YouTube announced plans last month for several new features, including a feature that will enable users to ask their viewers to provide translated subtitles for videos.

With a community of more than 1 billion viewers across the globe and the majority of video content being created in English, this new feature makes a lot of sense.

“In the coming months, your fans will be able to submit translations in any language based on the subtitles or captions you’ve created, helping you reach even more viewers,” explained YouTube Director of Product Management for Creators Matthew Glotzbach and VP of Engineering for Creators, Oliver Heckmann, at the VidCon conference where the new features were announced.

With over 6 billion hours of video being watched every month on YouTube and 80% of the traffic coming from outside the US, this new feature recognises that not everyone viewing videos speaks the same language. Automatic speech recognition and automatic translation on YouTube already exist, but your fans are the best people to do the job. In the near future, they will now be able to submit translations in any language based on the subtitles or captions you’ve created, helping you reach even more viewers.

You Tube channels Barely Political, Fine Art-Tips, Got Talent Global and Unicoos are already testing out this new user-generated subtitling. It is similar to a feature that has been available in some time in South-east Asian online video service Viki.

Other new YouTube features include a new crowdfunding-style feature that enables you to ask your fans for donations to support your channel, an Android app for YouTubers called YouTube Creator Studio, which users can use to access their statistics, respond to comments and get notifications on how their channels are performing, new video support, and more songs and now sound effects in a new licensed Audio Library for creators; as well as more ways for YouTube users to build playlists.

These new features will be rolled out over the coming months. What do you think about them?

This is what Mashable and Guardian thinks about it:

http://mashable.com/2014/06/26/youtube-announces-translator-tip-jar-and-management-app-at-vidcon/

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/27/youtube-crowdfunding-subtitles-60fps-video