Translating town halls, leadership messages and policy videos for every office

What counts as an internal video

Internal video covers everything a company records for its own people: all-hands and town hall recordings, CEO and leadership updates, onboarding welcomes, benefits explainers, policy and code-of-conduct videos, change announcements, and project demos shared across offices. Formal training and safety content is its own category with stricter requirements, covered on the training video translation page.

How internal video differs from marketing video

Three things change when the audience is your own staff.

• Accuracy over polish: employees act on what they hear about pay, benefits, reorganizations and policy. A slightly stiff voice is acceptable; a wrong number of vacation days is not.
• Confidentiality: town halls discuss results, plans and people before they are public, and recordings may show internal dashboards, offices and faces.
• Fairness: if headquarters hears a message in its own language and other offices get it a week later, or only in English, the video undermines the message it carries. Releasing every language at the same time matters.

Cultural adaptation matters less than in marketing, because staff share company context, though references to one office's events or local rules still need care.

Choosing a format for each type of video

Leadership message (2 to 10 minutes)

AI voice track plus subtitles. Short, high-attention videos where hearing the message in one's own language carries weight.

Town hall or all-hands (30 to 90 minutes)

Translated subtitles plus a translated transcript. Several speakers and a Q&A suit subtitles better than a single voice, and the transcript lets staff skim to the part that concerns them.

Onboarding and benefits explainers

AI voice track plus subtitles, reviewed by HR in each country. These are rewatched for years, so review once, carefully.

Policy and code of conduct

Reviewed translated subtitles or transcript, with the approved local policy text linked alongside. The video explains; the approved document governs.

Project demos and team updates

Subtitles or transcript only, with light review. Low stakes and a short shelf life.

Confidentiality: what actually leaves the device

Before choosing a tool, ask what it receives. Many video translation services need the full video file, picture included, uploaded to their servers. For a town hall with unreleased figures on slides or a roadmap on screen, that is more exposure than the job requires, because translating speech only needs the audio.

Questions worth asking any provider: is the whole video uploaded or only the audio, how long are files and results kept, who can access them, and are they used for anything beyond your job? Compare the answers with your company's data-handling policy, and involve your security team for anything sensitive. On-device video processing and privacy explains what keeping media local does and does not protect.

Review by local managers

Local review is where internal translation earns trust. A workflow that suits most companies:

1. Communications produces the translated versions as soon as the source video is final.
2. Each country's designated reviewer, usually a local manager or HR partner, reads the translated transcript against the source, focusing on numbers, dates, names, role titles and policy terms.
3. Reviewers flag lines about things that differ locally, such as a benefit that exists only in one country, so a short note can go into that office's release message.
4. Corrections that affect meaning go into a glossary of internal terms: codenames, team names, programme names.
5. All languages are released together with the source-language version.

Start the glossary on day one. Codenames, acronyms and department names are exactly what machine translation gets wrong, because they appear in no public text.

Example: a quarterly town hall in four languages

Risks and limits for an internal rollout

• One voice per video: a voice track renders every speaker, Q&A participants included, in the same chosen voice, and transcripts do not label speakers. For multi-speaker town halls, subtitles are clearer.
• No voice cloning: the CEO will not sound like the CEO in a dubbed version. Some leaders prefer subtitles so their own voice stays audible; for that, publish the original video with the translated subtitle files, since the translated MP4 replaces the original voice with the AI voice.
• Slides and on-screen text stay in the source language. Share translated slide decks separately if they carry key numbers.
• Policy translations can have legal weight in some countries. Treat the AI version as an explanation and link the approved local text.
• Internal jargon and codenames will be mistranslated until the glossary is in place.

Translating internal video privately with mydubly

mydubly is designed so the video file never leaves your device. The browser extracts the audio, uploads only the audio in short chunks, and receives text and the generated voice track back; the final video is assembled in the browser. Uploaded audio and results are deleted within 30 minutes of a job finishing, and unfinished jobs expire after 24 hours. Slides, dashboards and faces in the picture are never uploaded. Outputs include a translated MP4 with an AI voice, translated audio, SRT and VTT subtitles, and transcripts in both languages, for files up to 2 hours in 21 languages. mydubly makes no claims of compliance certification, so assess it against your own policies. Details are on the private video translation page.

Next step for your communications team

Take your most recent leadership update, pick the two offices that most need it in their own language, and run a pilot with a local reviewer in each. Time the review and collect reactions from staff. Begin on the private video translation page, and see subtitles vs dubbing if you are unsure which format each video needs.