Can You Watch Short Dramas in Other Languages? Of Six Apps, One Posts Seven on YouTube
We read the language of every recent upload on the official YouTube channels of six short drama apps. Five post in English, with four stray exceptions in 3,603 uploads. ShortMax runs a separate channel rotating seven languages in almost exactly equal shares.
Almost everything these apps promote on YouTube is in English, so a fair question is whether they offer anything else — Spanish, German, Korean, Vietnamese.
We cannot see inside the apps’ language settings. What we can see is what their official YouTube channels publish, and every upload there carries a title in some language. So we read them.
Five of six apps post in English, with rare exceptions
We track the official YouTube channels of six short drama apps: ReelShort, DramaBox, GoodShort (two channels), FlexTV, ShortMax (two channels) and MoboReels. Seven of those eight channels are English-language channels. Across their 3,603 recent uploads, we found four titles in another language:
- two Spanish full-length uploads on ReelShort, both posted on 10 August 2026
- two Portuguese Shorts on MoboReels, both posted on 26 March 2026
That is one upload in about nine hundred, clustered on two single days — it looks like a test, not a service. Nothing else turned up in a search for accented letters and common Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Indonesian and Tagalog words, and no title uses a script other than Latin. (Four FlexTV titles contain a Japanese or Chinese character, but in each case it is decoration inside an English title.)
The eighth channel is different. ShortMax runs a separate channel, “ShortMax – Multilingual”, and it posts in seven languages as a matter of routine.
ShortMax’s multilingual channel, language by language
The channel does not label language as such, but it localises everything around the title: long uploads end in the channel’s name translated into that language (“ShortMax - Ve dramas y series”, “ShortMax - Regardez des séries et des émissions”), and Shorts open with “Drama Name:” in that language (“Titel der Serie:”, “Tên phim:”, “드라마 제목:”). That is enough to place 498 of the 500 uploads we hold, which run from 24 April to 28 September 2026:
| Language | Uploads | Share | Full-length | Shorts | Median length, full uploads | Median views, full uploads |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| French | 74 | 14.8% | 23 | 51 | 17 min | 1,204 |
| German | 74 | 14.8% | 22 | 52 | 17 min | 931 |
| Spanish | 72 | 14.4% | 22 | 50 | 18 min | 771 |
| Chinese (traditional script) | 71 | 14.2% | 23 | 48 | 22 min | 423 |
| English | 70 | 14.0% | 21 | 49 | 16 min | 1,231 |
| Vietnamese | 69 | 13.8% | 21 | 48 | 22 min | 558 |
| Korean | 68 | 13.6% | 22 | 46 | 26 min | 346 |
“Full-length” means three minutes or longer; everything shorter is a Short, and each full upload comes with roughly two Shorts pointing at the same show.
The split is almost perfectly even. No language gets more than 14.8% or less than 13.6% of the uploads. That is not an accident of the period we happened to catch: in every month from May to September, every one of the seven languages got between 11 and 20 uploads. The channel runs a strict rotation.
English is one slot in seven. On this channel, English is treated exactly like German or Vietnamese. ShortMax’s main English output is its separate English channel.
The Chinese is traditional script. Both the channel-name suffix and the “Drama Name:” label on the Chinese uploads are written in traditional characters — the writing system used in Taiwan and Hong Kong — not the simplified characters used in mainland China.
Same show, seven voices?
The obvious guess is that each show is uploaded seven times, dubbed into each language. We tested it the only way the data allows: a dubbed copy of the same cut should last exactly as long as the original, to the second.
It mostly is not that. Of 154 full-length uploads, only two running times turn up in more than one language. The median lengths also differ by language — 16 minutes for English, 26 for Korean — which is not what seven copies of one video would look like. So for the most part, each language slot is carrying its own uploads.
Two cautions. A dub re-edited by even a few seconds would slip past this test, so it cannot rule out that some shows appear in several languages. And the titles themselves are translated, so we cannot match them across languages by name.
Dubbed or subtitled?
A handful of titles say so, in their own language:
- Vietnamese: 9 titles marked Lồng Tiếng (dubbed)
- Korean: 4 titles marked 더빙 (dubbing)
- Spanish: 3 titles marked Doblado (dubbed)
- German: 3 titles marked Synchron (dubbed)
Because each show usually appears as one full upload plus two Shorts, those 19 titles cover only a few shows. The other titles in those languages, and every French, Chinese and English title, carry no marker at all — which, as on the English side, tells you nothing either way. A missing marker is a missing label, not proof of subtitles.
Which languages get watched
The view counts are comparable here in a way they usually are not. Because the channel rotates languages evenly, the uploads in each language are about the same age: the median full-length upload was 76 to 81 days old in every language when we read the counts. Age is the thing that normally ruins view comparisons, and here it is held nearly constant by the channel’s own schedule.
With that out of the way, English and French full uploads draw a median of about 1,200 views each; Korean draws 346 and Chinese 423 — roughly a 3.6-fold gap from top to bottom, with German, Spanish and Vietnamese in between.
That measures YouTube reach for one channel’s uploads in each language, nothing more. It says nothing about how many people use the app in each language, and a Korean viewer may simply be less likely to find a Korean upload on a channel whose name is in English.
If you want short dramas in another language
- ShortMax is the only one of these six apps with an official channel in other languages. If your language is Spanish, French, German, Vietnamese, Korean or Chinese, its multilingual channel posts in it about three times a week, counting Shorts — roughly one full-length upload a week per language.
- Search the translated title, not the English one. Titles are translated rather than kept in English, so an English name will not find the Spanish upload.
- Check the app itself for audio and subtitle options. Everything here is YouTube. Whether any of these apps offers a language switch inside the app is not something we can see from outside, and on the English side the only dubbing signal we have is a title marker on about a quarter of ShortMax’s catalogue.
What we measured
Every upload on the official YouTube channels of six short drama apps, read on 28 September 2026: up to about 500 recent uploads per channel, so roughly the last five months on ShortMax’s multilingual channel, which by its own profile has existed since July 2023. Language is read from the channel’s own localised labels, not guessed from the text. Two uploads carried no label and are left out of the table. For how long these titles run in English — and why the ones people remember are so long — see our count of short drama titles.