A Quality Assessment of YouTube's Automated Subtitling: Audiovisual Advertisements as a Cas Study
No Thumbnail Available
Date
2025-11-24
Authors
Wafaa Fuad Saeed Ashqar
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Al-Najah National University
Abstract
YouTube has provided a significant feature which helps companies that intend to extend their product/services across borders to transfer their promotional campaigns to a bigger number of audiences. YouTube’s automatic subtitling facilitates the mission to those companies and encourages them to achieve their goals. Accordingly, this study is conducted to assess the quality of automated subtitles. This study aims to contribute to research on audiovisual translation (AVT) into Arabic, especially in advertising. The study evaluates the quality of Arabic automatic subtitling given by YouTube for a group of ads for some international companies such as Mercedes Benz, Qatar Airways and J&J. The purpose of this study is to add a vision to the possible professional amendments of subtitled commercials, and the results of this analysis show that YouTube’s automated subtitles for the selected ads are good in general, but some cultural references and aesthetic language need to be considered in the chosen ads. This appears significantly in the vocative loss of certain elements in the textual and aesthetic production of ads; a loss which may usually hinder the promotional function of these ads. From a professional and functional perspective, thus, the study finds that Arabic versions of YouTube’s automated ads in the process of subtitling is inadequate and needs a process of human post editing. Therefore, the study recommends the incorporation of a professional action to optimize ASR performance in accordance with voice recognition and subtitles segmentations. In addition, the study urges further scholarly contributions from academic institutions and researchers in conducting more experimental research in the field of automated subtitling, particularly in today’s online commercial exchanges.