Caption Technology Opens Up World of YouTube Japan

By Yoree Koh

YouTube Japan has developed an automated caption technique that’s designed to make Japanese videos more accessible to older viewers. But while it’s part of Google’s efforts to make inroads within the local market, the latest launch may also help make Japanese videos more appealing overseas, eating away at the language barrier that has long kept Japan news semi-isolated with an automated translation feature.

YouTube launched the Japanese version of automatic captions last week, becoming the only language in which the software is available outside English. It was first released to select U.S. users in November of 2009 and made available to the wider public the following March. Auto-captions have since been generated on nearly 40 million videos, according to YouTube.

Using the Google Voice Search technology the software can automatically generate captions in sync with time codes, saving video creators the laborious chore of doing it manually. The auto-captions only take a few minutes to complete, spitting out the text like a script with the accompanying time codes. Video owners can download, edit and improve the text, then upload the newer version. It gives video creators more incentive to add closed captions, indicated by the “cc” on the video control bar, as a function.

Aimed to improve video viewing for the hearing impaired, the Japanese language version could be useful for Japan’s rapidly aging society. For instance, news broadcaster TV Asahi said it plans to offer auto-captions on its videos.

Moreover, the auto-captions opens the way for many more videos to be translated into various languages: it can be coupled with an auto-translate feature that allows the captions to be rendered in 53 languages. And recent experience demonstrated the need for that can be vivid: As the world clamored for information about the March 11 disasters, the lack of information available in other languages frustrated the global audience tuned into the massive news story, stoking fears about the nuclear crisis along the way.

“There was a big response from overseas regarding the natural disasters and in order to make this news more readily accessible abroad we decided to make captions available on news videos in the hopes that they can be translated,” said Akihiro Hayashi, director of digital editing at TBS News. The TV broadcaster, a YouTube Japan media partner, said it plans to upload its own captions to all news videos.

To be sure, the auto-captions and translations are not perfect. The Japanese language, written in three different sets of characters, brims with homonyms. While Google’s speech recognition technology takes context into account when picking words, absolute accuracy is still a ways off. For example, in a news video about Japan’s heat wave the auto-caption assigns the character meaning “door” when the voice track was talking about ‘degree,’ because of pronunciation similarities.

Still, approximate or otherwise, the captioning and translation technology mean more people than ever before will be able to work out what’s going on in the world of YouTube Japan.

Read this post in Japanese/日本語訳はこちら≫