Captions enable creators to describe what is being said or occurring in their videos for viewers who might not be able to hear or understand the sound or see the action.
 
Subtitles provide viewers with a video’s dialogue in additional languages.

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 add captions or subtitles to a video, go to your video’s advanced settings and click Upload a caption file.

Choose the file you’d like to upload and tell us which language it’s in and whether it’s a captions or subtitles file.

Once the file is uploaded, check the box to activate it. Uncheck the box to deactivate the file, or click the red x to delete it entirely.

We support SRT, WebVTT, DFXP/TTML, SCC, and SAMI files, but we recommend using WebVTT whenever possible.

Please note that we also recommend encoding your caption files in UTF-8 format. Otherwise, captions that contain special characters may not display properly during playback.

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!

There are lots of programs and services you can use to create captions for your videos. Basically, you can use anything that will output caption files in one of our approved formats.

​Amara and Dotsub are two popular options. Read on to learn how to create caption files with both.

Amara provides a free and simple method of creating subtitles and captions for your videos. To get started:

1) Vist Amara and create an account.
2) Once you're logged in, visit the Subtitle Videos page, paste the URL of your Vimeo video, and click Begin.
3) Your video will be loaded to the right with two options to the left. Click "Create subtitles now!" and then follow Amara's instructions.

​For an in-depth step-by-step, hop on over to Amara's handy FAQ.

Dotsub provides a free platform for creating captions and translated subtitles for your videos. To get started:

1) Vist Dotsub and create an account.
2) Once you're logged in, create your caption and translated subtitle files.
3) Your subtitles then can be downloaded from Dotsub, and uploaded to your video on Vimeo.

​For in-depth step-by-step, Dotsub provides help and tutorials.​

We support all of these wonderful languages:

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're uploading a file in a mysterious dialect that our player doesn't seem to support, feel free to get in touch.