How to Contribute Subtitles to Someone Else's YouTube Video

Update YouTube subtitles for another video

Reviewed by Candace Gasper

Last Updated: January 31, 2025

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.

Quick Steps

Open a text-editing software, such as Notepad.
Use the same subtitle format.
Type the subtitles.
Save the file as .txt.
Send the file to the YouTube user.

Steps

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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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