YouTube is now offering content creators the ability to include foreign language dubbing of their videos following a highly successful pilot program by MrBeast.
By Phillip Moyer | Posted 6 minutes ago
When a story comes out on YouTube, it’s generally bad. The popular social media platform was in the news recently for letting users watch five ads before videos and significantly increasing subscription prices right before Thanksgiving. But now Deadline is reporting a positive change – after a pilot program by MrBeast, content creators can now sync their content in other languages.
This change allows creators to expand their reach to international audiences by giving viewers the ability to listen to YouTube’s vast library of content in the language of their choice. While the platform previously offered the ability to automatically translate subtitles, creators had limited ability to provide audio in multiple languages. Previously, the only option they had was to create a separate foreign language channel – something that required more effort and hampered channel selection by Google’s recommendation algorithm.
Creators with access to the tool can use the Subtitles Editor tool to upload new audio tracks. Viewers can check if another language is available for a video by clicking the video’s settings.
YouTube’s choice of MrBeast to lead the project makes perfect sense. Through separate channels, the creator has already released some of his most popular videos in foreign languages. These channels have translated his videos into Spanish, Portuguese, French, Japanese, Hindi and Arabic.
MrBeast has made great efforts to create multilingual content on these YouTube channels. He has hired professional voice actors to create his dubbed channels, many of which have appeared in foreign language versions of popular films, video games, and television shows including Naruto, Regular Show, My Little Pony, Super Smash Bros., and The Lego Movie.
Uploads to most of these channels stopped on December 4th, 2022 when YouTube allowed MrBeast to test the sync system on his main channel. His latest videos on most of his foreign accounts announced the change, explaining that all new translations can be found on his main channel. The exception is MrBeast’s incredibly popular Spanish-language account, which regularly tops 100 million views.
For those who don’t know, MrBeast is the 4th most popular YouTube channel and the most popular channel centered around a single personality. This record previously belonged to PewDiePie’s gaming channel until MrBeast smashed his record in November 2022.
MrBeast’s YouTube content generally revolves around competitions, stunts, and philanthropic work. Among his most popular videos is a $456,000 real-life game of Squid, a stunt that sees him spending 50 hours in solitary confinement and paying for anything someone can fit in a small circle in the floor at an electronics store.
However, the addition of multilingual syncing will not be available to all YouTube creators immediately. The program is expanding to thousands of different creators, many of whom have already created videos in multiple languages.
So far, there is no official list of all the different YouTube creators that will get access to the new multilingual dubbing tool. However, YouTube has stated that they have already tested the new tool with a handful of other creators, resulting in 3,500 multilingual videos being quickly created.
