YouTube’s automatic subtitles in the ESL/ESP classroom

Introduced in 2009, YouTube’s autocaptioning technology allows users to automatically obtain intralingual subtitles for the videos uploaded on the platform. As YouTube is owned by Google, this so-called “automatic caption timing”, uses Google Automatic Speech Recognition system (Google Voice) to automatically synchronize the subtitles with the speakers’ utterances. In order to go one step further and produce automatic interlingual subtitles in an extremely wide range of foreign languages, Google decided to combine its ASR system with its Machine Translation system (Google Translate). However, it is generally acknowledged that, despite the improvements in technology and the vast resources of Google and YouTube, automatic captioning can fail to convey the message accurately. This can cause a series of cascading errors, leading the Machine Translation system to mistranslate or to affect overall accuracy. This paper intends to present the results of a practice-based study conducted with a group of students at the University of Turin on the topic of marketing, to focus on the potentiality of the use of YouTube’s automatic subtitles in order to enhance various skills, in particular listening skills and specialized vocabulary skills