About the Channel
Youth With You is your typical idol group building show, but it's one I hold near and dear to my heart. I was first introduced to fan translating during the earlier seasons. The show is aired in Chinese and iQiyi began providing their own translated subtitles in recent years, but there were still many extra clips and behind the scenes footage that were left unsubbed.
I really wanted my fellow fans to enjoy these extra contents too. So I began learning how to source videos, create subtitles efficiently, and list them on YouTube so that the translations could reach a wide audience.
After the show ended, I branched off to subtitle interviews and vlogs by the show participants. Whatever the community I cultivated seemed to find an interest in, I did my best to provide subtitles for the content they wanted to see.
UX Driven Decision Making
I've based many decisions of my channels around considerations for user experience. Here are a few that have made the greatest impact:
Translator's Notes
Some things like puns, idioms, or slang is often lost in translations
Providing translator's notes offers the viewer some extra context
Playlists
Once I had uploaded a good number of videos to my channel, I started to organize them into playlists so that viewers could easily find what they were looking for
Some of the longer videos were cut into multiple clips and uploaded at different times were put into their own playlists as well
Title and Description Tailored for SEO
I listed the people who appear in the video in the description so that it's more searchable
Based on YouTube analytics and seeing what search terms viewers were using to find my videos, I began including their Chinese names and stage names as well
My Process
At the peak of my channel, I was posting a subbed video pretty much every other day and sometimes even providing same day translations for newly posted videos. So I really needed an effective process that would allow me to stay organized and on top of things. Here's a brief overview of the process I developed to make subtitles for a single video:
Source Video and Preliminary Checks
Find video to translate on streaming website or social media, and download it.
Upload to YouTube without posting to make sure it doesn't infringe on copyright
(otherwise it will immediately be struck down).
Timing
Using Aegisub, create a subtitle file and mark timecodes
for either closed captions or speech.Translating
Translate each timed segment.
(This step always takes the longest.)Prep for Posting
Export the subtitles to a .srt file and upload it to the YouTube video
that's already uploaded on the dashboard. Write the title and descriptions.Post and Share
Post immediately or schedule the post for high traffic hours.
Share on social media (I used Twitter).
Impact and Takeaways
The best interaction I ever had with a viewer was when I was talking to another translator on social media and we were divvying up a set of interviews so our content didn't overlap. They told me they had actually been inspired to start translating after watching one of my videos. It made me so happy that my work could encourage others to take the first step into community contribution.
Let’s Chat!
I'd love to hear more about your experiences
as well as potential opportunities.