Step-by-Step Techniques for Seamless YouTube Subtitling & Captions

How to Easily Add Subtitles and Closed Captions to YouTube Video

Richard Bennett

Mar 27, 2024• Proven solutions

In this article, we are going to show you how important it is to add subtitle and closed captions in your YouTube video, and how to add them.

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Why subtitle and closed captions are important for YouTube videos?

• Forced closed captions and subtitles actually help the viewers to understand the content in your video if the audio quality of your video is bad, muffled or barely audible. Reading makes it easier for them to understand.
• This also helps people with hearing impairments. People with troubled ears can still watch and understand your content.
• It’s a great aid to such videos which have been recorded in other foreign languages that you don’t understand. Hence it will increase the number of viewers all around the world.
• They both are generally added for easy accessibility to the viewers who wish to watch in sound sensitive environments.

So, here we are going to show you two ways to add subtittles to video: directly or uploading caption or transcript files

Adding subtitles and closed captions manually

To add subtitles and closed captions to your YouTube video, fisrt, you should sign in to your YouTube account. On left right below ‘Home’ you will find ‘My Channel’. It will direct you to your personal YouTube page. On the top, right next to your subscribers lays the ‘Video manager’, giving you the list of your uploaded videos.

Select the video and click on edit to get a drop down menu. Click on subtitles and CC. This will take you to the subtitling interface. To the right of video select ‘add new subtitles’ and then ‘create new subtitles’. Select the subtitle language. Play the video to listen to the content and type down in the box. Click on ‘+’ button once you are done.

This will create a subtitle timeline right beneath the video. You can manage by dragging and expanding the subtitle duration according to the audio of the video. The subtitle will appear at the bottom of the video screen. Click ‘publish’ once done.

An interruption might occur with appearing of subtitles in accordance with video. Hence a lot precision is required while doing so.

Uploading Caption or Transcript Files automatically

To upload Caption or Transcript Files to YouTube Videos you first need to create a format on a text editor. For windows use Notepad and for Mac you may use TextEdit. Create a format of putting the number of subtitle first, time stamp and then text of the subtitle. For example

1\

00:02:34:12 using a format of (hour : minute : second : millisecond)

2. *text*

This is the sample text for first subtitle at zero hours, two minutes, thirty four seconds and twelve milliseconds. Once done with this. Go to file, select ‘save as’. Write the file name with an extension of .srt and select ‘All files’ for type of file. Click encoding menu and select UTF-8. Once saved, sign in to your YouTube account.

On left right below ‘Home’ you will find ‘My Channel’. It will direct you to your personal YouTube page. On the top, right next to your subscribers lays the ‘Video manager’, giving you the list of your uploaded videos.

Select the video and click on edit to get a drop down menu. Click on subtitles and CC. Go to ‘add subtitles’ and then ‘upload a file’. A pop-up menu will appear select ‘subtitles file’. Click upload. The file will send subtitles to your video.

This will create a subtitle timeline right beneath the video. You can manage by dragging and expanding the subtitle duration according to the audio of the video. The subtitle will appear at the bottom of the video screen. Click ‘publish’ once done.

3 Best Tools for add/managing video Subtitles/CC

1. Amara

Amara is a smart video editor which helps insert captions and subtitles to videos. It also helps in transcribing the videos. It takes help of crowd sourcing to subtitle any YouTube video. They take help from viewers to subtitle the videos. By making crowd subtitling available for any YouTube creator, they are allowing them to reach more viewers in more languages

2. DIY Captions

DIY captions help you to transcribe the YouTube videos, if not in most accurate manner, then in a little easier way. All you have to do is just paste the URL of the YouTube video and it will provide you all the subtitles. These may not be accurate but will provide you major base material which can be tweaked a bit here and there and is far better than making all the subtitles starting from scratch.

3 Subtitles for YouTube

Subtitles for YouTube is a Google Chrome extension which provides subtitles for YouTube videos. For this you will have to provide a subtitle file with .srt extension. The attractive feature of this is that you won’t have to download the video and still run the subtitles on it. This is very much helpful for people who work on YouTube or watch movies without subtitles.

Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett is a writer and a lover of all things video.

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