Watch YouTube creators, lectures, and live streams in your language—even when videos lack subtitles or offer them only in the original language.
YouTube hosts millions of videos in languages you might not speak. A Korean tech reviewer unboxing a new laptop. A French historian explaining the Revolution. A Brazilian streamer playing through a new game. YouTube's automatic captions can transcribe the original speech, but they don't translate it—you're left reading Korean, French, or Portuguese unless the creator manually added subtitles in your language, which most haven't. Translext fills that gap by listening to the tab audio, transcribing what it hears, and showing you real-time captions in the language you choose.
This is a Chrome extension, so it works only when you open YouTube in a browser tab. It can't capture audio from YouTube's TV app, your phone, or a standalone video player. Once installed, it places a floating caption window over the YouTube player. You pick your target language, start playback, and Translext begins displaying translated captions as speech happens. You can also enable text-to-speech to hear the translation spoken aloud, though that adds a layer of synthetic voice over the original audio.
If you normally watch YouTube through a smart TV app, a mobile device, or embedded players on other sites, you'll need to shift to Chrome on a desktop or laptop. Navigate to youtube.com, find the video or live stream you want, and open it. Translext appears as a browser extension icon in your toolbar. Click it, choose your target language from the list of seventy-plus options, and press the start button. The extension taps into the tab's audio stream—the same audio your speakers or headphones receive—and begins transcribing and translating in real time. Pausing the video pauses translation. Switching tabs or closing the YouTube page stops the session.
YouTube's automatic captions are single-language. If a Japanese vlogger narrates a travel video in Japanese, YouTube can generate Japanese subtitles, but it won't convert them to English, Spanish, or any other language unless the creator uploads separate subtitle files—and most don't. Live streams present an even tighter constraint: there's no time to prepare multilingual subtitles, so you're stuck with the original language or nothing. Translext solves that by translating on the fly. You might follow a German tutorial on woodworking techniques, attend a Russian university lecture posted as a live premiere, or catch a Portuguese gaming stream, all without waiting for someone to add your language manually. The translation won't be flawless—live speech recognition makes mistakes, and so does machine translation—but it gives you enough to follow along.
Translext displays captions in a draggable window that floats above the video player. You can move it so it doesn't block the creator's face, on-screen graphics, or YouTube's own controls. If you've turned on YouTube's native captions, you'll see two sets of text: YouTube's original-language subtitles at the bottom of the video frame and Translext's translated captions in the floating box. Some people leave both on to compare; others turn off YouTube's captions to reduce clutter. The overlay stays on top even in theater mode, but it doesn't persist in fullscreen because browser extensions lose control of the page in that view. You'll need to watch in the default or theater layout to keep the translation visible.
No. When you press the fullscreen button, the browser gives total control to the video element and extensions can't draw overlays on top. The Translext caption window disappears until you exit fullscreen. You can use YouTube's theater mode instead—it enlarges the player without going fullscreen, and the floating caption box remains visible and draggable. Theater mode is usually enough to minimize distractions while keeping translation captions on screen.
Both. Translext captures whatever audio plays in the tab, so it works equally well on live broadcasts and uploaded videos. Live streams are a strong use case because creators rarely provide multilingual captions in real time—they're busy presenting. You'll see the translation appear a few seconds behind the spoken words, just as with any live transcription. If the stream has sudden audio glitches or the speaker talks very fast, expect occasional gaps or errors in the translated text.
You probably don't need Translext for that video. Manually uploaded subtitles are usually more accurate than live machine translation because a human reviewed the text and timed it carefully. Translext shines when no subtitles exist in your language, or when only auto-generated captions in the original language are available. You can still run the extension on videos with good subtitles—it won't break anything—but you're doubling up on translation work for no benefit.
Translext runs speech recognition and translation in the browser tab, which uses CPU and memory. On older machines or if you have many other tabs open, you might notice slight sluggishness, especially during high-bitrate live streams. The video itself continues to play at normal speed—the extension doesn't throttle YouTube's player—but your computer works harder. Close unnecessary tabs and background apps if you see performance drops. The extension doesn't upload audio or send it anywhere, so network speed isn't a factor.
Yes, as long as the tab stays open and you don't stop the extension. When one video ends and the next begins, Translext continues listening to the tab audio and translating the new video's speech. You don't need to restart it manually. If you navigate away from YouTube entirely—say, you click a link that takes you to a different website—the extension stops because there's no YouTube audio to capture. Returning to youtube.com and playing another video requires you to start the session again.
Live captions and translated audio for anything playing in your browser tab. No bots to invite, nothing to upload.