There is one more important tip to share with you about the RootsTech classes – there are ELEVEN official languages at the conference this year (German, English, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and traditional Chinese.)

What if you have ancestral lines to one of those countries, but you don’t speak the language?

Or what if there is a class session whose topic interests you, the speaker isn’t presenting in English and you’d like to hear the talk?

Or if you do speak the language and would like to attend the session?

Check out Explore by Language. A RootsTech techie gave me the link. BOOKMARK THE Explore by Language LINK for future reference, so you don’t have to keep coming back to my post!

Let’s say I want to listen to Lluvia Concha’s first presentation, which is in Spanish:

When I click to start the talk, a toolbar appears at the bottom of the session screen. Click on YouTube.  You will be taken to the YouTube channel. All RootsTech sessions have been recorded on YouTube.

First, click on > to start the video.

Next, see the CC icon at the bottom right side of the screen? Click on it. That turns on Closed Captioning.

Now, click on the Settings icon, just to the right of CC. A box (seen in the image above) opens. Click on Subtitles – Spanish.

Now, click on Auto-Translate.

A lengthy list of languages appears. Just scroll down to English and Closed Caption will add the English subtitles. Very easy to do!

There is one warning, though!

Because I have Swedish ancestors, but don’t speak the language, I wanted to explore SVENSKA classes.

I wanted to listen to Släktforska i Stockholm (Genealogy Research in Stockholm) by Thomas Fürth, so I click to begin the presentation.

I clicked on the YouTube list just below the screen – the same step I took with the Spanish video.

However, when the screen switched to YouTube,

THERE WAS NO CC OPTION.

I asked for help through RootsTech and apparently, depending on the time when the presentations were recorded, some sessions did NOT have the CC option added.

Therefore, if you don’t speak the language and there is no CC button, you won’t be able to understand what is being said in the class.

Don’t let that deter you from checking out all the classes in another language, though. You might be missing an excellent presentation that does offer CC.

DISCLAIMER: I am an official RootsTech Connect 2021 ambassador and have received perks for promoting RootsTech conferences.