According to a video posted by Masaru Kamikura, YouTube now supports machine transcription for Japanese language videos, in addition to English. I tried uploading (random) a Japanese video just to test, and indeed there is now a Japanese option for the transcription file in addition to English.
I confess though that the machine transcription failed, but that often happens in English too. It is a beta service after all (see picture).
Check out the Japanese video below for Masaru’s commentary on the new feature. To get an idea why more Japanese captions on YouTube will be helpful, click the CC button and then translate captions.
In the interests of accessibility, we at Penn Olson have been experimenting a little with the transcription feature in order to help get our videos subtitled. YouTube turns your speech to text as best it can, and inserts captions at the appropriate time. The accuracy of the transcription is perhaps not as important as the automatic timing of the captions.
Hopefully with this feature now in place more Japanese YouTubers will caption their work, making it possible for anyone with hearing impairments — or Japanese language impairments — to understand.
YouTube’s help documentation still only says that the speech processing algorithm works for English, though I guess this will be updated soon enough.
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