How to Contribute Subtitles to Someone Else's YouTube Video

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Last Updated: November 8, 2024

Although community captions were discontinued in September 2020, you may still want to share subtitles with another user. This wikiHow shows you how to create your own subtitle .txt file to send to a YouTube user.

Things You Should Know

Subtitles can expand the audience of a video since they make the video accessible to people in different languages.
Create a TXT file with timestamps and subtitles.
Send a message to the video's creator on YT and ask if you can send the file for them to upload to the video's subtitle area in YT Studio.

Steps

Download Article

On a Windows PC, you can open Notepad.
Make sure that the timestamp is correct, otherwise your subtitles might not be in sync with the video.

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Add extra timestamps if necessary.
See Message Someone on YouTube on how to send a message.

Community Q&A

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Question

Will I get money after contributing this?

Community Answer

No, it's just a way to help others' videos.

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Question

What do I do if the subtitles I put on a video on YouTube haven't been approved yet? Do I need to do anything for them to be approved?

blockshift 758

Community Answer

You don't need to do anything after that. You just need to wait for it to get reviewed, then approved.

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Question

How do I make fancy subtitles?

Ruby

Top Answerer

There is no way to make "fancy" subtitles. It depends what you mean by "fancy", but all subtitles should follow the same format. Subtitles are there for accessibility, not aesthetics.

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Tips

You can also try contacting the YouTube channel owner and asking them to add captions to the video. If they decline, see if they would be willing to allow crowd-sourced captioning.

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Tips from our Readers

The advice in this section is based on the lived experiences of wikiHow readers like you. If you have a helpful tip you’d like to share on wikiHow, please submit it in the field below.

Since YouTube removed community contributions, you can use websites like Captionfy.io or Amara.org to create subtitles for other people's videos. The video owner can also download the file and publish it on YouTube.
Be sure to watch your video through with subtitles to make sure the timing is correct. Programs such as VLC Player can load up a subtitle file along with a video.

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