YouTube Goes Multilingual

Hey, what d’ya know, more YouTube news. The Google subset is now taking up more headline space than that which documents the travails of Paris Hil— Okay, I won’t go there. On to the topic at hand.

In its latest briefing to the world (literally) YouTube has done those based outside the US the courtesy of creating “country-specific” – nine to start – sites in order to better serve its international visitors/viewers. Nations listed in the global launch are: Brazil, England, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Poland, and Spain.

Last week we covered Flickr’s announcement of its language support initiative, which the company claimed would help fuel growth internationally. Presumably, Google feels the same will occur with its own multilingual expansion for YouTube .

And, well, we agree. Google states that in addition to the translation of content, it will append the existing and future video files with metadata that will provide users the option to enjoy all of the site’s content or just content “tagged” as part a country-specific annex of the site. For example, YouTube.com, as we all know, offers “everything under the sun.” YouTube.fr, YouTube.es, or YouTube.jp will do so as well while offering full translation, but they will in the future also allow one the option to filter out anything not associated with French, Spanish, or Japanese languages.

See, globalization has at least one advantage: Choice.

To kick start the launch of the country- and language-specific subsets, YouTube is providing content produced by a number of international broadcast partners: BBC, France 24, Antena 3, Cuatro TV, RTP (Portuguese), and VPRO and NPO (both Dutch), along with a healthy infusion of video made by various football clubs (soccer teams, for the Americans in the Profy audience) and non-profit organizations.

All YouTube sites catering translations for the nine first picks are accessible now.