How to dub your videos into other languages

A video can reach people in another language in four ways, and they are not the same. The first three keep one video and add a voice: YouTube dubs it for you, you upload your own dubbed track to YouTube, or Instagram translates your voice on a reel. The fourth is a separate video for each language, posted on its own.

Dubs and extra tracks keep every view on one video, and viewers hear their language without looking for it. A separate video can be written for its audience, not only translated, and it can go on a channel or an account of its own. Which one fits depends on the platform, the languages, and whether the voice is yours.

YouTube makes dubbed audio tracks by itself when you upload a video, and it is on by default for eligible creators. Viewers hear the dub that matches their preferred language, and can switch between the original and the dubs in the player. Some languages get expressive speech, which keeps the original speaker's pitch and intonation, and lip sync is an experiment open to select channels.

Which languages a video is dubbed into depends on the language it is spoken in:

A video is left out when it runs over 120 minutes, has little or no speech, is spoken too fast, is in a language YouTube does not support or cannot detect, or contains copyrighted content. You can choose to review dubs before they are published, and publish, unpublish or delete each one; a deleted dub cannot be published again.

If you already have a voice in another language, you can add it to the same video as a second audio track, on long videos and on Shorts. It is available to creators with access to YouTube's advanced features. In YouTube Studio on a computer, open Languages, choose the video, add a language, and next to Dub click Add and select your audio file.

The file must be audio only, in a format YouTube supports, and roughly the same length as the video. Viewers get the track in their preferred language by default and can switch in the player settings. YouTube removes a track whose copyrighted content differs from the original audio.

Instagram can translate your voice on a reel with Meta AI and sync your lips to the new words. It is not available to everyone yet, and it works in Spanish, English, Hindi, Portuguese, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Kannada, Japanese, Korean, French, German and Italian. Arabic is not on the list.

It only translates your own voice: a reel with music, sound effects or other voices gets "Voice translation is not available". On the screen where you publish the reel, turn on Translate voice (under More options if you do not see it) and allow Meta to use AI for it. Translations can take up to 24 hours; you can review them, turn off the lip sync, or delete a language, and a deleted translation cannot be added again.

The fourth way is a separate video in each language. Clip-Short's AI Agent can do this for any video it made: the translate button writes each scene again in the new language, keeping how long it is spoken, and records it in the same voice over the same pictures, with the captions timed again. It makes a new video, which uses one of your plan's AI Agent videos.

It works in the AI Agent's 11 narration languages, among them English, Spanish, Portuguese and Arabic, which it speaks as Egyptian colloquial. A series can do it for every episode: each finished episode is also made in up to 2 more languages you pick. Videos you filmed yourself are not re-voiced; for those, captions come in the language that is spoken.

On YouTube, check first whether automatic dubbing already covers your language pair: it costs nothing and keeps every view on one video. If your voice matters, or the pair is not covered, a track you recorded yourself goes on the same video. On Instagram, voice translation fits a reel where you are the only one speaking, in one of its languages.

Make a separate video when the audience in the other language needs its own script, when the language is not covered, or when you want a channel or account for that language. Whichever you choose, have someone who speaks the language watch it before it goes out: machine translation can be wrong on names, jokes and dialect.