Live English subtitles for meetings with Japanese speakers (Zoom, Teams, Google Meet)
Published: 2026-09-16
If you work with a Japanese team, you know the moment. The meeting switches into Japanese, you follow most of it, and the part you miss turns out to be the decision.
The caption and translation features built into Zoom, Teams and Google Meet often depend on the host's settings or plan. As a participant you frequently cannot turn them on, and asking a client to enable captions for your benefit is awkward.
This guide shows how to get live English subtitles for the Japanese spoken in a meeting, on your side only, with no host settings involved.
What you need
- Chrome or Microsoft Edge on a computer. Safari and Firefox do not work
- Not a phone or tablet. Mobile browsers cannot share tab audio
- The meeting open in the browser, not in the desktop app. This is the crucial part, explained below
- A one-time download of the speech recognition model. For Japanese, the Balanced setting is about 590MB. Do this before the meeting, not during it
No account, no extension, no payment, and no time limit.
Before you use this in a meeting
Subtitling a meeting produces text, and that text can be saved. To the other people in the room, that is close to being recorded. Company policies and client agreements sometimes restrict this. Check first, and if in doubt, say at the start that you are using subtitles as a listening aid.
Technically, the audio never leaves your computer: LiveSub recognises speech inside your browser and translates it with Chrome's built-in on-device translator. But because the text can be saved, treat it as you would a recording.
The one thing that decides whether this works: join in the browser
LiveSub gets audio by sharing a browser tab. It cannot hear the Zoom or Teams desktop app. If the meeting is running in the app, there is no tab to share, and there will be no subtitles.
So join in the browser:
- Zoom: on the page that opens from the invite link, choose the option to join from your browser. It is usually shown as a link below the button that launches the app
- Microsoft Teams: choose "Continue on this browser"
- Google Meet: it runs in the browser already
On Windows, choosing "Entire Screen" in the sharing dialog can sometimes include the sound of other apps, but this depends on your setup. Joining in the browser is the reliable way.
Step by step
1. Prepare before the meeting
Open https://livesubweb.com/?lang=en in Chrome. Under "Translate from / to", choose Japanese → English. If you leave it on English → Japanese, you get garbled text instead of subtitles.
Under "Recognition setting", leave Balanced. Meetings are continuous speech, and keeping up matters more than the last bit of accuracy. Japanese-tuned is more accurate but needs a powerful GPU; if your computer cannot keep up with it, LiveSub switches back to Balanced by itself.
Press "Try a sample". It plays a short built-in Japanese clip and shows subtitles without sharing any tab. This loads the model and confirms everything works, so you are not doing it for the first time while people are waiting.
2. Put names in the word list
Company names, product names and people's names come up again and again in meetings, and speech recognition gets them wrong in a different way each time. Open "Word list" and add the correct spellings, one per line. Japanese entries need at least 3 characters, English ones 4. Two minutes of preparation makes the subtitles noticeably easier to read.
3. Share the meeting tab
When the meeting has started, go to LiveSub and press "Start (share a tab)". In Chrome's dialog:
- Pick the "Chrome Tab" section at the top
- Choose the meeting tab
- Tick "Also share tab audio" at the bottom left
- Press Share
This is Chrome sharing the tab's audio with LiveSub on your own computer. It is not the meeting's screen share, and the other participants see nothing. If subtitles do not appear, the audio checkbox is almost always the reason; press "Share again" and tick it.
4. Move the subtitles into a floating window
Press "Show in a floating window". The subtitles move into a small window that stays on top, so the meeting can fill the screen and you can still read. You can move and resize it, and scroll back to a line you missed instead of asking someone to repeat it.
During the meeting
- Subtitles appear about one to two seconds after the words are spoken
- When people switch to English, the Japanese recognition model does not handle it well, and the subtitles for those stretches will be unreliable. Ignore them; you do not need them for the English parts
- When two people talk at once, the overlapping parts come out wrong or are dropped
- Long meetings are fine. There is no time limit
- Afterwards, "Download transcript" saves the Japanese and the English with timestamps as a text file. It is useful when writing up notes, so you are not relying on memory alone
Honest limits
- Desktop app audio cannot be captured. If you are not in the browser, this does not work
- It is machine translation. You get the gist. Confirm numbers, dates and commitments with the speaker rather than relying on the subtitle
- Names are the weak point. The word list helps, but it does not catch everything
- Overlapping speakers reduce accuracy
- About one to two seconds of delay. This is a listening aid, not simultaneous interpretation
- Computer only. It needs Chrome or Edge on a desktop or laptop
Related guides
- For a recorded meeting or a recorded presentation, see how to get English subtitles on Japanese videos that have no captions
- For live broadcasts, see how to translate a Japanese livestream in real time
Try it
Run through the steps once before a real meeting, so the sharing dialog holds no surprises: