Subtitles provide viewers with a video’s dialogue in written form. Captions include subtitles plus a written description of what is occurring in their videos for viewers who might not be able to hear or understand the sound.
To turn on captions or subtitles when viewing a video, click the CC button in the player's bottom toolbar. In the menu that appears, select the caption or subtitle track you’d like to see. To see captions in action, try turning them on in the video below:
Video creators upload captions and subtitles to their own videos. If you do not see your language, it probably means that the video has not yet been transcribed or translated. Feel free to contact the video creator directly to inquire!
Adding captions or subtitles to your video
You can add captions or subtitles to your video on the Advanced tab of your video settings. To upload a captions or subtitles file, click Choose File, specify the language, and tell us whether it’s a caption or subtitle file. Once the file is uploaded, check the box next to the file name to activate it. Uncheck the box to deactivate the file, or click the red X to delete it entirely.
If you don’t already have captions or subtitles for your video, you can purchase them through one of the trusted providers listed below. These same providers are also listed on the Advanced tab of your video’s settings.
Vimeo supports the following captions and subtitles file formats: SRT, WebVTT, DFXP/TTML, SCC, and SAMI files, but we recommend using WebVTT whenever possible. We also recommend encoding your caption files in UTF-8 format. Otherwise, captions that contain special characters may not display properly during playback.
We support all of the languages listed below. If you're uploading a file in a mysterious dialect that our player doesn't seem to support, feel free to get in touch.
Abkhazian
Afar
Afrikaans
Albanian
Amharic
Arabic
Armenian
Assamese
Aymara
Azerbaijani
Bashkir
Basque
Belarusian
Bengali
Bihari
Bislama
Breton
Bulgarian
Burmese
Catalan
Chinese (China)
Chinese (Hong Kong SAR China)
Chinese (Simplified Han)
Chinese (Singapore)
Chinese (Taiwan)
Chinese (Traditional Han)
Corsican
Croatian
Czech
Danish
Dinka
Dutch
Dutch (Belgium)
Dzongkha
English
English (Canada)
English (Ireland)
English (United Kingdom)
English (United States)
Esperanto
Estonian
Faroese
Fijian
Filipino
Finnish
French
French (Belgium)
French (Canada)
French (Switzerland)
Galician
Georgian
German
German (Austria)
German (Switzerland)
Greek
Guarani
Gujarati
Haitian
Hausa
Hebrew
Hindi
Hungarian
Icelandic
Indonesian
Interlingua
Interlingue
Inupiaq
Irish
Italian
Japanese
Javanese
Kalaallisut
Kannada
Kashmiri
Kazakh
Khmer
Kinyarwanda
Kirghiz
Korean
Kurdish
Lao
Latin
Latvian
Lingala
Lithuanian
Macedonian
Malagasy
Malay
Malayalam
Maltese
Maori
Marathi
Moldavian
Mongolian
Nauru
Nepali
Norwegian
Occitan
Oriya
Oromo
Pashto
Persian
Persian (Afghanistan)
Polish
Portuguese
Portuguese (Brazil)
Portuguese (Portugal)
Punjabi
Quechua
Rhaeto-Romance
Romanian
Rundi
Russian
Samoan
Sango
Sanskrit
Scottish Gaelic
Serbian
Serbo-Croatian
Shona
Sindhi
Sinhala
Slovak
Slovenian
Somali
Southern Sotho
Spanish
Spanish (Mexico)
Spanish (Spain)
Sundanese
Swahili
Swati
Swedish
Tagalog
Tajik
Tamil
Tatar
Telugu
Tetum
Thai
Tibetan
Tigrinya
Tonga
Tsonga
Tswana
Turkish
Turkmen
Twi
Ukrainian
Urdu
Uzbek
Vietnamese
Volapük
Welsh
Western Frisian
Wolof
Xhosa
Yiddish
Yoruba
Zulu
If you previously purchased captions or subtitles from Amara for your videos, they will still appear on the Advanced tab of your video settings, but you’ll no longer be able to edit them in the Amara Editor. You will only be able to edit your existing captions or subtitles by downloading the file, making changes directly in the file, and then re-uploading the file to Vimeo.
If you purchased captions or subtitles from Amara that are pending, you will still be able to access them and launch the Amara Editor from the Advanced tab of your video’s settings once the captions or subtitles file is ready.