YouTube platform is used by over 2.6 billion people worldwide monthly according to latest statistics available to us during the first quarter of 2023. According to these statistics, YouTube ranks second globally among the largest search engines after Google, and is the second most popular social media platform after Instagram. Currently, there are over 151 million active channels on YouTube with content being watched by users from various cultures and countries. There are approximately 100 localized versions of YouTube in about 80 different languages. YouTube provides these versions to enable users from all around the world to interact seamlessly despite their cultural, national, and linguistic differences. However, the language in which the video content is spoken still significantly influences the quality and countries of the users who consume the content.
Content creators on YouTube have been able to overcome this barrier as the platform recently introduced the “Multi-language Audio” feature that allows them to dub their content to different languages on the site. This enables viewers to listen to the audio content of the video in their local languages instead of just reading written translations.
When watching an educational video on YouTube, for example, you probably want to hear the explanation in Arabic to understand it clearly. If the video creator dubs the video into Arabic and uses the new multi-language feature on YouTube, you can listen to the audio content of the video dubbed in Arabic by changing the spoken language settings in the video to your country’s language or your mother tongue. Let us explain how to do this in the following paragraphs.
What is the Multi-language Audio feature in YouTube?
This new feature was recently added to YouTube to enable content creators to reach a larger audience worldwide. The Multi-language Audio feature allows creators to add multiple audio tracks to a single video, up to 40 audio files, allowing them to dub their content in multiple languages so that viewers speaking foreign languages can hear the video in their original languages.
Channel owners record the audio content of the video in multiple languages, and some content creators sometimes use voice actors to record the audio content of their videos in different languages. Then they merge these audio recordings and attach them to the original video through YouTube Studio page, allowing viewers to hear the audio content of the video dubbed in their languages instead of just relying on written subtitles on the video, or creating several versions of the video in different languages and publishing them on various versions of their channels to address their audience and followers individually, like MrBeast in Arabic.
This feature is particularly important for a large sector of YouTube users, especially in countries like India with the largest number of platform users worldwide, approximately 467 million users. The residents of India speak various languages such as Hindi, Telugu, Bengali, Punjabi, Tamil, among others, and do not share a common official language, which pushes content creators in India to create multiple versions of a single video dubbed in multiple languages to make it suitable for viewing in different states of India.
Therefore, the Multi-language Audio feature in YouTube significantly contributes to increasing the audience and followers of content creators, reducing the number of uploaded videos, facilitating user access to them, and reducing congestion on the site servers. With a few simple steps, users can now change the language of the video they are watching instead of searching for another separate version of the same video uploaded elsewhere on the site.
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How to Change the Spoken Language for Videos on YouTube
The Multi-language Audio feature in YouTube is available for use on the web platform on personal computers or on the YouTube app for various types of smartphones and smart devices. If we come across a video on YouTube that contains multiple audio files in different languages, we can choose to hear the video’s audio in the language of our preference from the available languages in the list as follows:
On Computer
If we encounter any video on YouTube on the web that contains multiple audio files in different languages, we can choose to hear the video’s audio in our preferred language from the available languages list by opening the web browser we use on our computer, navigating to the YouTube site, searching for the desired video, and playing it. Then, we click on the gear icon at the bottom of the video screen to open the video settings menu, then click on the “Audio track” option and select the language we want to hear the video audio in from the available languages for the video.
On Smartphones and Smart Devices
In any video that contains multiple audio files in different languages, we can choose to hear the video’s audio on a smartphone in any available language from the language list by opening the YouTube app on our smartphone, searching for the desired video and playing it. Then, we tap on the gear icon at the top left of the video screen to open the video settings menu, then click on the “Audio track” option and select the language we want to hear the video audio in from the available languages.
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The Multi-language Audio feature on YouTube is still used in a very small percentage of videos posted on the site, as it requires additional effort from content creators to translate and record the video’s audio in other languages and then add them as attached audio tracks to the video. This does not guarantee that the video will achieve the desired spread among the target audience speaking these languages at the same time.
Therefore, if you cannot find the language you want to hear listed in the available audio track languages for a video on YouTube, it simply means that the video creator did not include an audio recording for the video in that language when uploading it to the site. However, it is expected that dubbed videos in multiple languages will become more widespread on YouTube in the near future.
