Should my YouTube videos have Urdu or English subtitles?

There are two kinds of subtitles and they do different jobs. Burned-in captions are part of the picture: everyone sees them, they suit vertical Shorts and videos watched on mute in an office or on public transport, and they can be styled to match your channel. A captions file, usually an SRT uploaded in YouTube Studio, can be switched on and off by the viewer, can exist in several languages, and gives YouTube and Google the exact text of what is said.

Language choice depends on who is watching. A channel speaking Urdu to viewers in Pakistan often finds English or Roman Urdu captions read faster on a phone than Urdu script, and they help overseas Pakistanis whose spoken Urdu is better than their reading. Religious, poetry and news channels are the exception, as their audiences are often comfortable reading Urdu script. If a meaningful share of your viewers are abroad, Studio's audience report will show it, and an English captions file becomes more useful.

Do not rely on YouTube's automatic captions for mixed Urdu and English speech. They are unreliable for that, and wrong captions are worse than none because they misrepresent what you said. Have the captions written or corrected by a person, especially names, places like Gulberg Greens or Chaklala, and technical terms. In practice, most channels we work with burn in short captions for Shorts and key moments, and upload a full captions file for long-form videos.