Trying to get your amazing video more views in other countries? YouTube can help with that, thanks to a new partnership to get your video captions professionally translated.

YouTube has already offered caption translations for more than 300 languages using its Google Translate service since September. But if you’ve got a killer video and need people to understand what the dialog actually is, Google Translate may not cut it.

So Google has partnered with translation services Gengo and Translated.net so their services are accessible from within YouTube. They offer the ability translate professionally in up to 36 languages. When you request that some captions need translation, YouTube will now display these vendors (and eventually more) with how much they cost and estimated delivery date.

After you click on one of the vendors, you will be directed to the vendor’s site where you can place your order. When the vendor is finished, the translations come back to YouTube for you to approve.

Ideally, you’ll get professionally translated captions in a quick fashion and be able to get your video more of a spotlight in other countries you want to make an impact in.

Translation image via Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Adoro falar con xente na súa propia lingua.

You probably don’t understand that, but Google does. Google Voice Search just added 13 new languages, including Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, and Portuguese to bring its total linguistic competency to 42 languages and dialects.

Meanwhile, Siri knows English, French, German, and Japanese, although Apple will be adding another 11 when iOS 6 hits in the fall.

Adding languages is not easy, but it’s a task that is custom-built for big data, and Google has big data in its back pocket. Before a language comes onstream, the company needs a minimum of hundreds of thousands of phrases, which the company can then parse as its servers learn to translate.

For some languages it’s easier than others: Google says that while Romanian follows predictable pronunciation rules, Swedish does not. (Perhaps that’s why there are so many good Romanian hackers?)

The full list of new languages also includes Basque, Bulgarian, Catalan, Hungarian, Icelandic, Serbian, Slovak, and Galician.

(No, I’d never heard of Galician before either. Wikipedia says it’s the language that is spoken in Galicia, which makes sense, and that Galicia is an autonomous region of northwestern Spain. Another day, another lesson.)

The update is rolling out now but won’t be fully operational for another week. Android users with version 2.2 (Froyo) or later get it automatically; others may need to install the Google Voice app. And iPhone users will presumably also be getting the update as part of the bundle of services in the Google for iPhone app, but there is no word on timing — or even a mention of the iOS app in the Google announcement. Read into that whatever you wish.

So that phrase above? It’s Galician for “I love talking to people in their own language.”

Of course, knowing that Google Voice Search and Google Translate aren’t perfect, especially with new languages … with my luck, it probably says something like “Your mother has hairy legs and smells like a goat.”

photo credit: woodleywonderworks via photo pin cc

Following the use of social media in the Arab Spring uprisings, Twitter has added more support for a few of the languages of North Africa, Central Asia, and the Middle East, including Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew, and Urdu.

In a blog post, a Twitter spokesperson revealed the new language support is due to the work of a large and diverse group of volunteers.

“Among those who donated their time and translation skills to make right-to-left languages a reality on Twitter [are] a Saudi blogger, Egyptian college students, a journalist at the BBC, IT professionals in Iran and Pakistan, an Israeli schoolteacher, the co-founders of the grassroots #LetsTweetInArabic campaign, academics specializing in linguistics, and teenagers in Lebanon.”

In conflict-torn areas of the world, Twitter execs and others are hoping that social media can help bring people together and unite them over commonalities. As the company wrote of the #Jan25 tweets, “A single tweet can bring you closer to neighbors and heroes, immerse you in political change or disaster relief.”

Urdu is the official language of Pakistan and is spoken in western India and parts of Afghanistan. Arabic is a variety of dialects is spoken throughout North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. Farsi is the official language of Iran and is spoken widely in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as by communities in Bahrain, Yemen, the UAE, and elsewhere. Modern Hebrew is, along with Arabic, an official language of the State of Israel and is spoken by most of the eight million people in Israel.

Here’s a map we made to illustrate Twitter’s new geographic reach:

Right-to-left translation efforts began in earnest in January 2012. Before then, right-to-left languages were not available for crowdsourced work in the Twitter Translation Center, where hundreds of thousands of volunteers work to bring Twitter to more languages and geographies.

Image courtesy of gezzeg, Shutterstock