YouTube Dubbing Study

Key takeaways

1. 39 of the 97 most-subscribed YouTube channels (40%) had dubbed audio in another language on at least one of their 5 latest regular videos, and 21 on all of them. Across 485 videos, 149 (31%) could be played in another language. See details
2. English-language channels dub most: 21 of 33 (64%), against 18 of the 64 channels in other languages. Over half of the English channels' latest videos (85 of 165) carried a dub. See details
3. Most dubs are not YouTube's. Of 1,582 dubbed audio tracks, 1,174 (74%) were uploaded by the channel and 408 were made by YouTube's free automatic dubbing. 17 channels uploaded their own dubs, 24 had YouTube's, and two had both. See details
4. Channels that make their own dubs go wide: the median video carried 13 languages, 53 languages in all. Mark Rober put 50 on two of his latest videos, and MrBeast 20 to 22 on each of his. See details
5. Six languages were on 65 or more of the 76 videos with channel-made dubs: Arabic, Portuguese, Indonesian, Spanish, Russian and Hindi. The next, Turkish, was on 61. See details
6. YouTube's automatic dubs from English came in the 20 languages YouTube lists and no others, a median of 10 per video. From other languages they went mostly into English (46 of 48 videos). See details
7. 74 of the 75 auto-dubbed videos had no captions the channel had uploaded, against 21 of 76 with channel-made dubs. Channels that pay for dubs mostly caption too; channels on YouTube's auto-dubs rely on YouTube for both. See details
8. On the 25 music channels only six videos had a dub, all YouTube's automatic ones and all tour diaries or behind-the-scenes films. No music video in the sample was dubbed. See details

How many of the biggest YouTube channels dub their videos?

About two in five. Of the 97 most-subscribed YouTube channels we could check on October 25 and 26, 2026, 39 (40%) had at least one of their 5 latest regular videos available in another language through YouTube's audio track menu, and 21 had every one of them dubbed. The other 58 offered their latest videos in the original language only.

Across all 485 videos, 149 (31%) carried at least one dubbed audio track. A dub here is a second audio track in another language on the same video, the same URL and view count, which viewers pick in the player or get by default from their language setting. Dubs that a channel publishes as a separate video on a second channel are not counted.

Who makes the dubs: the channel or YouTube?

Mostly the channel. YouTube tags every audio stream it serves as the original, a dub the channel uploaded, or a dub made by its own automatic dubbing. Of the 1,582 dubbed tracks in the sample, 1,174 (74%) were uploaded by the channels and 408 (26%) were made by YouTube.

The two groups barely overlap. 17 channels uploaded their own dubs, 24 carried YouTube's automatic dubs, and only two had both kinds on their latest videos. YouTube opened multi-language audio, the upload route, to millions of creators in September 2025, and made automatic dubbing available to everyone in February 2026; its help page says auto dubbing is on by default for eligible creators.

"Uploaded by the channel" says who published the track, not how it was made: a channel can upload a dub recorded by voice actors, produced by a dubbing studio or generated with an AI dubbing tool. What it rules out is YouTube's free automatic dubbing, which carries its own tag.

Which languages do YouTubers dub into?

A channel that makes its own dubs goes wide. We found that the median video with channel-uploaded dubs carried 13 languages in October 2026, and 53 languages appear across the sample. Mark Rober had the most: 50 languages on two of his latest videos and 32 to 50 on each of the five, in line with YouTube's September 2025 note that he averaged over 30. MrBeast's latest five carried 20 to 22 each.

Arabic, Portuguese, Indonesian, Spanish, Russian and Hindi lead, each on 65 or more of the 76 videos (86% or more). Channel-made dubs also reach languages that YouTube's automatic dubbing doesn't offer from English: Turkish was on 61 videos, Vietnamese on 48, Thai on 47 and Simplified Chinese on 15.

What does YouTube's automatic dubbing actually produce?

YouTube's automatic dubbing is narrower than what channels make themselves. We found that on the 27 auto-dubbed videos recorded in English, the dubs came in exactly the 20 languages that, according to YouTube's help page, are offered for English originals, and no others. The median video had 10 of the 20 (50%), against 13 on the median video with channel-made dubs. The 20 are Arabic, Bengali, Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malayalam, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Russian, Spanish, Tamil, Telugu, Ukrainian.

From other languages, auto dubbing went mostly into English: 46 of 48 (96%) auto-dubbed videos recorded in another language had an English dub (Hindi into English on 15; Spanish into English on 13; Spanish into Portuguese on 13; Spanish into Arabic on 12 videos). Nine of the 13 channels in other languages that had automatic dubs got English and nothing else.

YouTube says its automatic smart filtering keeps music videos from being dubbed. In our sample that held: on the 25 music channels only six videos were dubbed, all of them tour diaries and behind-the-scenes films from Ed Sheeran, Billie Eilish and Ariana Grande, and no music video carried a dub. Kids' channels split: Vlad and Niki and Like Nastya dub, while Cocomelon - Nursery Rhymes had no dub on its latest five.

Do channels that dub also caption their videos?

Channels that make their own dubs mostly do; channels on YouTube's auto-dubs almost never do. Our data shows that 55 of the 76 videos with channel-uploaded dubs (72%) also carried a caption track the channel uploaded; MrBeast's latest videos had captions in 24 to 28 languages. Of the 75 auto-dubbed videos, 74 (99%) had no captions of the channel's own, so viewers got YouTube's automatic captions and YouTube's automatic dubs.

That matters because a dub can only be as good as the words it starts from. YouTube's help page warns that automatic dubs "might contain errors due to mispronunciations, accents, dialects, or background noise" and that YouTube "may also have challenges translating proper nouns, idioms, and jargon." In our auto-caption accuracy study, YouTube's automatic captions got 98.2% of words right in the median video but missed names and terms 5.1 times as often as other words.

Among these channels, captions of their own are rarer than dubs. The caption coverage check on the same 97 channels found only 27 that uploaded captions on any of their latest videos, fewer than the 39 that dub, and 24 of those 39 uploaded no captions of their own at all.

Which kinds of channels dub?

Entertainment and English-language channels are the ones that dub. Our data shows 21 of 33 English-language channels (64%) dubbing, against 18 of 64 (28%) in other languages, and 24 of the 43 entertainment channels (56%). Music channels were the least likely: 3 of 25 (12%).

The English channels also dubbed more of their videos and into more languages: 85 of their 165 latest videos carried a dub, with a median of 15 languages. Channels in other languages dubbed more narrowly, usually one automatic dub into English.

Categories are the ones Wikipedia's list of the most-subscribed channels gives; a channel listed under two (say, Education/Entertainment) is counted under the first.

Which YouTube dubbing claims hold up?

Two figures come up in most coverage of YouTube dubbing. We traced each to its source and set it against this sample.

Every popular claim our research pages trace, 265 in all, is on one page: popular video statistics, fact-checked.

What this means if you publish video

The channels that dub most widely produce their dubs themselves rather than leave them to the platform. If you want viewers in other languages:

• Know what you're getting from auto dubbing. It is free and on by default for eligible channels, but from English it reaches at most 20 languages, gives you no line edits (YouTube's help page: "You cannot edit automatic dubs"), and YouTube itself flags proper nouns and jargon as weak spots.
• Fix the captions first. A clean caption track is the script a dub is made from. Check every name and term, the words automatic captions miss most.
• Pick languages by your audience, not the list. The channels that upload their own dubs add Turkish, Vietnamese, Thai and Chinese, which auto dubbing from English doesn't offer.
• Price it per language. Our video dubbing cost guide compares YouTube's free auto dubbing, AI dubbing tools and studios per minute, and the multi-language audio guide walks through uploading a dub in YouTube Studio.

Mark Studios' content localization covers subtitles, dubbed audio tracks and multi-language audio setup. For who watches with captions and subtitles, see the video captions statistics. How long the same channels' videos run, and how many of their uploads are Shorts, is in our YouTube video length study.

How we ran the study

Sample. The same 485 videos as the caption coverage check in our auto-caption accuracy study: the 5 latest regular uploads (videos tab, two minutes or longer; Shorts excluded) of each channel in Wikipedia's list of the most-subscribed YouTube channels, as listed on October 25, 2026; two channels with fewer than three readable regular uploads were left out, as in the caption study. That leaves 97 channels. Most videos are recent (median upload date 2026-10-16), but a few channels had not posted a regular video in years, so the oldest dates from 2020.

Audio tracks. On October 26, 2026 we loaded each video with the open-source yt-dlp tool and read every audio stream it lists. Each stream's address carries YouTube's own content tag (acont): original for the recorded audio, dubbed for a dub the channel uploaded, and dubbed-auto for one made by YouTube's automatic dubbing. YouTube doesn't document these tags, so we checked the reading two ways: every dubbed-auto track on an English video was in one of the 20 languages YouTube lists for automatic dubbing from English, while dubbed tracks include languages that list doesn't have, such as Turkish and Thai. We counted one track per language. As a further check, 25 randomly drawn videos without dubs were reloaded and still had none. Videos that YouTube rate-limited on the first pass were reloaded until all 485 had loaded.

Captions. "Own captions" means a caption track the channel uploaded, from the caption coverage check run the day before on the same videos.

The collection and analysis scripts are in the study folder of the caption-checker repository, and the per-video results are in the CSV below. None of the channels reviewed or endorsed this study.

Limitations

• Five videos per channel. A channel that dubs only its biggest uploads, or started recently, can show fewer dubbed videos here than it has.
• A snapshot. Automatic dubs can be added after upload and channels can unpublish dubs, so the newest videos may gain tracks later.
• Who uploaded is not how it was made. A channel-uploaded dub may come from voice actors, a studio or an AI tool; YouTube's tag doesn't say.
• Other routes to other languages. Channels that run a separate channel per language, as many kids' and music brands do, show up here as not dubbing.
• The biggest channels only. These are the most-subscribed channels on YouTube, weighted toward entertainment, music and kids' content; the median channel will dub less.

How to cite this study

Link to the section you use, for example https://www.markstudios.com/research/youtube-dubbing-study#who-makes-the-dubs. To cite the study as a whole:

Mark Studios. "YouTube Dubbing Study." Published Oct 26, 2026. https://www.markstudios.com/research/youtube-dubbing-study

@misc{markstudios_youtube_dubbing_study_2026,
  author = {{Mark Studios}},
  title = {{YouTube Dubbing Study}},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  url = {https://www.markstudios.com/research/youtube-dubbing-study},
  note = {Last verified 2026-10-26}
}

Our measurements and the CSVs are free to reuse under CC BY 4.0 with a link to this page. The videos and their audio remain the property of the channels that published them.

Sources

Download the per-video results (CSV) · Download the per-channel results (CSV)

1. Google, Use automatic dubbing (YouTube Help). Accessed 2026-10-26.
2. YouTube, Unlocking a global audience with auto dubbing (YouTube Official Blog, Feb 4, 2026). Accessed 2026-10-26.
3. YouTube, Unlock a world of viewers with multi-language audio (YouTube Official Blog, Sep 10, 2025). Accessed 2026-10-26.
4. YouTube, New YouTube Live tools for fan funding, dubbing and more (YouTube Official Blog, Sep 23, 2026). Accessed 2026-10-26.
5. Wikipedia, List of most-subscribed YouTube channels (revision used). Accessed 2026-10-26.
6. yt-dlp, yt-dlp: a feature-rich command-line audio/video downloader. Accessed 2026-10-26.

Update policy and change log

We plan to rerun the check every six months on the same list, so the numbers track how dubbing spreads; YouTube has said it will pilot automatic dubbing for live streams in early 2027. Corrections go to contact@markstudios.com.

• Oct 26, 2026: First published: 485 videos from 97 channels, 1,582 dubbed audio tracks.
• Oct 26, 2026, later: Added the dubbing claims check (27 languages; Mark Rober's 30+).