The Universal Subtitles project aims to "make captioning, subtitling, and translating video publicly accessible in a way that’s free and open, just like the Web." Their efforts include a subtitling widget for simple online subtitling, a subtitles protocol to create a retrievable subtitles database, and a collaborative subtitling site. This project is sponsored by the Participatory Culture Foundation with seed funding from the Mozilla Foundation.

They need $25,000 to fund their cause, and are asking for contributions.
The Mozilla Foundation will match dollar-for-dollar all contributions to their cause (up to $25,000) from their Open Web Fund.

Their project page is on Mozilla Drumbeat, and you can go there to join their project, donate or just learn more about it.