Translation for online video is about to get a whole lot easier. Google just announced that they are going to start offering an automatic caption service for YouTube videos.
Offering a service like this, provided it works as described, is nothing short of amazing. Subtitling videos or offering an alternative translated soundtrack is a time-consuming and often costly process that prevents content creators from optimizing the reach of their videos. Being able to post a video to a corporate YouTube channel and then having a captioned translation available in 51 different languages is going to make it a lot easier to get that content embedded in multiple blogs and partner sites.
