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> I don't think this functionality was as little-used as the support post represents. I've used it a little bit, and been watching a bunch of content that relied on it. That said, creating subtitles with their tools was an absolute shit experience. I've done my fair share of subtitling using other programs, and it's clear that whoever made the interface on YT hasn't really used the real deal, and doesn't understand what's important. Because the most important part for getting good subtitles is to get the timing right, to make sure every subtitle is displayed for the minimum time needed, and to make sure you split the dialogue in the right places, so that reading them "flows", so that they match what's being said. And you want to tie them to scene changes, to keyframes, so you don't get weird blinking, and for that you need the ability to step through the video frame by frame and adjust the subtitles. But the YT subtitling tools emphasized the text, and translations of the text. It was easy to suggest changes to a piece of text and get that through the "community" process, but changes to the timing was super-hard to do in their tools, and really hard to get through. You can upload a .srt that you've created in a real subtitling program, but that completely overwrites the existing subtitles, and was impossible to "diff" with what was already there, so that shit gets rejected as a rule, because reviewers don't understand the changes. So the result is that whoever manages to make the first community translation that is accepted, that person's timing is then taken as canon by everyone else, and all other translations are based on those exact timing, never mind if they're good, never mind if they're a good fit for every language, never mind if someone else can do better timings. And that completely sucks the joy out of the process, because you can't really improve existing subtitles, you can only try to change a word here and there. |