Score one for the global village: Google has announced that YouTube (News - Alert) video captions can be professionally translated into 36 languages.

“Back in September, we launched a feature that made it easier to make your YouTube video accessible in more than 300 languages and help grow your audience globally, by translating the video’s captions yourself or inviting friends or people you know to help translate,” said Jeff Chin, YouTube product manager, in a blog. “Now, you can connect directly with translation vendors and pay to get your captions translated quickly and professionally.”

When a content producer requests a translation for captions in YouTube, a screen displays a list of vendors along with their estimated pricing and delivery date, for easy comparison shopping. YouTube has initially collaborated with two companies, Gengo and Translated.net.

Users click a simple “Start order” button next to the vendor they’d like to use, which will then create an order and direct the user to the vendor’s website to complete payment. When the translator completes the translation, it will send the translated caption directly back to YouTube. Once the content creator approves, the translated caption will be available for all viewers.

Chin offered helpful hints on how to get the closed captioning process rolling as well. “Before you can translate your video, you’ll first need a caption track for your video,” he noted.

 “One of the easiest and quickest ways to create a caption track is to create or upload a transcript of your video. YouTube will then automatically sync your transcript with the video and create the time codes to generate the caption track.”

Users can also leverage YouTube Analytics to uncover the top geographies viewing a given video, to better choose to caption videos in the languages spoken in those countries, Chin added.