How to Contribute Subtitles to Someone Else's YouTube Video

Last Updated: August 10, 2021

Subtitles help expand the audience of a video. Multilingual subtitles, for example, help a number of people to understand the message of the speaker without acquiring knowledge of the speaker's language. 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.

Steps

1
Open a text-editing software. On a Windows PC, you can open Notepad.
2
Follow the exact format. Make sure that the timestamp is correct, otherwise your subtitles might not be in sync with the video.

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3
Type the subtitles. Add extra timestamps if necessary.
4
Save your work as a .txt file.
5
Send the file to the YouTube user. See Message Someone on YouTube on how to send a message.

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Community Q&A

Question

Will I get money after contributing this?

Community Answer

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

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Community Answer

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

Can I still add subtitles to someone else's video?

Ruby

Top Answerer

No, as of September 2020, community captions are no longer an option. You can request for the creator to subtitle their own videos, or write down the videos transcript and send it to the creator to change into subtitles.