Why captions?

We've found video to be a great medium for sharing information, but in its raw form, it can be difficult or impossible for some users to understand. Adding captions (timed transcriptions) and subtitles (textual translations) to a video can help address many of these challenges. The text can be read by users who cannot hear, and it can be translated (automatically or manually) for users who do not understand the original language of the video. Plus, captions make videos more easily searchable.

Download captions!

If you'd like to read a transcript of one of our captioned videos or download some text to translate, head to our list of captioned videos.

Make captions!

We'd love your help in making the videos on Webmaster Central accessible to more webmasters, so we're now accepting user submissions of captions and subtitles. We'll add these submissions to our videos, and also post the text on this site so anyone can have access to it. If we end up using your submission, we'll mention your name to give you credit in the description of the video, as well as on this site where we'll host the text.

Creating captions and subtitles

For information about how to create captions and subtitles compatible with YouTube, check out this help article. Some software and online services for creating these files are listed here.

Sending your captions to Google

Once you've created your file, email it to wmc-captions@google.com, and be sure to let us know which video it's for and which language the text is in. You can attach your captions or subtitles as a text file or just copy the text into the body of the message. If you don't have time to create a fully-formatted caption file, that's fine, we'll accept untimed transcripts as well for the original language of the video and add the timing ourselves.

Please only use this email address to send captions or subtitles for videos hosted on the Webmaster Central YouTube Channel. We don't have the resources to answer emails to that address, so non-caption messages will not receive a reply. If you have a question about your site and Google, please ask in our Webmaster Help Forum.

And our friends in Google's legal department wanted us to mention: By submitting captions or subtitles to Google, you grant Google a worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, sublicensable license to distribute, reproduce, modify, perform, display and otherwise use the captions or subtitles in Google services, including in connection with the related video.