. I really think now is the time where, like I said, the barriers to entry are dropping more and more so that if you, if anyone ever thought about this as an option, it’s really worth going out there and exploring it because you probably will find that there is a vendor that’s right for you.
And you can get back value. And from everything that I’ve done in the space and everyone I’ve spoken to, the value you get back is brilliant. You get more discoverability, you get more viewership, you get more retention.
Dane Golden:
Now of course now you’re going to have to hire all sorts of commenters in different languages to make sure, or maybe the AI will translate it for you. I don’t know.
Brett Snelgrove:
I know, I mean, that’s, that’s a whole other world as well. Yeah. That’s a whole other area.
Dane Golden:
So here was one of my pet peeves from major startups like Uber and other companies, is what they would do is they would start a company YouTube channel, right? And they’re an international startup. Really big. And again, I keep harping on Uber because they used to do this a lot, but a ton of international companies would do this.
They’re like, great, we have a video now. It’s an ad. Maybe it’s a 30-second ad. We’re going to upload it to our YouTube channel. And you know what, we’re going to, we’re going to be showing this in a lot of different countries, so it has to be in Croatian and Hungarian and Czech and so forth. So we’re going to upload a different video in each of these different languages to our YouTube channel, like all on the same day.
So we’re uploading 12 videos for every country we service in different languages. Same video. Well, what that does, It’s an organic traffic killer. It will destroy and ruin your traffic because what happens if someone is, has liked or subscribed or has become a watcher of your channel? They, you know, some Tuesday now they’ve got 12 videos in their feed, 11 of which they don’t speak the language for.
And so they’re definitely not going to watch it. They may unsubscribe because now you’re spamming them with, with foreign language stuff that is not relevant for them. This solves that problem for businesses and creators too.
Brett Snelgrove:
Absolutely. And I think there’s cases for using multi-language localization. So taking one video, having multiple languages available in that one link, one video versus running multiple different channels in different languages. The latter is if you have a real vested interest in a particular territory and you want to be able to access it via that language.
And you know, there there’s business or commercial value. That you want to achieve by having that localized content? It is, it would be truly localized in terms of, you know, if you think about things like your end screens, if you have any, anything there that would be in the right language…
Dane Golden:
Oh, right.
Brett Snelgrove:
Where, obviously you can’t do that if you are doing, the multi-language localization. It’s still going to have “watch more,” “subscribe,” in English because there’s no way they’d dynamically update that. But there is, I have heard as well for both, ends of the, both scenarios. There’s great opportunity in terms of revenue if that is a play for you. So, multi-language, local localization because you are increasing the likelihood of retention.
So people are watching that video more, especially if English isn’t their first language, it’s going to get recommended more. It’s going to be pushed up in the feed more. There’s going to be, it’s going to get recognized as a valuable video. So therefore YouTube will want to sell against it in terms of ads. You have a great opportunity there. The other case is…
Dane Golden:
Stop there for a second. That was actually a great, a great thing because we don’t just get watched by video marketers on this podcast. We get watched by creators too. And so if you are, if, if, getting revenue is an important thing for you, and you actually are running ads on your YouTube channel, it’s not meant to just drive business to your website, that ability when you are localized to a different country than the language you speak, now what’s happening is that they can put that native language at the front of that video in an ad, and you are significantly increasing your revenue.
Brett Snelgrove:
Yeah. Yeah, and just think about if you are a creator, you’re based in an English country, but you know you’re getting audience out of Germany. You know, you can’t run a German channel. But if you, if you get to a tipping point where you go, that German audience is looking big enough, I have enough time, resource, budget to be able to go and look into localization.
You can rapidly be able to, to deploy that, get access to the audience and really massively increase not only that audience, but the overall audience for your channel. And suddenly you’ve got a massive boost. If you can do anything to improve your existing inventory you have on YouTube, that’s what you want to do.
And if you can do it on mass, even better.
Dane Golden:
And okay, now I have my own methods. I want to know yours. So you have a channel, great. And you’re like, yeah, we need to expand. Great. How do you know what sort of countries to expand to and how do you know, like what languages are watching your channel and what ones would be the ones you’d want to invest more time and money in?
Brett Snelgrove:
Sure.
Dane Golden:
Because ev everything costs money and time to make these translations. How do you, how do you decide which ones to focus on?
Brett Snelgrove:
I think it’s about your own priorities in terms of who your consumers or audience are based and who you’re trying to access. You can go into YouTube analytics, you can look at geography. You can look at the breakdown there. Usually you will find US, UK is up there at the top, but you will also find Mexico.
Dane Golden:
If you’re an English speaking…
Brett Snelgrove:
If you’re an English speaking, and that’s, that’s primarily what I can speak to. If you’re English speaking, but then you’ll also see India, Mexico, Germany, France, any number of the Spanish speaking kind of countries will start appearing there in terms of people who are watching your content. Now, you can also then dive deeper into your analytics and go, “Let’s look at the views. Let’s look at the watch time. Let’s look at the revenue and the CPMs and things like that” There’s, I’ve seen great success where if you are targeting a language where the alphabet is drastically different to your home country, alphabet. So I’m thinking Korean, Japanese…
Dane Golden:
yeah.
Brett Snelgrove:
Arabic… you put captions on, you can instantly access that audience and a lot of those countries have fantastic CPMs and…
Dane Golden:
Because they’re looking at captions. Because they’re looking at captions and we are not looking at captions because it’s already in English. And I’m American. I know American. I don’t need these other languages, but I create this and they know how that caption functions, even if I don’t. And so they’re watching it.
Brett Snelgrove:
Yes, exactly. And I often put in the title or the description, “captions available” Like make it really clear to your audience. Because it is, as soon as you look at YouTube analytics, you’ll see you accessing a global audience. There’s people all over the globe. There’ll be people from Indonesia, Philippines, Turkey, everywhere who are watching your content.
You pick the ones that are a priority to you. You make sure you communicate in the easiest and subtle way to your audience that that’s available for them. Update enough videos and then you’ll start seeing impact.
Dane Golden:
Now I want to talk about Dane Golden’s hack that I’ve never seen anyone else talk about. There is a bug in YouTube’s system, or at least there has been. I’m not sure if I’ve seen it lately, but it’s definitely been there
Brett Snelgrove:
Okay.
Dane Golden:
and you might see this from time to time and wonder why is this happening?
So if you’re the type of person that watches YouTube with captions on all the time like I do, because I just I just feel I can get more out of it if I seeing the words as I’m listening to them. If you upload manual captions in several different languages, but however, if you do not upload it in English, but you’ve uploaded it in Korean, Japanese, German, French, Italian, and Spanish and so on, and Portuguese, something very weird happens.
You know what I’m talking about.
Brett Snelgrove:
No, I haven’t heard about this. I always include English.
Dane Golden:
Okay, if you don’t do it, because I’ve seen channels that don’t do it. What happens is it doesn’t show English as the, as the captions. Even if English is your default language. It shows, it shows, I think Korean.
Brett Snelgrove:
Right,
Dane Golden:
I don’t know why, but Korean maybe comes up as the first language in order of languages because it’s a character language.
So, I’m watching a video in English that’s, that’s got manual captions, but they’re not manual captions in English. So the automated captions get subverted and the number one manual caption shows up first. So I’ve seen this a lot, but not so much lately. I don’t know why, but that’s a real thing.
Brett Snelgrove:
That’s, that’s really interesting. But I think the great thing about that, that speaks to whatever your native language is, upload that subtitle. That is the first caption file you need to be putting in there. Absolutely.
Dane Golden:
Sure. So what I hear you saying about prioritizing, so let’s say you have, let’s say there’s a lot of people in India watching, which there are a lot of people that watch YouTube in India and sometimes they might speak English, sometimes they might speak Bangla or any number of different languages, right?
Because there’s many possible languages in India. If you’re a YouTuber, you might think, oh, great, I’m going to optimize for all these languages. But a lot of times it doesn’t really get the best CPM. Or if you’re a business, you may not expect a lot of customers from, and I’m picking on India, but it could be any number of countries where you’re getting a lot of traffic, but you don’t expect to do business there.
Is it really worth your while? Or maybe you’re targeting, you want to expand into another market you really want to nail, let’s say Latin America. Okay, great. I’m going to do Spanish and Portuguese. Now I want to ask about, because hey, this is a big world. You and I both speak English. We don’t always speak the same kind of English, but we, we get the idea. Do you need to upload different dialects because the Mexican, Spanish and the Spanish in Spain, and Spanish in Argentina, not always the same.
Brett Snelgrove:
Not…
Dane Golden:
What about What about different versions of languages?
Brett Snelgrove:
Where it’s made available, there is, options for Spanish where there is Spanish that’s relative to Spain and what I call Latam Spanish or Spanish that is spoken around the rest of the world as another option as well. In most cases though, I think people will understand and be forgiving if they know the video is in an original language that’s not their own. If there is some effort that’s been made to be able to upload it with captions or the metadata or audio to accommodate for them. Because I think as long as you are insuring whatever you are uploading is correct as possible, and that especially if it is. Like you said, anything that has technical words in it, anything that’s got lingo, anything that might have historic words that might be hard to translate, you need to make sure those are correct so that they can reach those audiences.
Dane Golden:
Now you’ve been posting about this on LinkedIn. I want to make sure people remember where you are on LinkedIn. Could you say that again and spell your name for us?
Brett Snelgrove:
Sure, so you can go find me on LinkedIn, Brett Snelgrove, so B-R-E-T-T S-N-E-L-G-R-O-V-E. If you search for me on LinkedIn, you can easily find me there. I’ve got a direct URL as well, which is LinkedIn.com/in/brettsnelgrove all one word.
You can go to my profile there. I’ve got a whole bunch of featured or tagged articles that are within my main profile that you can go see that include a lot of of posts about the topic we’re talking about, right now, and I do honestly believe it’s really powerful.
Dane Golden:
And what types of services would you provide around this or other types of services?
Brett Snelgrove:
So for me at the moment, I am I’m doing some consultation work at the moment, so I’m doing strategy work for a lot of different people at the moment. And I’m interested in always finding new opportunities. So if people will go to LinkedIn, Look at what I’m about, read my about section, read my posts, want to find out more about me. want to get in contact, just drop me a message.
Dane Golden:
Great. Brett Snelgrove, and my name is Dane Golden. This is the video marketing podcast. Just Google the video marketing podcast or find it on my VidActionTV YouTube channel. VidAction.tv is my business where we help you up your game on YouTube, either organically or with YouTube ads. Most people don’t do both, they do one or the other. We feel they work together. To grow a channel and grow a business and create more sales for you. So until next week, here’s to helping you help your customers through video.