Translating YouTube for a global audience with Farbod Mansorian from Unilingo

The Business of Creators is a podcast for content creators and everyone interested in the creator economy. On this show Ian Shepherd speaks with the pioneers shaping the industry and digs deeper to get the scoop on new ways to create, distribute and monetize content.

Ian is co-founder of Electrify Video Partners,  a company investing $m in established creators to accelerate their growth. Check out electrify.video.

In this latest episode Ian speaks with Farbod Mansorian, the CEO of Unilingo. Farbod is the pioneer of translating YouTube videos into multiple languages. We discuss 

• Why creators should convert their content into other languages
• How they can do it and how much they can make
• Which languages to choose
• YouTube's multi-language track vs channels in multiple languages
• How AI will affect translation services 

And much, much more! You can get in contact with Farbod on Twitter @farbodmansorian. 

Please go check it out and subscribe to the show for more interviews from industry leaders shaping the Creator Economy. 

Transcript

Farbod Mansorian  0:00  
Converted it from English to Spanish, and I uploaded it to YouTube, and didn't think much of it, and then I looked at my phone one day and the video had 2.5 million views. 80% of the world does not speak English. If you're a top creator with billions of views, you almost owe it to your audience to translate your content.

Ian Shepherd  0:19  
Welcome to the business of creators. If you're a content creator, or you want to know more about the Creator economy, then this podcast is for you. Now, in this episode, I'm speaking with farboard mentor, Ian, the founder of unilingo, and a man who has been pioneering the translation of YouTube videos into new languages for the last six years. Far board explains how unilingo helps creators, how creators should think about YouTube's new Multi Language tracks versus having multiple channels in different languages, and how AI will affect translation services. We pack a lot into this episode. Before we get into that, I want to tell you about electrify video partners, a business I co founded that invest millions of dollars into YouTube channels such as Veritasium. If you want a business partner to grow your YouTube channel, or you're wondering how much your channel could be worth, check us out at electrify, dot video and get in contact, right? Let's get on with the show. So today I'm joined by farboard from unilingo. Welcome to the podcast.

Farbod Mansorian  1:13  
Thank you. Yeah, thanks for having me.

Ian Shepherd  1:15  
Great. So for everybody listening, can you just explain who unilingo are and what you do?

Farbod Mansorian  1:21  
Yes, unilingo was started for really viewers. Unilingo was started because we wanted to bring access to good content in under utilized in emerging markets. We understood that majority of the content in the world is being created in English, and yet, there are hundreds of millions of people in other parts of the world that do not have access to this content simply because they don't speak the language. And it was really just the love of let's connect creators to a global audience.

Ian Shepherd  2:01  
I love it. And what's your personal sort of background? You've obviously saw this great opportunity to connect everybody with different content. But how do you personally kind of find yourself in this position to start this business?

Farbod Mansorian  2:15  
I moved to Canada when I was 17 years old. My dad flew me over from Ian to Canada a day before I needed to serve in the army, and said, We're going to Canada. So when we land, my dad says, All right, well, we are here. I'll be back in two weeks. You just manage everything, and I'll be back. And two weeks turn into two years, and I found myself really doing anything and everything by myself, and that really built my character. And you know, the the perseverance, the grit, the not given up, which has helped me run multiple businesses throughout the years. When growing up in Ian, I I mean, 80% of the content that we watch in Ian is is imported through translation, whether it is subtitles or dubbing. So I knew that there's this market that exists and and I need to do something about it. So when I got my engineering degree in in mechanical I started one company which allowed people to charge their phones on the go. And I ended up selling that company for $750,000 and with that money that I received, I started a second company. Worked on it for a couple of months, then we sold it to a dental clinic, and I was just thinking about the next idea, and I was watching a TED Talk by Tim urban called in the mind of a master procrastinator. First thought I had was, I want my mom to see this. And the reason why I wanted my mom to see this is because my mom was struggling with with just, you know, finding motivation to to get going. And I really wanted my mom to change. So what I did was I took this TED talk and I translated it in her native language, and she really liked it. So being an entrepreneur and looking at the whole market, I realized that the Spanish speaking market is a, is a, is an up and coming community on YouTube. So what I did was I took that same TED talk and I converted it from English to Spanish, and I uploaded it to YouTube, and didn't think much of it, just thinking about the whole business and where we were going to go. And then I looked at my phone one day and the video had 2.5 million views, and that gave me a start to really think. About, how do we make localization accessible in a single system of record for creators to be able to access a global audience? And that's how we got our start.

Ian Shepherd  5:12  
I love it. A really personal story there, and you're not the first person I've spoken to who's put up a video on YouTube, come back to it a bit later in time, and found that it's had millions of views, and that's led to either a channel or a business. But for you, so you've had this kind of Eureka moment, and you've started creating different content. Where does it come? Where do you go next? In terms of creators speaking with creators about this.

Farbod Mansorian  5:41  
Yes, in fact, what I did with that video was, you know, as an engineer, there is always a fudge factor in the in the calculation of of of, you know, where you want a product to go. So I thought that, well, this must have been a fluke. The reason was because that same TED talk was dubbed but also subtitled, and I released both versions to YouTube at the same time, and it was the dubbed version that received two and a half million views, and the subtitle version received only 5000 views. So when I looked at the retention graph. The retention graph on the dub version was at 48% whereas the retention graph for the subtitled version was 32% and I learned and confirmed this with an article that came out from Netflix. Netflix was running AB tests of a friend show to an audience, they were showing them subtitles or dubbing, and they found out that people are more likely to watch until the end of the video, if the video is dubbed, then Subtitled. But this was counterintuitive, and it was counterintuitive, because if I ask most people in the beginning, do you want to watch videos with subtitles or dub, they would say subtitles, and later on, I realized that people say subtitles because they don't want to come off as someone who doesn't know any English, right? Like, if, if you go, if you know a little bit of English, then you're more likely to perhaps watch it with subtitles. But let's be real. You know, majority of you know, I spent nine months in Mexico City at one point, and you know, I would say nine out of 10 people didn't speak a word of English while I was there. So I had to sort of fight the urge to move into subtitles and say, you know, I'm making a leap of faith here, but I think it's going to work. And so really, how I got my start was once, once I saw the views, I thought to myself, well, I need to learn about dubbing. How is dubbing done? So what I did was I packed everything, you know, my pack backpack, and I moved down to Argentina for three months. And you might say, Why? Why don't I go to Mexico? It was, frankly, because I just found an audio engineer on in Argentina, and he happened to be there, and so I flew down there. I spent hundreds of hours in dubbing studios, and I really understood how dubbing works. And you know how what voice actors do, what audio engineers do, what directors do, what translators do, you know, what's, how long does it take for them to get in the car, drive to the studio, record, go back home? And I was also one of the first few people that thought about remote recordings, like, how do you record a voice actor remotely? And back then, people didn't really believe in it, but I kept at it and and, you know, we now see with, you know, a lot more, a lot more people have, have, have realized the benefits of of of record, recording remotely. So I got back from Argentina, and I've found myself at a at my first VidCon. And VidCon is the largest gathering of fans and creators in the world. And I did not have the money to sign up for even the community track, which was only a few $100 and I found that they had a, you know, volunteer, they needed volunteers, so I signed up as a volunteer, and the shirt said volunteer on it. But as I landed in LA, I went to a print shop. I printed a shirt that said, would you like your let us translate your videos in Spanish, and I printed that on my shirt. And I would attend talks with creators, and I would sit at the front row, and it would all see my shirt, and it says, Let us translate for videos in Spanish. And so afterwards, they would come up to me and talk, but how I really landed our first creator. His name is Derek Mueller, Veritas Ian. I knew that creators needed to pick up their badge a day before the event started, so I just went and stood by the batch, by the by the booth, and I just stood there till I saw a face that I could recognize so that I could pitch them the idea. And Derek shows up, and I say, Derek, I can translate and dub your videos into Spanish. And well, the channel is now at 2 million subscribers and almost 300 million views, and it's generated hundreds of 1000s of dollars for him, basically by just taking in this existing back catalog and converting it. And since then, I basically made sure that I am at every single conference, whether it was in Singapore, Australia, Dubai, whether it was VidCon or non VidCon conferences. And it, you know, people say, Well, how do you get your creators? And my answer is, I showed up, I was there, and I just pitched them. I knew cold emails will not work, because it'll get lost in a vast sea of emails that they receive. And that was my approach to get our first few creators.

Ian Shepherd  11:14  
Wow, I love that story, and certainly the tenacity you showed, both in terms of learning about dubbing in Argentina, but then into kind of recruiting those first creators. So fast forward to today. Can you explain to us how a Creator would get set up with unilingo, or what sort of the process that you would go through to assess the opportunity. And how should a creator think about the opportunity? If you're

Farbod Mansorian  11:44  
a top creator with billions of views, you almost owe it to your audience to translate your content. 80% of the world does not speak English, but 80 you know, 60 plus percent of top, top performing content is made in English, so there's a clear gap. So every time a creator makes content in one language, they're leaving money and views on the table. So So kind of that's, that's, that's, that's, that's how we look at it. We want to help unilingo is going to be the single system of record for creators to be able to translate, distribute and manage a global audience. And if you look at the whole localization and globalization space, there are Legos, there are Lego pieces, you know, there is a translator, and then there is somebody who could help you sell your merch in another country. There are creators that there are folks that can help you, licensing your content, your dubbed content, in other markets. But there's also the question from the Creator side. You know, most creators have hundreds of pieces of of content that they've produced over the years and and when you go to a translator and say, well, translate my videos, the first question that comes up as well. What pieces of what videos should we? Should we translate and for, for what languages and so what we want to create at what we are creating at unilingo is, is essentially putting all these pieces of Lego together and and creators go on our platform with a click of a button, they have their all of their content will the content that will produce the highest ROI or return on on translation dollars, dubbed and produce and and posted to the platform of their shorts. And that's how we really look at it. We just, we we're not looking at just the AI or the dubbing piece or the translation piece. For you know, creators don't. Creators want to make content. They don't want to deal with translators and voice actors and and posting the content in multiple languages. And this is what many of our creators say today is I just love that I get to spend 10 minutes a month on my Spanish or French content, and everything else is handled by unading. So I just made sure that we create the least amount of effort on the part of the Creator, so that they get to focus on making the best content, and once they have the best content, we can take that content and and globalize it.

Ian Shepherd  14:28  
That's That's fantastic. And I guess the first question would be, what languages should a creator start with? So if we assume that they're English speaking with the obvious choice be to then go to Spanish speaking. Or how do you think about the different markets?

Farbod Mansorian  14:44  
Yeah, so the top that the top languages we looked at, at unilingo, are always Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Hindi, Arabic, German and French. Language. The reason why a majority of our, of our, of our content is being produced from English to Spanish is because there are 40 million people in the US that speak Spanish as a first language. And so it is just an agents and market that we can that we can go into. But also Latin is, Latin America is very close to the, you know, to the United States, where majority of the top creators are and, you know, it just made sense to take them from English to Spanish in terms of, and then once we once we see traction and growth in Spanish, we then launch into subsequent languages. The reason we don't just, you know, take a creator in 10 languages at the same time is because we don't want to create a bad experience for creators. We don't want creators to spend time and money and effort go all of these 10 languages and not see a quick ROI. We want them to show we want it to be a methodological approach. We effectively don't want creators to regret translating their videos, because we know inherently translation is good, but it needs to be done systematically. So we picked Spanish, and then, from Spanish on, we open up a new market every time the channel hits a certain internal metrics that we have at unilingo in terms of views, watch, time, retention, CTR, comments. And then once that market is successful, we launch into a different market.

Ian Shepherd  16:37  
Got it that makes sense, but there's been a lot of talk recently about this new function, functionality from YouTube to launch multiple language tracks, which would obviously defeat the object of creating separate channels. How should How should everybody think about one video with multiple language tracks versus multiple channels in different languages.

Farbod Mansorian  17:05  
Yeah, yeah. I mean, we started separate channels. So if you look at Reddit, you know, what is like? What is Reddit known for? Reddit is known for a sense of community. And when we thought about, you know, when I first started unilingo, I looked at Netflix and I saw that Netflix has this featured enabled since 2013 you can swap audio midstream, and it's extremely seamless. So I knew this was going to come at some point one of these platforms, I just didn't know when, and so I didn't want to wait and and we started creating these separate channels. But there are advantages and disadvantages to creating separate channels. The major advantage to creating a separate channel is that you know, if you have, you know, if you have a, you know, X in Espanol, the banner, the thumbnails, the titles, video description, the playlist names, the Community tab, posts, the about page, the comments are all in this in one language. The only disadvantage of creating multiple languages is if you have one video that generated, let's say, 10 million views, and you dub it in 10 other languages, and each video gets each dubbed video gets 10 million views, well now you could have had now you've got 100 million views that are spread over 10 pieces of content, and most creators would rather have 110 million views on just one piece of video, because it looks better and it also creates viewer trust. So that's kind of like the downside of it. It's just, you know, you're spreading your view, your your views across, you know, across multiple, multiple channels. And this was what, what Jimmy Donaldson from Mr. Beast told me was, hey, you know, I love that you've created all my channels in different, all these different languages. But what if there was a way to bring it all together? And in fact, unilingo was the first company to to upload the first multiple audio track for the first creator, and that would be Mr. Beast, and we worked directly with the product manager was in charge of this feature. And at the time, this feature wasn't like this. You would upload a video, we would render it using a program, and I would the video would have multiple audio tracks, we would upload it to video to YouTube. Then somebody from YouTube first had to verify that the translations don't have profanity and such. So we work directly with the Trust and Safety Team at Google, and then once they gain their trust. We would just upload a video with multiple audio tracks. They would manually swap out the single audio video with the multiple with the multi audio video. And I'm very happy to see the feature has come a long way since the disadvantage of the multi language feature is that when you do when you create Dubs, you have things such as lip syncs or lip movements. So when you currently, unilingo is working on a technology that is going to reanimate the lip movements of the original speaker to match the language of the voice actor, so it is all seamless, and it makes it seem like the creator is speaking that language. You cannot do that with the multi language feature. And I, you know, and it's probably several quarters away before you before YouTube is able to retrofit their existing engineering infrastructure to be able to allow a creator to upload multiple versions of the same video. But not only that, right? Like, let's say, let's say you are able to create, upload this, like, three versions of the same video to your main channel. But what happens to the thumbnails, right? So now the thumb, if the text, there's text on in on in the thumbnail at unilingo, we convert that text from the original language to the target language. And furthermore, you know, when we dump Mr. Beast in other languages and all the creators we work with, we always make sure that the text on screen is translated with the multiple language feature. You're leaving out three things. Text on screen will will remain in the in the original language. If there is text in thumbnail, it will remain in the original language. And the last piece is comments. Currently, if you go to last Mr. Beast video and sort comments by newest, what you're going to see is you have hundreds of 1000s of comments that are in different languages, and it really kills this sense of community, right? Like, if I go to a and oftentimes what we see is, you know, somebody will leave a comment and said, you know, like this comment, if you speak Russian, is anybody else here speaking Hindi? Is anybody else here speaking Arabic? So it just makes it really tough. And for those reasons, I think not until YouTube has fully figured out the multi language feature, it is best to create multiple channels, which Ian Ingo is extremely good at. We've created now over close to 120 YouTube channels in the last six years. And, and, you know, and, and you know, today we've generated an additional $11 billion it's our 11 billion views from existing content by just taking their content and redoubling it in other languages, 10s of millions of dollars in additional revenue and 58 million subscribers from these additional channels. There's also one last thing that is very important, that is brand deals, right? Let's say you have a, let's say you have, you have the multi language feature, and you do a brand deal with a company that has an has an audience, has a market only in English. But you know, you could tell the brand that, hey, I also have these other channels, right? You know, I have the, sorry, I have the multi language feature. Are you interested in dubbing it, and the brand will most likely say, No, I don't have an audience, I don't have a market. I don't have paying customers in that market. So it kind of makes it difficult to remove a piece of branding or a brand shadow from a video and replace it with, let's say, a company like Wix or North VPN that has a already existing market in Latin if there was a another channel, all we needed to do was just take out that brand deal and replace it with the market, with the brand deal in that in that market,

Ian Shepherd  24:15  
I love it. There's there's lots there, and that distinction between the multi language tracks and the different channels, that makes absolute sense the way you've explained that, particularly with the comments and the text on screen. And what does the what does the business model look like for a creator? And how much could a creator potentially Ian if they were to reversion their channels into different languages?

Farbod Mansorian  24:39  
Yeah, yeah, that's a good question. So from now, having worked with with many, many creators over the years, what we've seen is, if you have a billion views and you're going to Spanish within about 12 months, you're likely to ON. Lock an additional 10% of views in that market. So let's say you have a billion views, and you're going to 10 markets. You have the potential, based on what we've seen with previous creators, to, you know, to to effectively, you know, double your view. So translation is the quickest growth hack to double your views in the shortest amount of time. Now, what we've seen is creators don't really want to pay for translation, and what we've seen is, the more we are able to bring or drive the cost of localization down, the more interest there is in, in in, from the from the side of creators. So unilingo has been working very hard to integrate AI and machine learning in different parts of the process to, you know, to to bring the cost down. It's, it's almost like an inverse, you know, like inverted curve. You know, that the cheaper the price of of translation, the more interest. And this is why we have a lot, you know, a lot of AI dubbing companies that have, you know, you know, flooded the market over the past several years and but, and then they skip the human part. They're, they're, they're, they're going directly to AI, whereas, you know, I am a firm believer that that, that that in order to get fully connected and have an immersive listening and viewing experience, you want that human emotion, you want, you want to be able to connect with the content in terms of the in terms of the model, what unilingo does is, the less creator wants to pay for their translation, for for the translator, the more unilingo will step up and subsidize the translator, the translation costs, but we will take a portion of the revenue generated by the generated by the translated content. We never take a piece of the the original content. It's theirs. It's theirs forever, and, and, but what Ian lingo does is, you know, we have some creators where they don't pay anything at all. And, you know, lingo, you know, unilingo pays for everything, and we take a larger chunk of the of the ad revenue. But this also requires an internal, you know, algorithm, if you will, to to detect, you know, good content and see good content and you know, and investing in those creators as they come up,

Ian Shepherd  27:43  
that's fascinating. And we've spoken a lot about YouTube, and obviously the revenues there because of AdSense. Have you explored other platforms as well? Or is that yet to come? Yeah.

Farbod Mansorian  27:56  
In fact, unilingo started as a localization company for educational content. You know, we did TED Talks. We've, we've converted many of YC videos from English to Spanish. You know, we work with, you know, we took Mark Rober, his Spanish channel from zero to 2 million subscribers. So really the focus was on educational content, um, and so we started, actually on, we also started, like early on, we started to talk to Udemy instructors, and we said, well, you know, you know, you're being approached by AI dubbing companies, and they tell you, hey, you know, you run your entire courses through our algorithm and and you have aI dubs in different languages, what they fail to understand is, again, learning is a personal, is a is a personal relationship between the student and the instructor and the professor and the teacher. So what we did was, early on, we actually work with the Udemy instructor, and we converted his entire course, and he was teaching, he was teaching coding, and so we actually opened this up to a large number of people, believe it or not, in China. So what we see is we are platform agnostic, you know, we, I don't you know whether it's YouTube or Tiktok or Instagram reels or Facebook, we are setting up. We are setting ourself up so that creators from any of these platforms can come to us and and go global. And in fact, we did sign our first Tiktok creator last year, he has 15 million followers on Tiktok. And so, you know, we're, we've taken his content and we are repurposing it and republishing it to Tiktok.

Ian Shepherd  29:52  
Wow. I mean, it's fascinating to hear the journey you've been on, on this, on in this discussion. But also, I know. From from discussions we've had previously, and you've clearly learned so much along the way. What's next for unilingo,

Farbod Mansorian  30:09  
yeah, well, we know that there is a storm of dubbing companies coming to the market. We know that we need to move fast. We need, we know that we need to, you know we need, we need. We know that we need to. We know that you know, at some point, like it's, if you fast forward to 100 years from now, there will be content that is fully, fully converted from one language to another without the touch of a human. And, you know, we, we, you know, I'm a mechanical engineer. My co founder is left Facebook and and he's just love, in love with, with where the market is headed. So really, what's next for unilingo is, how can we implement synthetic voice, true lip sync, emotions and such, in parts of the process that doesn't really affect the viewing experience, and from there, we will work our way up to where we are doing a video that is fully AI dubbed, But we it's really important that the retention on videos, these videos, stay strong, you know, I can give you an example. There is another company that provides AI dubbing to creators, and they tried, you know, they've raised 10s of millions of dollars, and they, they were doing AI dubbing for content creators. They were doing, you know, for lack of better words, so bad that they pivoted to corporate training content. So now they're using their AI dubbing technology for that purpose. This same company work with one of the creators we currently work with. Two years ago, converted 100 of their videos from English to Spanish using synthetic voice, and that that same channel today has 10,000 views, or 21,000 views, with 100 pieces of content. Unilingo came in and started that same channel in English, but into Spanish, with, with fully human, you know, with, with, with, with, with something that sounded natural. With, with, with, with good intonations and good emotions. And with just 10 pieces of content, 10 videos, and we only started channel three months ago. The channel is now sitting at, at 2 million additional views and 20,000 subscribers, whereas the AI channel is 21,000 and 1000 subscribers. So we know that it is the this, this AI dub thing is, is, is a few years away, but we know it will be here. My estimate is between three to five years now, top creators are going to start looking at AI dubbing, and it's going to be here, and we need to be ready when it comes.

Ian Shepherd  33:17  
I can't wait to see that. And you've been working with creators for quite a while now, with the business more broadly. What sort of changes do you imagine or expect to see with the Creator economy over the next five years?

Farbod Mansorian  33:32  
Yeah, I mean, unilingo is not in the in the dubbing space. Unlingo is in the Creator economy. Is in the business of helping creators. You know, the reason why we did, we did dubbing. One of the reasons was we saw that dubbing was this sort of expensive, luxury way of localizing that was really reserved for the big producers, Netflix, HBO discovery, but Creators couldn't afford it. It was, it was too expensive. So we wanted to make dubbing accessible and affordable for creators. And I kind of see this shift that that as as as, you know, in the in the in the in the coming years, we are going to see a huge shift from these giant institutions to, you know, creator based companies. And, you know, I remember I spoke to a an executive at a top, at a top, you know, it was, in fact, at Netflix, and I said, we work with this creator, and he has a team of five, and he gets 500 million views a month. And she totally dismissed it. She said, Well, you know, they've just got a team of five people when we make a show, you know, it's a large team, and there are millions of dollars of budget that is involved. And so, you know, I think. Where the Creator economy is headed is more and more people are going to create content, and more and more people are going to watch content. And people say, well, there are more creators getting in this space. I make less money. You know, it's really, you know, I think I find that sort of perspective come from a come from a scarcity mindset. It's like, it's not like the pie, the size of the pie staying the same, and there are more players entering. No, the piece of the size of the pie is also expanding. And what that means is there are more advertisers entering, more brands are entering. In LATAM, there are two companies, Mercado Libre and the rapid, or rapid you have to roll your R, you know, they generate billions of dollars in revenue. And when you look at their strategy and content marketing, what you find is that it's very little, you know, they don't actually invest a lot into greater content creation or creator marketing. But, but I think as these, these CMOS, these aging CMOS, are replaced with the new with, with, with, with, you know, with more the younger crowd, they're going to know how important it is to connect with creators. And then more money will flood into the ecosystem, and then the CPMs will increase in in these, in these, in these, develop, developing markets. So overall, you know, it's, it's, it's, you know, it's, it's, it's all positive. I think we'll be fine. You know, the thought of, like people being being pessimistic, I think it all work out. We'll be okay. We will be fine.

Ian Shepherd  36:43  
Well, no, it's been, it's been fantastic to get your your views and hear about the journey and the story of unilingo and some of the things that are in the pipeline for the future, and particularly with AI and translation services. Thanks for your time today. Far board, if anybody wants to get in contact, how should they find out about unilingo and connect with you?

Farbod Mansorian  37:05  
Yeah, you know, I love Twitter, so I would love to connect with people on Twitter. My Twitter handle is my first name, my last name, which is F, A R, B, O, D, M, a n, s, O R, I A n, and my DMs are open, so anybody who's interested and listening, please reach out. I'd love to talk.

Ian Shepherd  37:28  
That's great. I'll put it in the show description. And thank you again for joining me on the podcast today. So that was the latest episode in the business of Creators Podcast. We've got some amazing guests coming up, so please hit subscribe to join the conversation, and don't hesitate to send me a DM on Twitter or LinkedIn with your feedback about the show you.