- The CC button or the C key turns subtitles on and off on a computer.
- The gear menu lists every track, including auto-generated ones.
- Pick the track by your level, not by what YouTube chose for you.
Turn subtitles on
To turn on subtitles on YouTube on a computer, click the CC button in the player or press C on the keyboard. Press C again to turn them off.
If the button is grey and does nothing, the video has no subtitles at all. Some channels upload none, and auto-generated ones are not always available.
Choose the language
Click the gear, then Subtitles/CC. You will see the tracks the video has. Tracks marked auto-generated were made by speech recognition.
Use auto-translate with care
Auto-translate turns an existing track into another language. It helps when no track exists in your language, but machine translation adds mistakes.
Make the track work for you
With NativeLingo, subtitles in your language get a few words swapped into the language you learn. It follows the track you pick in the player, manual or auto-generated.
If you pick a track in the language you learn, there is nothing to swap, and YouTube shows its own subtitles. Ads and live streams always keep their own subtitles.
Questions
The channel did not upload any, and YouTube did not generate them for that video.
Yes, in the gear menu under Subtitles/CC and Options.
No. It works in Chrome on a computer.