Captions are considered as one of the most handy features as we are not always in a position where we can hear the audio of any video and captions can save your day in that regard. With captions you can watch a video even your phone is muted. The company has confirmed that YouTube is now doubling down on captions adding the transcripts and auto-translations for videos you watch on your phone.
When it comes to transcripts, they will be auto-generated by using Google speech recognition models like automatic captions with added difference that allow you to read them down in the list from similar to auto-transcripts in Google Recorder app. Like auto-captions dont expect these to work flawlessly especially when it launches. It works brilliantly in Google Recorder but videos can be more of mixed bag and you may get either perfect transcripts or really low quality depending on the video.
Now you can have auto-translated captions and it works exactly the way you are thinking. If a video has got captions you can go into settings and tap on Auto-translate and select your preferred language and then you will have subtitles adapted to your language. This feature is available for long time on web version but its arrival on mobile version is long overdue. Auto-translated captions will be available in 16 languages initially with Ukrainian language joining the list next month.