How do I translate a YouTube video?
Paste the video's URL, pick a target language from the 134+ supported ones, and the app produces a translated transcript along with translated subtitles. It translates the text rather than dubbing the audio, so what you get is something to read alongside the video, with the original timing preserved so the lines still match what is on screen. You can change target language later without starting over, and translations you have already produced are kept, so returning to one is immediate rather than a fresh run. The original stays available the whole time — switching between source and translation is a single action, which is the point for anyone using this to learn a language. Translation is a Premium feature; reading the original subtitles of a captioned video is free and unlimited.
Which languages does the YouTube translator support?
Translation covers more than 134 target languages. That includes the ones you would expect — Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Arabic, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Chinese — and a long tail that most tools skip, such as Turkish, Vietnamese, Ukrainian, Bengali, Filipino, Thai, Persian, Urdu, Swahili and Azerbaijani. There is no per-language pricing: every supported language is included in the same subscription, so you can translate one video into one language today and a different one tomorrow without any extra cost. Separately from what it translates into, the app's own interface is localized into 30 languages, so the menus and settings can be in your language even when you are translating into another. The source language does not need to be declared — it is detected from the transcript. Language availability does not depend on the video's own language, so any supported pair works in either direction.
Is translating YouTube videos free?
Translation is a Premium feature, because it runs a language model over the whole transcript. Reading the original is not: extracting subtitles and transcripts from any public video that already has YouTube captions is free and unlimited, with no account and no card. So the source material costs nothing, and Premium is what turns it into another language. With Premium you can translate into any of the 134+ supported languages, the translated lines keep their original timing so they still match the video, and the original stays available alongside the translation for instant switching — which is the point for language learners. Translations you have already produced are kept, so returning to one is immediate. One subscription covers both iOS and Android when you use the same Apple or Google account.
How accurate is the translation?
Translations are produced by Google's Gemini model working from the video's transcript rather than from the audio, which means it has the full surrounding context of a sentence instead of translating fragments in isolation. In practice that reads far more naturally than word-by-word substitution, and it handles idiom and sentence restructuring rather than transliterating them. It is still machine translation, though, and it inherits whatever the transcript got wrong: if the speech recognition misheard a technical term or a proper noun, the translation will faithfully translate the mistake. Specialised vocabulary, heavy accents, overlapping speakers and poor audio are where you should read the output more sceptically. For lectures, interviews, tutorials and general conversation it is usually accurate enough to follow the argument without consulting the original. Because the original transcript stays available beside the translation, anything that reads oddly can be checked against exactly what was said.
Can I translate the video subtitles AND see the original?
Yes — the translation does not replace the original, it sits alongside it. Switching between the source transcript and the translated one is a single action, and because both are kept after the first run the switch is immediate rather than a re-translation. This is the behaviour language learners specifically ask for: read the original first, check yourself against the translation only where you got stuck, then go back. It also matters for anyone quoting the material, since you can verify a translated line against exactly what was said before using it. The timing information survives translation, so both versions stay aligned with the video and you can jump to the moment a particular line was spoken from either view. Neither version is discarded when you switch, so you can move between them as often as you like without regenerating anything.
