Easy professional translations for YouTube video captioning

This quick-tip is about an extension to YouTube's captioning service. It's relevant to bloggers who focus strongly on videos as a complement to their blog content.

In Septemeber 2012, YouTube introduced a feature that let you or your friend translate the captions of videos (that you own) into additional languages.

Now they've partnered with some professional translation firms so you can get a quote, order, receive and pay for professional translation - all within YouTube / Google.    So you don't have to worry about whether your friend's high-school Spanish is really good enough for your international audience!

The first step to doing this is uploading a transcript file for your video. Something to bear in mind if you do this:  If SEO matters for your blog, then you probably don't want to put the transcript into both YouTube and the blog, because that would create duplicate content.

Takeout now lets you download your own YouTube videos

This Quick-Tip is about accessing your own YouTube videos, using Google's Takeout / Data-liberation service.

If you upload a video using the Blogger Post Editor's video icon, then it's stored in Google Videos - which is now retired except for the part that hosts vids uploaded thru Blogger.   (This was where they were being put  the last time I checked, which was a few months ago)

Many people dislike this, and prefer to upload their vids to YouTube first, and then link to the YouTube video from Blogger.  This gives

• Better control over the size of the video you display in your blog / website
• Video management tools (sorely lacking in Google Videos). 
• Statistics about viewers
• The chance to earn money separately from your blog if your video becomes popular
• Access to many more YoutTube features.

This is similar to the recommendation to upload pictures to Picasa independently of the post-editor, and putting them into your posts via the URL - it just gives you more control.

Now you can use Google Takeout to download a copy of the original for videos that you have uploaded to YouTube - without changing the format.   This is different to YouTube's download function, which only lets you download a transformed/transcoded version (eg a .wmv I just checked was available for download from YouTube as .mp4).

This can be used if you are:

• Moving your content away from Blogger / Google
• Transferring a blog to a different Google account:
  Currently there is no way to transfer ownership of a video in YouTube without changing the link to it, one option is to download the original video, upload it again using the new account and edit the original post to point to the new location.