YouTube Language Regions: The 27 Slots You're Leaving Empty
Most creators translating a YouTube video pick "Spanish" and move on. YouTube, meanwhile, does not really have a slot called "Spanish". It has four: Spanish, Spanish (Spain), Spanish (Latin America) and Spanish (Mexico) — plus Spanish (United States).
If you filled one of them, you left the others empty. A viewer whose YouTube interface is set to Spanish (Mexico) is looking at a different slot than the one you filled.
VidAI 1.9.2 lets you fill all of them in one run, with one toggle, at no extra credits. This is the feature almost nobody knows exists, so this post explains exactly what it does — and, just as importantly, what it does not do.
The two-line version
In the translation settings there is now a choice:
Publish each language to its regions as well Base language only · Base plus its regions
Pick "Base plus its regions" and every language you translate also publishes to its regional slots. Then each language gets a chip showing how many regions it will fill, and you can untick any you do not want.
Which languages actually have regions
Seven of them, 27 regional slots in total:
| Language | Regions | Codes |
|---|---|---|
| English | 6 | en-US, en-GB, en-AU, en-CA, en-IN, en-IE |
| Chinese | 6 | zh-CN, zh-TW, zh-HK, zh-SG, zh-Hans, zh-Hant |
| Spanish | 4 | es-ES, es-MX, es-419 (Latin America), es-US |
| French | 4 | fr-FR, fr-CA, fr-BE, fr-CH |
| German | 3 | de-DE, de-AT, de-CH |
| Portuguese | 2 | pt-BR, pt-PT |
| Persian | 2 | fa-IR, fa-AF |
Translate into those seven and you go from 7 published localizations to 34 — the 7 base languages plus 27 regional ones. Every other language has no regional variants on YouTube, so nothing changes for them.
The honest part: it is the same translation everywhere
This is the thing to understand before you switch it on, and the UI says it out loud:
Every region gets the SAME translation.
Turning on regions does not produce British spelling for en-GB and American spelling for en-US. It does not write a Mexican Spanish variant and a Castilian one. It takes the one English translation you paid for and publishes that identical text into all six English slots.
So this is a coverage feature, not a localization-per-region feature. If your channel genuinely needs "colour" in the UK and "color" in the US, this will not do it, and we would rather say so than let you discover it later.
What it does do is stop you leaving five of YouTube's six English slots empty for no reason.
Why that is worth doing anyway
Because an empty slot is not neutral — it is a fallback. When a viewer's interface language has no localization, YouTube falls back to your original title and description. For a Ukrainian creator that means a viewer in Ireland with YouTube set to English (Ireland) may see Ukrainian, not the English you carefully translated, because you filled en and not en-IE.
The same English text in all six slots is not a compromise in that situation. It is the difference between your viewer reading your language or reading a language they do not speak.
And the credits argument is simple: it costs nothing extra. The translation is already done. Publishing it into six slots instead of one is copying, not translating, so there is no second charge. If you were going to translate English anyway, leaving regions off is leaving free coverage on the table.
The one language to be careful with
Chinese is the exception, and you should uncheck part of it today.
Chinese does not split by region the way English does — it splits by script. zh-Hans, zh-CN and zh-SG are Simplified. zh-Hant, zh-TW and zh-HK are Traditional. Those are not accents, they are different characters.
Right now the same translation is copied into all six, which means a Simplified translation lands in the three Traditional slots. A reader in Taiwan or Hong Kong sees characters that are not what they read. That is worse than an empty slot, because the fallback would at least have been legible to some of them.
Our recommendation until we fix this: if you translate Chinese, open the Chinese chip and untick zh-Hant, zh-TW and zh-HK. Keep zh-CN, zh-Hans and zh-SG. Proper Traditional Chinese as its own translation target is on our list; copying Simplified into it is not a good enough answer, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
What unticking actually means
There is a sentence in the region picker that matters more than it looks:
Unticking stops a region being published from now on. It does not remove a localization already published to a video.
Read that as: the checkbox controls the future, not the past.
If you published to en-GB last month and untick it today, the en-GB localization is still on that video. YouTube keeps it until something removes it. Unticking only means the next translation run will skip it.
This is deliberate — a checkbox that silently deleted published metadata across your back catalogue would be a genuinely dangerous control. But it does mean that if you want a region gone, unticking is not enough; you have to remove that localization from the video itself.
How to set it up
- Start a translation on a video in YouTube Studio.
- In Options, switch Publish each language to its regions as well to "Base plus its regions".
- Look at the language list. Languages with regions now show a chip — 6 regions, 4 regions, and so on.
- Open the chip for any language where you want fewer regions and untick them. Do this for Chinese.
- Check the credits estimate — it should not have gone up.
- Translate.
The setting is remembered per channel, so you set it once.
Who this is actually for
If you translate into Spanish, Portuguese, French, German or English, this roughly quadruples your published localizations for free. Those five languages carry 19 of the 27 regional slots between them, and they are the languages most channels translate into first.
If you translate into Japanese, Korean, Polish or Ukrainian, this feature does nothing for you, because YouTube has no regional variants for them. That is fine — the toggle simply has no effect on those languages, and it will not charge you for the privilege.
