How To Translate Video With AI: The Top 4 Technologies

With the rise of artificial intelligence technology, it's becoming easier to break down these barriers and connect with people who speak different languages. One area where this is particularly important is video content, where language can be a major obstacle to sharing and consuming information.

Learn which technologies you can use to translate video content and increase your reach.

In the past few years, we have seen a significant spike in video content. It is used in every social media platform and has become a powerful tool for marketing purposes. According to several reports, nearly 91% of businesses in various industries rely on video content as part of their strategy for better communication with their target audiences. Whether short, snappy videos for ads or longer videos for demos, there are a lot of options for reaching out to potential customers or new followers through video content.

The usage of video content as a marketing tool isn’t the only data point that has increased. Viewer statistics are also demonstrating a steep increase in video consumption and are expected to reach new heights in the following years. Nowadays people from virtually every corner of the world are granted access to online content. YouTube for instance has become the second-largest search engine on the internet, and it’s all about visuals. Yet, we ask ourselves: how is it possible to make relevant video content for a global audience?

Here is where video translation comes into play. With the use of AI-powered technologies, video creators can now translate their videos and localize their content with ease. Read along to learn more about the most popular modern AI technology and how it is used to translate video content.  

Before we explore the most popular technologies used in video translation, it seems only reasonable to give a clear definition of this process.

Video translation is the process of translating spoken or written content in a video into another language, usually to make it more accessible to viewers who don’t speak the original language in which the video was made. In addition to translating spoken or written words, video translations may also involve subtitling, dubbing, or voice-over narration to convey the original message. All of these techniques have one purpose, to bring the overall video experience to a new, target language audience.

Doing video translations back in the day was not an easy task as it was made mostly by humans. That meant that a translator had to carry out many steps before making the final product, including analyzing the content to determine the tone and message, typing down text, and synchronizing the subtitles. Nowadays, this process is much easier thanks to AI-powered technologies and tools that transcribe and adapt the video’s narrative fast and efficiently. But how does it work exactly?

In today's globalized world, the demand for multilingual content has never been higher. Whether it's for educational, informational, or entertainment purposes, video creators now need to translate videos and add captions in different languages to reach a wider, international audience. Fortunately, advances in technology have made video translation and captioning more accessible and efficient than ever before. Below, we will explore some of the key technologies that play a crucial role in making this happen. We'll also discuss the benefits and challenges of these technologies.

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)

One of the primary technologies widely used in video translation is ASR. Also known as Speech-to-Text (STT), this technology enables machines to automatically transcribe spoken language into written text. ASR systems use algorithms to analyze speech signals and identify individual words or phrases, which are then converted into written text. Most ASR uses AI to convert audio into text accurately by matching the speech to a format that could be read by a machine. What is more, it is no longer necessary for words to be spoken clearly thanks to the advancement of AI solutions that can easily transcribe various dialects, accents, and natural speech.

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) can bring many benefits to video captioning and video translation, such as increased efficiency, consistency, accessibility, and scalability. However, ASR also faces challenges, such as background noise, difficulty understanding context, and the need for extensive editing. Despite these challenges, ASR remains a valuable tool for creators who are looking for technological ways to translate video content.

Audio Recognition Technology

Another technology that is important to translate video content is audio recognition technology. It is crucial as it has the ability to separate other sounds from actual speech. With the help of machine learning techniques and software algorithms, this technology can analyze music, environmental noise, crowd cheering, traffic noise, and other side noises. When used in video translation this technology helps in providing accurate results because it understands that not every sound is necessarily a word.

Audio recognition technology comes with certain advantages such as accuracy, time efficiency, improved overall experience, and more that can be very useful when it comes to video captioning. That said, this technology faces some challenges that are yet to be improved. Some technical limitations along with data privacy and security should be carefully considered as important factors.

Language Detection

Quite often video content is presented in only one language. However, sometimes this is not the case as there could be a mix of two or more languages, for instance in an interview, during a podcast, or in a panel discussion with foreign speakers. Automatic language identification (LID) is able to detect and identify the language and dialect of the speaker. There are several approaches to LID, of which the most popular one is probably the use of deep neural networks. The latter is used as it is believed to be the most accurate technique, that can deal with a variety of words at once.

Language identification is another important innovation that finds application in the video captioning process. It is becoming critical as it allows hassle-free multilingual content creation which also happens to be much more cost-effective than other solutions used for language detection in the past. This technology comes with some limitations too, for example when it comes context ambiguity or the lack of training data in some languages that might lead to difficulties with accuracy.

Speaker Diarization

This technology is also used in videos where there is more than one speaker. The process allows for the separating of individual speakers so that other technologies such as ASR can transcript each speaker’s unique audio characteristics. By doing so, a video with multiple speakers can be captioned in a more readable format. This is achieved through the use of different algorithms and trained neural architectures.

Diarization is used for its advantage to better understand what a conversation is about by taking a large amount of text and breaking it into something much more meaningful. This technology is yet to be improved as it is currently working only for asynchronous transcription and not real-time.

Despite the use of latest technology, video translation continues to be confronted with challenges or obstacles. Some aspects of video translation and captioning such as wordiness, long sentences, lengthy dialogues, and audio expansions, can really be tricky to deal with. This is why a key to making the entire process easier and hassle-free is a combination of the use of technologies and human efforts in order to overcome these and other common video translation challenges.  

Although video translation technologies use AI-powered tools, this is currently only supplementary. Accurate and quality results are present but some processes such as text editing, context accuracy, and more still require human participation. One thing is certain, AI is taking translations to a new level where everything is more simple, fast, and affordable. If you are looking for a new tool to help you with your audio or video translation, we strongly recommend that you choose one that uses the most advanced technology. This way you can guarantee yourself that the whole process will be manageable and as hassle-free as currently possible.