How to Translate a YouTube Video to English Without CC

The video that answers your question is a lecture in Mandarin, or a Korean interview, and you speak neither. You click CC for English subtitles. The button is greyed out. Or the subtitles menu opens and there is no Auto-translate in it.

YouTube can translate subtitles into English. It cannot translate subtitles that do not exist. That covers most versions of this problem. If the video has captions, YouTube's Auto-translate gives you English for free, but only after you turn a caption track on (steps below). If it has none, translating the YouTube video to English without CC means making captions from the audio first. I build Tubelator, a Chrome extension that does this, so it is the tool used here (steps).

Why the CC button or Auto-translate is missing#

Auto-translate translates a caption track, not the video's audio. The player takes an existing set of subtitles, either uploaded by the creator or generated by YouTube's speech recognition, and machine-translates the text. No track means nothing to translate, and the option never appears.

Why would a video have no caption track? YouTube's help page lists the usual reasons automatic captions are missing:

• The spoken language is not one YouTube generates captions for.
• The audio is poor, or the speech is buried under music.
• Several people talk over each other, or the video switches between languages.
• There is a long silence at the start.
• The video is very long, or YouTube is still processing complex audio.

Creators can also remove automatic captions from their videos.

That list describes a lot of what people want translated: a lecture filmed from the back of a room, a podcast where the hosts talk over each other.

YouTube Auto-translate not working? Turn on a caption track first#

Try this before installing anything. It is free and built into YouTube.

1. Start the video and click the gear icon (Settings) in the player.
2. Open Subtitles/CC and pick a caption track, any one.
3. Go back into Subtitles/CC. Auto-translate now appears at the bottom of the list.
4. Choose English.

Step 2 is the one people skip. Auto-translate only shows up after a caption track is selected, so with subtitles off the menu does not list it at all.

If there is no CC button at all, or the Subtitles/CC menu has nothing to pick, the video has no caption track. No setting will change that, and neither will clearing your cache or reinstalling your browser. Unless the creator adds captions, they have to be generated from the audio.

Can YouTube translate the voice itself? Only if the creator added it. Some videos have an Audio track option in the gear menu, which means the creator uploaded dubbed audio in other languages. Otherwise, YouTube translates text only.

How to translate a YouTube video to English without CC#

Install Tubelator from the Chrome Web Store (desktop Chrome only), open the video, and its panel appears next to the player. It makes subtitles from the video's audio with speech recognition, so it does not need a caption track, and it can produce English directly. It covers 98 spoken languages, including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hindi, Russian, Turkish, Vietnamese, Persian and Spanish.

Before you start#

You need an account to generate subtitles, though not to read captions that already exist. Let any ad finish first, because a job cannot start while one is playing, and the video has to be at least one minute long. If a job fails, it costs nothing: usage is counted only when a transcript completes.

Also check whether it already exists. If this video has already been transcribed into English, the Target Language list marks English with a Transcribed chip, and you can load it from the Transcripts dropdown at the top of the panel instead of generating it again.

Set the two languages#

On a video with no captions, the panel says No transcript available for this video. and offers Transcribe Now. The subtitle button Tubelator adds to the player leads to the same place. Its tooltip says Create a transcript to enable subtitles. Either one opens the Transcribe tab.

The form has two fields:

• Video Language: The language spoken in the video
• Target Language: Translate subtitles into this language

Set Video Language to the language you hear, set Target Language to English, and press Generate AI Subtitles and Transcript.

Check the first field every time: Video Language is not auto-detected. It starts on English, or on whatever you chose last time. Leave it on English for a Mandarin video and the recognizer listens for English. What comes back is garbled. If a video mixes languages, pick the one spoken most.

Chinese, Japanese and Korean videos#

The steps are the same: set Video Language to Chinese, Japanese or Korean, and Target Language to English. Tubelator listens to the audio, not the picture, so it makes no difference whether the video has Chinese subtitles burned into the image or nothing on screen at all.

What happens next#

The panel and the button step through Accessing audio..., Processing video and Transcribing... with a percentage. Once transcription starts, the top of the panel reads Transcription in progress. Most videos finish in seconds. Long ones take a few minutes, which is still less than watching them.

Watch the original and the English together#

English alone is enough to understand a video. If you are learning the language, or want to check the translation against what was said, you want both lines on screen: the original above, English below.

If the video has captions in its original language, load them, then click the + next to the track pills at the top of the panel and choose English. YouTube's translation appears as a second pill marked YT-TR (YouTube translation) and uses none of your transcription allowance.

If it has no captions at all, run two jobs: one with Target Language set to the same language as Video Language (a transcript of what was said), and one set to English. Both tracks then sit in Active Transcripts and are already stacked on the video.

Styling the two lines differently and looping a hard passage are covered in dual subtitles for language learning.

Keep the English subtitles#

The Transcript tab shows the English text with timestamps; click a line to jump the video there. Export To opens Export Transcript, which exports whichever track is active, the English one included, in thirteen formats such as .SRT, .VTT, .DOCX and .PDF. Copy Plain puts the text on your clipboard without timestamps. The formats, and why PDFs of Chinese or Arabic text come out readable, are covered in how to get a transcript of any YouTube video.

Which option fits#

Tools in the last row ask you to paste a link or upload the file, then return a subtitle file or a dubbed video. They are built for creators preparing their own videos for another audience. If you only want to understand something you are watching, downloading it and uploading it somewhere else is a long way round.

What this does not fix#

Recognition mistakes carry into the English. Background music, heavy accents, people talking over each other and specialist terms all reduce accuracy, and a misheard word gets translated as it was misheard. A clearly recorded lecture or interview usually comes out good enough to follow; if you will quote or publish it, check the passages that matter.

The English track has no word-by-word highlighting. Each translated line is timed to the video, but single words are not, because a translated sentence does not follow the word order of the original. A transcript in the original language does highlight each word as it is spoken.

One language per job. To get English and Spanish from a Japanese video, run two jobs.

It does not work on phones. Tubelator runs in desktop Chrome, on regular YouTube video pages, so the YouTube mobile app and Shorts are not covered. On a phone you are limited to what YouTube itself offers, which needs a caption track.

Some videos cannot be transcribed. Private videos are blocked. Videos that need a sign-in or a purchase to play, such as members-only, age-restricted or rented videos, usually fail.

What the free plan covers#

Reading captions that already exist, YouTube's translated tracks, and transcripts that were already generated for the video do not count against your transcriptions.

The free plan covers one video over 30 minutes a month, so a single 90-minute lecture fits, but a weekly lecture series does not. Plus is $3.99 a month, discounted from $4.99. It raises the allowance to 50 transcriptions a month, removes the one-long-video limit, and handles videos up to four hours. The pricing page has Pro and the full comparison.