YouTube Launches Auto-Captioning & Translation For Japanese Videos

In March of 2010, YouTube launched English-language auto-captioning.  Since the launch, viewers have used the service to generate auto-captions on nearly 40 million videos.  This week, YouTube announced that they are expanding the auto-captioning feature, rolling it out a whole new language—Japanese.  Now, anyone viewing a video with a clear Japanese soundtrack will be able to create auto-captions in Japanese and translate them into more than 50 different languages.

How does it work?  According to Brad Ellis, product manager at YouTube, “Now on any video with a clear Japanese speech track, a red ‘CC’ button will appear at the bottom of the player, where you can click it to generate automatic captions from the speech.”