No English? No Problem. My Courses Now Have Captions In Multiple Languages

Fifteen years ago, I began getting requests for captions in my course and lesson videos. These requests came from enthusiastic blues guitarists in other countries who, despite speaking some English, struggled to keep up with my videos. At that time, getting my videos transcribed was reasonably priced, but getting those transcriptions translated was prohibitively expensive, to the tune of about $700 per hour of footage.

So for the past 15 years, whenever someone has asked for captions in their language, I've told them the same thing: I'd love to, but it's just way too expensive.

But a funny thing happened during those same 15 years. Computers got really, really good at transcribing audio, and even translating it into other languages. It was called "machine learning," and it was pretty rough (and slow) at first, but today it's extremely accurate and very, very fast.

Last year I moved my entire library of free lessons and course videos to a video hosting platform called Mux, and while Mux had automatic transcription, it didn't have automatic translation yet. That changed in March of this year when they added a way for video creators to have their videos automatically translated into over a dozen languages.

I began experimenting with this about two weeks ago, and pretty soon I had captions for my entire library of videos (over 350 hours) in 9 different languages, with more to come. The dream of making my courses easier to understand for non-English speakers was finally a reality.

How It Works

If you're watching a public video on the website (or if you're using the basic online player for a course you purchased), you'll see a CC button in the video player, as shown in the following images. Clicking that button lets you enable captions in your preferred language.

For Locals

In the Pro Player, the process is a little different. The caption settings are located in the video settings panel as shown in the images below. Once you enable captions in your preferred language, they will be enabled automatically when you switch videos.

What Am I Missing?

As of this writing, I have captions for every video done in:

• Spanish
• French
• Portuguese
• Italian
• German
• Japanese
• Chinese (Mainland)
• Dutch
• Russian

There are many more languages I can add for a marginal price, so this list will grow as people request new languages.

This is something I dreamed of doing 15 years ago when the price was $700 per hour per language. Now I can do my entire library (350 hours) for about $110 per language. Technology is amazing.