How to change transcript language in YouTube

Paul By Paul, who built Transcript Any Video
Published

Click the gear icon on the video, open Subtitles/CC and pick a language, then reopen Show transcript. If the language you want isn't in that list, the video doesn't have it: you can turn on Auto-translate for the captions on screen, or copy the transcript and have it translated.

If the text is in a language nobody speaks in the video, that's a different problem: YouTube guessed the language wrong. It has its own section below.

How do you change the transcript language on a computer?

YouTube builds the transcript from the video's captions. Its help page says you can see the transcript of any video that has captions. So changing the transcript language means picking another caption track.

  1. Open the gear. Start the video and click the Settings icon at the bottom right of the player.
  2. Pick the track. Click Subtitles/CC. The list shows every caption track the video has. Click the one you want.
  3. Reopen the transcript. Under the video, expand the description and click Show transcript.
  4. Or switch inside the panel. When the transcript panel has a language menu, it sits at the bottom left. Pick the language there.

YouTube's own tutorial gives the same first step: “To change the language of the caption track, click the Settings icon, and go to Subtitles/CC.”

Can't find the language menu in the panel? YouTube redesigned the transcript panel in early 2026, and on some videos the language button is gone. Set the language in the player first. A user on the Readlang forum found the transcript then follows the caption setting, though not on every video. The quirks of that new panel are in YouTube transcript not working.

Why does the list show only one language?

Because the video only has one. YouTube Help is direct about it: “Automatic captions will be in the video's default language only.” Any other language exists only if the creator uploaded it.

Reading the Subtitles/CC list tells you what you have:

How do you change the YouTube transcript language to English?

It depends on what the list holds.

Case 1: English is in the list

Pick it under Subtitles/CC and reopen the transcript. If there are two English tracks, prefer the one without “(auto-generated)”.

Case 2: English isn't in the list

YouTube Help gives the path: when the language isn't listed under Subtitles/CC, click Auto-translate and select it. That's fine for following along. Don't count on it for exact wording. A YouTuber who showed his viewers how to turn it on says he can't vouch for its accuracy. A March 2026 article from youtube-transcript.ai shows a Japanese tech talk coming out stiff and hard to read, because YouTube translates sentence by sentence. Riverside's guide adds that YouTube gives you no transcript file of the auto-translation.

Case 3: You need English text you can keep

  1. Open Show transcript in the language the video has.
  2. Select the whole transcript and copy it.
  3. Paste it into ChatGPT, Claude or Google Translate.
  4. Ask: “Translate this into English. Keep the timestamps.”

An AI chat reads the whole text at once, so it can translate for meaning rather than line by line. Still check names and numbers against the video.

What about the YouTube app on a phone?

YouTube Help gives the same logic for Android, iPhone and iPad. Tap the More icon at the top right of the player, tap Captions, and select a language. If yours isn't listed, tap Auto-translate. The transcript itself opens from the description, with Show transcript.

Why are YouTube's automatic captions in the wrong language?

YouTube writes automatic captions in the language it believes the video is in. When that guess is wrong, it forces the sounds into the wrong language, and the result is nonsense.

It's an old complaint that hasn't gone away. On r/youtube in 2016, a viewer asked how to fix a Japanese video that YouTube took for Russian. A creator replied that his Spanish video got Portuguese captions, even though he set Spanish when he uploaded it. In 2021, another user saw an English video's captions switch to German; he and the friend who owned the video reported it, with no result. In 2026, people on the same subreddit still ask where to report a wrong language detection.

Auto-translate can't save it, because it translates the wrong text. One commenter in the 2016 thread got Vietnamese captions on English videos and found that auto-translate “just produces garbage”.

The same goes for transcript tools. Every tool that reads YouTube's captions, mine included when a video has them, hands you that same wrong text.

How do you fix captions in the wrong language?

  1. Check the list again. A creator track, without “(auto-generated)”, may sit under the broken one.
  2. Tell the creator in a comment. Only the person who uploaded a video can change its language, YouTube Help says. Reporting it through Send feedback goes to YouTube, not to them. The help page on changing a video's language also says published captions aren't affected, so ask the creator to fix or upload the captions, not just the language setting.
  3. Transcribe the audio yourself and name the language. Whisper, OpenAI's free speech recognition model, detects the language on its own, and lets you force it: whisper audio.mp3 --language Japanese. For English directly, add --model medium --task translate. Its README warns that the default turbo model doesn't translate. Downloading the audio and installing Whisper are covered in how to transcribe YouTube audio.

The video has no captions at all, so there's nothing to switch or translate? That's the case I built Transcript Any Video for. You paste the YouTube link, and it transcribes the video's audio, with the language detected on its own. You get the transcript word for word, then paste it into ChatGPT or Claude to translate it. Videos without captions can run up to 2 hours and cost 1 credit per 30 minutes. Credits are bought once, 10 for $1.99, and never expire. No subscription, sign-in with just your email, and you can ask for a refund.

Transcribe a video

FAQ

Can you get a YouTube transcript in any language?

No. YouTube Help keeps a list of the languages its automatic captions support. If the video is spoken in a language outside that list, YouTube makes no automatic captions, so there is no transcript to switch unless the creator uploaded one.

Can YouTube translate a video that has no captions?

No. Auto-translate sits inside the Subtitles/CC menu and works from a caption track the video already has. The transcript, too, only exists for videos with captions. With no track, the text has to come from the audio first.

Will the creator see it if I report wrong captions to YouTube?

No. YouTube's help says creators don't see anything sent through Send feedback. It goes to YouTube's teams, who may not reply. A comment under the video is what reaches the creator.

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