Need to translate YouTube video to English? Read the summary and ask in English

How to translate YouTube videos: the usual ways, and where they stop

A talk, an interview or a tutorial you need is in Spanish, Japanese or German, and you don't speak it. There are a few common routes.

• YouTube's own Auto-translate. Open Subtitles/CC in the player and, if English isn't listed, choose Auto-translate, then English. It's free and built in, and it's the right tool if you want to watch the whole video. It needs the video to have captions, and machine-translated captions can be rough.
• Copying the transcript into a translator. It works, but a long transcript is a wall of text, and you still have to read all of it to find the part you came for.
• Watching with subtitles at speed. Captions in a second language go by fast, and you can't skim a video the way you skim a page.

Where Claras fits

Claras is for when you want to know what was said, and find the part that matters, without sitting through the whole thing. It writes the summary, the chapter titles and its answers in English, whatever language the video is in. It suits researchers following sources in other languages, people learning from creators abroad, and anyone sent a link in a language they don't read.

A worked example: a Spanish interview, read in English

Say you have a 40-minute interview in Spanish with Spanish captions, and you need to know what the guest says about one topic. This is how Claras handles a video from Spanish to English, step by step.

1. Claras gets the transcript

It asks for English captions first. If the creator uploaded an English track, Claras uses it, and your transcript is in English. If not, it uses the video's own captions, here Spanish. Claras checks the text is really in the language it expects, and tries to turn down a machine translation into another language. With no captions at all, AI listens to the audio and transcribes it in Spanish.

2. The AI writes in English

Every request to the AI carries one instruction: write in the language you picked, whatever the language of the video. So the transcript is read in Spanish, and the chapters, their one-line descriptions, the opening, the key takeaways, the section summaries and three suggested questions all come back in English.

3. You find your topic

Scan the English chapter titles and click the one you want. The player jumps to that moment. Open the Transcript tab to read the Spanish lines around that time, which helps if you know some of the language.

4. You ask a question

Ask AI answers in English, but it finds the right part of the transcript by matching words. "What does she say about inflation?" shares few words with a Spanish transcript, so Claras may read the wrong part. Asking "What does she say about inflación?" or adding a name or a number gives it something to match. If nothing matches, it reads the start of the video.

What the output looks like

Our home page demo shows one video summarized in three languages. The English summary opens: "Four experts debate whether AI could end humanity, and whether it can be controlled at all." The Spanish one opens: "Cuatro expertos debaten si la IA podría acabar con la humanidad y si es posible controlarla." Same video, same transcript, a different language picked before pressing Analyze.

Tips for following videos in another language

Pick the language before you press Analyze

The summary is written once, in the language picked at the time. To get it in another language, you have to run the video again, which can count as another video on your plan.

Match the video's words in Ask AI

Names, numbers, brand names and technical terms are often the same in both languages, so put them in your question. A word or two in the video's language helps even more.

Start broad, then narrow

For "what is this about?", read the Summary tab, which is built from the whole transcript. Use Ask AI for one topic or one claim, then check that moment.

Check quotes before you use them

A summary is the AI's reading of the video, and translation adds one more step. Before you quote someone, find the line in the transcript and run it past a translator or someone who speaks the language.

Use the transcript to learn

If you're learning the language, read the English summary first, then the original transcript with the video. Our page on language learning with YouTube goes further.

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