Your community of viewers can help you to reach a larger audience by adding title, description, subtitles and closed captions to your videos. Once you have some language captions for a video, your community can submit translations to help you reach a global audience.
When content is submitted, you can manage it by reviewing, editing, publishing, flagging or rejecting it. Your community can also review the content, and it will automatically be published when it receives enough reviews.
Turn community contributions for videos on or off
Before your community can submit titles, descriptions, closed captions or subtitles, you need to turn on community contributions. You can turn on community contributions for selected videos or make it the default setting for all videos on your channel. Learn how fans contribute and review this content for your videos.
Note: If you have community captions turned on, you'll have to manually review them before they're published.
Follow these steps to turn on community contributions for all videos. Note that this change will reset any settings applied to individual videos.
- Sign in to YouTube Studio.
- From the left-hand menu, select Subtitles.
- From the top, select Community.
- Select Turn on.
- Sign in to YouTube Studio.
- From the left-hand menu, select Videos.
- Click the title or thumbnail of the video that you'd like to edit.
- From the left-hand menu, select Subtitles.
- If you haven't already, set the language for your video.
- Select the Community Contributions box and choose between On for this video and Off for this video.
- Sign in to YouTube Studio.
- From the left-hand menu, select Videos.
- Tick the boxes next to the videos that you'd like to edit.
- Select Edit, then Community contributions.
- Choose whether you'd like them to be On or Off, then select Update videos.
Manage community contributions
Once transcriptions or translations have been submitted, the content goes through a review process. YouTube moderates these submissions for spam and inappropriate content, while taking input from you and your community.
Once enough contributions have been added, the community will be asked to help review them. After review, you can publish contributions to show on your videos.
Make sure that you carefully review, edit, flag or reject content before publishing. You can also edit or delete content that's been published.
- Sign in to YouTube Studio.
- From the left-hand menu, select Subtitles.
- Select the Community tab.
- You can take the following actions:
Manage and approve contributions in progress
To see submissions in progress, click 'In Review' for a language beneath the Subtitles column.
- Approve and publish submissions: At the top of the page, select Publish.
- Edit submission: Click on the text and make any corrections. Changes will be saved automatically when you click outside of the caption that you edited. Select Publish to approve.
- Report spam or abuse: Select Report.
- Ask the community to make improvements: At the top of the page, select Needs more work.
To see published content, click 'Published' for a language beneath the Subtitles column.
- Edit submissions: Click on the text and make any corrections. Changes will be saved automatically when you click outside of the caption that you edited. Select Publish to approve.
- Delete submissions for subtitles/CC: Click the X to the right of the submission
- Delete submissions for title and description: Find your video in your Video Manager. Select Edit
Info & settings
Translations and select Delete
next to the language in question.
Give credit to contributors
When you allow community contributions on your channel or video(s), we automatically publish the top contributors in the video's description. Contributors can only get credit if they have a YouTube channel and haven't already opted out of credits.
- The main five contributors per language are shown, ranked by their contribution to the published version.
- The contributor list is shown in translated versions of the video description (if applicable).
You can also see the list of contributors under the Subtitles & CC tab next to the version that they added to.
Note that currently only contributors to subtitles/CCs can be credited in this way.