Stop smiling and nodding.Follow any video or call in a language you don't speak.

You know the move. Someone in the meeting switches to German, or the cooking video you wanted turns out to be in Korean, and you do the smile-and-nod. You catch one word in five. By the time you’ve understood the first sentence, they’re three sentences ahead. And you can’t pause a live call.

I live in Switzerland, a country with four official languages. Smiling and nodding through meetings is something I see a lot here.

Good news: your computer and your phone can now do the listening for you. They write the spoken words as subtitles (text at the bottom of the picture) and translate them while the video plays. A surprising amount of this is free and already on your device. You just never switched it on. Find your situation:

• YouTube, on a phone or a computer
• Other videos on a computer, with Chrome or Windows
• A video call in Meet, Zoom or Teams
• An iPhone or Android phone
• Tools from our directory, when the free options are not enough

You’re watching YouTube

Many YouTube videos have subtitles, often made automatically. To show them, press the CC button in the player (CC stands for “closed captions”, another word for subtitles). On a phone, tap the video once first to see the buttons.

If the subtitles are not in your language, YouTube can translate them. On a computer, click the gear icon, then “Subtitles/CC”, then “Auto-translate”, and pick your language. In the YouTube app on a phone, look for the same “Auto-translate” choice in the subtitle settings; the menus can look a little different. This only works when the video has subtitles to begin with.

Some channels also offer a version where a computer voice speaks the translation (this is called dubbing). The channel decides whether a video gets one, not you. If it exists, you can switch the sound track to your language.

You’re watching something else on a computer

In the Chrome browser (the program you use to visit websites, on Windows or Mac), there’s a free feature hiding in the settings. Live Caption writes subtitles for almost anything that plays sound, and a second switch, Live Translate, translates them. Set it up once, in this order:

1. Open the Chrome menu (the three dots at the top right), then Settings, then Accessibility.
2. Switch on Live Caption.
3. Chrome starts with English only. Next to “Manage languages”, choose “Add languages” and add the language the people in the video speak. Then select it under “Preferred caption language”.
4. Switch on Live Translate and choose the language you want to read next to “Translate to”.

Chrome can listen to about 19 languages, including Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Korean and Chinese. It can translate them into more than 100. For the translation, Chrome sends the subtitle text to Google.

On Windows 11, Microsoft’s own Live captions writes subtitles for any sound on the computer. Press the Windows key (the one with the Windows logo), Ctrl and L together to start it. The catch: it translates mainly into English (and Simplified Chinese), and only on “Copilot+ PCs”. These are Windows computers sold since 2024 with an extra chip for artificial intelligence, and they are usually advertised with that name. On those, Windows translates more than 40 languages into English, and the sound never leaves the computer.

You’re in a video call (the tricky one)

Google Meet, Zoom and Microsoft Teams can all show translated subtitles in a meeting. But only on certain more expensive company plans, and often it depends on whoever set up the meeting, not on you. As a guest, you may not even see the option. So if a meeting matters, ask the organiser before it starts. It’s a much less awkward question than “sorry, can you repeat the last twenty minutes?”

You’re on a phone

For YouTube videos, the YouTube steps above work on any phone.

On an iPhone 11 or newer, Apple’s Live Captions shows live subtitles for sound in any app: Settings, then Accessibility, then Live Captions. The subtitles stay in the original language. Apple’s translation feature, Live Translation, works in Messages, phone calls and FaceTime (Apple’s video call app), but not for videos. Neither feature is available in every country and language.

On Android phones, every phone maker builds its own menus, so I can’t give you one set of steps here. Open Settings and search for “captions” or “subtitles”; that usually gets you there.

When the free stuff gives up

Three products in our directory take a different route, according to their websites: they pick up the sound on your own computer, from a browser tab or from the whole computer, so they don’t depend on the website or on the meeting’s plan. All three charge for regular use and let you try them for free first; their websites show the details. To be clear: I haven’t tested them. What follows comes from their websites.

SonicCaption is an extension, a small add-on you install from the browser’s own store of extensions, for Chrome or Edge. It shows subtitles for any video or stream in the open browser tab, with the translation under each original line. The site says the subtitles appear about half a second after the speech. It shows text only. The sound is turned into text in your browser, and short pieces of text go to SonicCaption’s servers and its partners for the translation.

DubTab also shows translated subtitles, and it can also read the translation aloud with a computer voice, while the original sound gets quieter. It comes as a browser extension and as an app for Windows 11 and for Macs with macOS 14.2 or later. The app hears every sound the computer plays, so it also works for downloaded videos and for the Zoom program. Short pieces of the sound go to the speech and translation services DubTab uses.

SonicMeet is made for meetings in Google Meet, Zoom and Teams. The translated subtitles appear only on your screen. No extra participant joins the call, so the others do not see that you use it. It comes as a browser extension and as an app for Windows and Mac. The meeting sound goes to SonicMeet’s servers and partners for the translation, and the written record of the meeting is saved so you can search it later.

Don’t trust it with a contract

All of these tools guess at what they hear. They struggle with strong accents, background noise, several people talking at once, and names. The companies say so too: Zoom writes that translated subtitles “may not be accurate”, and Apple advises checking important information. A 2020 study of speech recognition from five large companies found almost twice as many errors for Black speakers in the US as for white speakers.

“Translated captions may not be accurate.”

Zoom, in its own help pages

For a cooking video or a lecture, a few wrong words do little harm. For a contract, a doctor’s appointment or anything where one word matters, get a human interpreter or a written summary.

Sources

• Google Chrome Help, “Use Live Caption in Chrome” (read 22 October 2026)
• YouTube Help: turning on captions, automatic captions, automatic dubbing (read 22 October 2026)
• Microsoft Support, “Use live captions to better understand audio” (Windows 11, read 22 October 2026)
• Google Meet, Zoom and Microsoft Teams help pages on translated captions (read 22 October 2026)
• Apple Support: Live Captions on iPhone; “Use Live Translation”, September 2026
• Koenecke et al., “Racial disparities in automated speech recognition”, PNAS, March 2020
• The websites of SonicCaption, DubTab and SonicMeet (read 22 October 2026)