multi-language support on YouTube is here
and it's...
Tom Scott is one of my favorite internet personalities. He makes great short videos about weird, interesting things. He actually puts in the effort to do research, is mindful of the impact his words might have on his audience; and he travels to the actual locations he is talking about. He is awesome.
by the by - he also has some really innovative game shows. Check out a playlist here.A couple of weeks ago he released a video about the world’s oldest hotel. A Japanese establishment, which unlike most of these claimants to the 'oldest hotel', or 'oldest business' tags, hasn’t resorted to gimmicks. It hasn’t tried to maintain some sort of old-world charm, living-museum vibe about the place. Keeping old things as they are, might be a more western thing. Although for a culture as obsessed with tradition and culture as the Japanese, this is kinda surprising. It’s almost as if culture is a complex force and is not as simplistic as Japanese=traditional.
Not that it looks like your average Western hotel - it has traditional Japanese-style dining and so on. But the hot springs are pumped up to a 'modern' pool, there's fast WiFi and so on.
As most of Scott's videos, it doesn't stop there. He talks about the complexities of defining 'oldest' or even 'hotel'. The problem is, the idea of a 'hotel' doesn't fully map on to the idea of a 'ryokan' - which is what this establishment is technically called - a inn with hot springs. More troublingly, the idea of a 'business' itself also doesn't fully map onto Japan-from-several-hundred-years ago when this ryokan first started.
But what I found really interesting about the video, is a new YouTube feature that is enabled here (atleast till the date of publishing this). There is an AI powered English dubbed audio track, which overlays an auto generated English language track over the interview of the owner of the hotel. It's very very very very well done. I obviously can't attest to the accuracy or quality of the translation, but the voice sounds naturalistic and matches the English language translation embedded into the video by Scott. The feature was released in February of 2023, and was previously tested by a small bunch of creators including Mr. Beast - who has talked about his multi-language growth strategy before.
Mr. Beast uses human voice actors to dub his videos and multiple audio tracks are available from the same menu you use to change your closed captions settings. If you know anything about Mr. Beast, it shouldn't surprise you to know that he has hired Junko Takeuchi, who voices Naruto.
From a business perspective, it makes complete sense:
for Mr. Beast to want his content available in multiple languages. His videos are easy to follow and rely on ridiculous premises. The visual language is loud, and kids (and younger folks in general) love it!
running multiple channels, one for each of the languages, just makes life difficult for his team, who have to write multiple video titles, actually upload the videos to the different channels. Time better spent in executing Mr. Beast's next insane idea
YouTube plays the video in what it identifies as your primary video-viewing language, regardless of the original language the video was posted for. This has huge implications on how a video is received, and would likely increase stickiness of the platform
I don’t know if this was intentional but I just love the fact that the first video Tom used this feature, discussed the complexities of imposing one understanding of the world onto another culture. It is also fitting that while I type this out, the website editor shows a "Translate" button on the left, claiming to translate website content into 120+ languages along with SEO optimization. sigh...
What do machine translations mean for the entertainment world, for arts & culture and for society in general? We'll find out....maybe.