Microsoft Teams live captions are missing, or in the wrong language

Which symptom is yours?

Five, in the order people hit them. Each has one cause, and three of the five sit with your admin or the organizer rather than with you.

• There is no live captions option. A meeting policy has it off, and the policy is yours, not the meeting's.
• The captions are in the wrong language, and you cannot change it. One spoken language per meeting, and once transcription runs, only the organizer can change it.
• Translate to is missing, or was there last month. Translation follows the organizer's license, not yours.
• They are in the meeting window, and you are working somewhere else. Teams keeps its captions in Teams.
• There is nothing to copy or keep afterwards. Captions are never saved, and the transcript belongs to the organizer.

The captions are in the wrong language, and you cannot change it

Teams captions one language per meeting. It is the Meeting spoken language, under Caption settings and then Language settings, and it is one setting for everybody: change it and everyone's captions change. Who can change it is the catch. With transcription off, any participant can. Once transcription is running, only the organizer, a co-organizer or whoever started it can touch it, and everyone else is looking at a setting they cannot reach. Teams does notice when the room is speaking something other than the set language, but the prompt to fix it goes to those people, not to you.

A meeting that switches languages has a Teams answer too, with two conditions: the organizer has to turn on multilingual speech recognition in the meeting options, and the organizer has to hold a Teams Premium or Microsoft Copilot license. It covers nine languages. Without both, the second language comes out as nonsense. Captions that come from your Mac instead detect the language themselves: Subtitles listens in sixteen languages and works out which one it is hearing, mid-meeting, with nothing to ask of anyone, and since 1.3 it translates live between any two of them.

They are in the meeting window, and you are working somewhere else

Teams draws its captions at the bottom of the meeting window and lets you change their size, color, number of lines and position, inside that window. Switch to the document you are taking notes in, to the board, to the ticket somebody just mentioned, and the captions carry on in a window you are not looking at. On a laptop screen, where the meeting and the notes cannot both be visible, that is most of the call. Newer desktop builds can open the captions in a window of their own, from the same Show live captions item, which you can move and resize. It is an ordinary window: it takes the click, it covers what is under it, and whether it stays in front once you click into your notes depends on the build you have.

An overlay solves that by ignoring which window is in front. Subtitles draws its captions above everything and lets clicks through, so Teams can sit behind Word and you still read the call. The demo on the home page is that exact switch, and the Teams page runs it over a Teams window.

When none of this is the problem

Captions that are on, in the right language, and still empty are an audio problem, not a caption one. Teams captions what it receives, so a muted or failing microphone at the other end, or a connection dropping packets, gives it nothing, and captions that lag or drop words are the same story. Ask the person to check their microphone before you touch anything else. Beyond that, update Teams, and on the web use Chrome, Edge or Safari, which all carry captions. If the item is there in one meeting and gone in the next, what changed is the organizer, and everything above applies.

Questions people ask next

Can I turn on captions in a Teams meeting myself?

Yes. Live captions are switched on per participant, from More actions, then Language and speech, then Show live captions, and only you see them. The two exceptions are a meeting policy from your own admin with Live captions set to Off, which follows you into every meeting, and joining without signing in, where the host's policy applies instead.

Why can I not change the spoken language?

Because transcription is running. Teams has one spoken language per meeting, and once transcription is on only the organizer, a co-organizer or whoever started it can change that language. Ask them in the chat, or use captions that detect the language on their own.

Are translated captions free in Teams?

No. The Translate to toggle depends on the meeting organizer holding a Teams Premium or Microsoft Copilot license, and it works for everyone in that meeting or for nobody. Subtitles translates on your own Mac, between any two of sixteen languages, on any call.

Does Subtitles work with Microsoft Teams?

Yes. It captions the audio Teams is playing, in the desktop app or in a browser tab, without joining the meeting, without a Graph permission and without appearing in the roster. The Teams page has the detail.

Can I read the captions while I take notes in another window?

Not Teams' own inside the meeting window. Newer desktop builds can pop the captions out into a window you can move, which is an ordinary window and takes clicks. Subtitles draws its captions above every window and lets clicks through, so the notes stay in front and the call stays readable.