YouTube comment translations have been around since mid-September, although with the newest update it has announced an expansion of its comment translation tools, along with broader access to Smart Replies in the form of streamlined, template response options, making it easier to quickly engage viewers in the app.
As usual, YouTube always arrives late to the party of implementing high-demand tools users have available across other social media platforms. YouTube recently incorporated “Go Live Together” for collective live-stream between creators although the feature was nothing out of the ordinary as Instagram has had the feature for well over 3 years. Now with the comment translation tool, it’s the same story…
Last September, YouTube launched the ability to translate comments within the app, via Google Translate integration tools to provide a seamless experience for users with different mother tongues to understand more types of comments in-stream.
YouTube says that comment translation has been a very popular addition, and based on this, it’s now adding comment translations to Studio Mobile as well, providing another way to engage with comments that are posted in another language.
What would comment translation mean for content creators?
For both users and YouTube itself, the benefits are evidently clear; provides more ways to engage with communities of creators previously limited to by language. A no-brainer when it comes to tools that would push higher engagement and open paths to discovering interesting content creators.
One snag of integrating Google Translate, of course, is that it is not 100% accurate although it does meet the necessary requirements to be accurate enough to provide a means to understand the context and engage in the app.
Now on mobile: A ‘Translate’ button for YouTube comments in over 100 languages 💬🌎
— TeamYouTube (@TeamYouTube) September 13, 2021
Unlock conversations with communities around the world in just one click!
Try it out in español, português, Deutsch, Français, Pусский, 日本語, Bahasa & 100+ more
Info→ https://t.co/Fj0AY3GaTs pic.twitter.com/uqWATsvht5
On the other hand, for creators, this would enable them to grow their following on an international scale and provide more alleyways for them to grow their influence. Although it is important to note that with an increase in global viewers, creators should keep in mind how content can be perceived differently with cultural barriers that go far beyond just comment translation.
Furthermore, although YouTube enables viewers to generate easy comments, the biggest obstacle for creators remains the integrated auto-translation of videos, which is limited by the geographic popularity of foreign languages spoken in that region. For example; if you watch a video in Spanish from a Columbian travel creator and you are currently in China, you might want to watch the video in French because it’s your mother tongue but unfortunately based on the location you can only choose to see it in Mandarin, English or Japanese.
So although it increases the possibility for international interaction, comment translation still does have its limitations
In addition, YouTube’s also expanding its ‘Smart Replies’ experiment, which provides comment suggestions when replying to viewers in-stream.
As you can see here, much like the message reply options that are now available in various apps, YouTube’s Smart Replies give you one-tap response options based on the user comment and the most commonly used creator replies across the app.
Smart Replies have been available to some users for a while, but now, YouTube is making them available to all creators in the main app, while it’s also launching a new experiment of Smart Replies on Studio Mobile too.
I’m not sure that these generic templates are always helpful, but you can edit them before sending – and for those running a bigger channel, with a lot of replies, it could help to simplify the process, and facilitate more engagement.
Finally, YouTube’s also moving playlists into the ‘Content tab’, while you’ll also now use now the ‘Create’ button in the top-right corner to build playlists.
That probably won’t have any major impact, but it’s another functional note, based on YouTube’s systematic updates.
More ways to engage in YouTube, faster. They won’t be for everyone, but there could be some specific, valuable use cases for these updates.
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