Translating YouTube videos: The key to unlocking an international audience?
How does a YouTube channel beat out the competition to attract an international audience of millions? The team at Hyper Studios believe that the answer is to adopt the same high-quality standards and techniques when dubbing YouTube videos as those that are used by their multi-million-dollar counterparts in the broadcasting industry.
Dylan Huynh started creating YouTube videos at just 14 years old and, over the last seven years, he’s converted his childhood hobby into a lucrative career. His production company, Hyper Studios, employs a full-time staff of 12, creating and sharing content across a handful of YouTube channels with a total following of over five million subscribers. But Huynh intends to transform his YouTube empire from an English-language channel to one that appeals to audiences around the world by translating his YouTube videos.
Testing the waters of professional YouTube dubbing
Huynh’s ambition to become a global sensation starts with the HyperPlays channel – an offshoot of the original Hyper channel that is dedicated to family-friendly gaming videos centred around Roblox. In February 2022, the Hyper Studios team turned to Take 1 with the idea of voice dubbing these high-energy, dynamic videos into Spanish to tap into a market of new viewers and grow the channel’s international following.
“There are Minecraft channels that are dubbed in Spanish that get hundreds of millions of views, but no one is currently utilising YouTube dubbing in the Roblox sphere,” the YouTuber explains. He believes that, as one the most popular channels currently sharing Roblox content, Hyper Roblox could attract a massive international audience by adding a professional dub to the videos and making the content available in other languages. He’s testing this theory by enlisting Take 1’s dubbing services to translate 15 of his YouTube videos into Spanish to gauge the response to the content.
Huynh believes that YouTube content creators are constantly raising the bar with video creation and quality and, when it comes to YouTube dubbing, extra care needs to be taken with lip synch, “It’s not just about the voice but the mouth movements too. Being able to rely on Take 1 to take care of that aspect of quality and deliver a high-calibre product made the process so much easier.”
Translating a YouTube video: Evolving from traditional TV to the digital space
After a lengthy search for the right dubbing partner, the Hyper Studios team chose Take 1 as their preferred YouTube translator because of their reputation in the media and entertainment industry and their high-quality approach to language services.
Jim Calcaterra, operations manager at Hyper Studios, says, “Take 1’s experience with massive names like Discovery and the BBC speaks for itself, but their approach to the project is what really made them stand out. We could tell they valued our content just as much as they would value massive TV projects.”
As Huynh is the primary character in the Hyper Roblox videos, finding a Spanish voice artist that could match his energy and performance was critical. “They got it right away,” added Calcaterra, “To dub Dylan’s YouTube videos well, we needed a voice that matched his liveliness and delivery, so that the overall feel of the video gives the same viewing experience as the one you get in English. They gave us options for voices, and we could’ve used any one of them – they were so high quality and fit with the content so well.”
Localization and translation: the future of YouTube content?
The Hyper Studios team intends to utilise profits from the Spanish video dubbing project to create more high-budget videos across their channels, but Huynh’s not stopping there, with plans to potentially expand this YouTube dubbing project into multiple other languages. He adds, “We’re still in the research and testing phase at the moment, but there’s definitely a couple of other languages we’re looking into.”
“I see YouTube as a platform that will overtake everything else in the next 10 years – having watched it evolve since I first started making videos at 14 years old.” He adds, “The top tier content creators on the platform are producing the same content that networks are making, in a shorter time, with their own money – and they’ve got all the creative freedom in the world.”
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