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YouTube No Translation

219 points by thefox 1y ago

silon42 1y ago
As someone from a country where dubbing is not a thing (except for kids cartoons), YouTube behavior is very annoying... Translated subtitles are useful though, even if often very bad.
AiAi 1y ago
It’s crazy that an extension is needed to fix this. When I first saw that “feature” I thought it was some bug and YouTube would fix soon, but they don’t seem to care about it.
CivBase 1y ago
I didn't know video translations were a thing. Is this not configurable?
- Zealotux 1y ago
  Apparently not, or the setting is not easily accessible, and it baffles me it's the case and someone at YouTube probably is proud of it on top of getting their promotion for such a terrible feature.
  - sigio 1y ago
    On desktop you can at least change it at runtime (like auto-dubbing), but on mobile they have made this completely impossible. I keep running into (originally) german video's that have been auto-translated to english for me, which I really dislike, since I can perfectly understand german. There's no way to disable this and just get subs only (which can be toggled on/off)
    - rjsw 1y ago
      I thought that yt-dlp uses the mobile interface, it shows the different language options and identifies the original one, the official mobile player must be making the choice of which one to use.
    - bitwize 1y ago
      I have never experienced this, but then again I'm on web. Haven't faffed with the YT mobile app since I put GrapheneOS on my phone 3 years ago.
- Version467 1y ago
  Surprisingly, it isn't. You can change the language in your google account and it will take that into account for what to translate and into what language, but you can't turn it off completely. I don't know who thought this was a good user experience, because it's one of the most frustrating features I've ever had to deal with. I'm german, but almost all of the things I watch are in english. So usually I will just ignore recommendations with german titles. Except I can't do that anymore, because there's no guarantee that youtube didn't randomly decide to translate the title of an english video into german. And recently, they've added auto-translated audio, which is even worse, because now I'm opening an english video and a terrible robotic german voice is talking to me and I manually need to switch to the original source. It's also not consistent behavior. It's not like all videos on the front page are looking like they're in german. It's just some of them and afaik there's no way to tell. And you genuinely can't turn it off completely. Incredibly frustrating and I'm just puzzled by the thought-process that lead to this decision. This would be a pretty cool feature if it was consistently applied and freely configurable.
  - MrGilbert 1y ago
    To add to that, the german translation most of the time is absolutely horrible and more clickbait then the original wording.
  - HPsquared 1y ago
    It should really be an option in the advanced search, or be able to say something like lang:de
  - WHA8m 1y ago
    I'd love to have a robotic german voice. All I get is the clickbait MrBeast TikTok voice. I get a real reaction when I hear it. I try so hard to avoid the current social media content. It's unbearable. The shock is even greater when I do stumble across it. Youtube is really the only website that is straight up unusable for me without a set of Addons (uBlock, sponsorBlock, Unhook).
  - chii 1y ago
    > I don't know who thought this was a good user experience the product manager(s) and the team who needed to show impact in their performance reviews.
- thrance 1y ago
  You'd guess so but no. If you're bilingual you have to choose one language, and videos in the other will get this ridiculously bad literal auto-translation treatment. Pure insanity, and something that makes me mad daily.
- torlok 1y ago
  As a polish YouTube user who wants to watch content in both languages, it's an infuriating no. YouTube started translating titles recently for me, and the translations are pure nonsense. I'm not exaggerating, it's dumb word for word translation with no context. I have to reverse engineer titles now. Even more recently they turned audio translation on too with the most ear piercing voice possible, but that can be turned off. Title translation can't be turned off.
  - WesolyKubeczek 1y ago
    Yup. I look up videos with Polish titles precisely because I want local content made in Poland telling about things specific to Poland, not some other stuff which turns out to be in English made for other locales. But I guess they see my frustration as "engagement".
    - ntstr 1y ago
      > because I want local content made in Poland telling about things specific to Poland, I used to use site:reddit.com as my go to must-use keyword whenever I wanted to look for something on Google, but since they introduced automated translation in my language (French) it has become a nightmare because I would find irrelevant content written for other places even when I type my search in French. You see, they had the great idea to not only automatically translate entire subreddits and comments but also have the translated forms be indexed by Google! So now you would try to look for comments on, for example, great retail shops for niche products and click links that talk about shopping in the USA or Canada. Hateful. I can't really describe how much I hate this without going into the most vulgar of expletives. site:reddit.com was the last bastion of finding things quickly on google without stumbling upon ton of markov chain / copy paste crap content. Now it's being ruined by this translation nonsense + LLM bots.
      - deklin 1y ago
        Both duckduckgo and brave search have reddit index. Not as much complete, as google sometimes, but at least without this nonsense.
- forinti 1y ago
  Nope. I follow channels in English, Russian, Portuguese, and Spanish. YouTube seems to randomly translate the titles and it's irritating.
- 69tg69 1y ago
  Of course not. Because the decision makers at Google can't fathom that anybody in the world might be bilingual.
- grishka 1y ago
  I am Russian but am also fluent in English so I watch videos in both these languages. This automatic translation doesn't happen that often with my usage of YouTube, but when it does, it frustrates the crap out of me. So yes, I did look for a setting to turn it off, but didn't find any. Relatedly, Google and Microsoft insist on showing machine-translated developer docs by default. A translate button is fine, but doing it by default?! I struggle to understand who thought that this could possibly ever be a good idea.
julius 1y ago
Chrome/Brave: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/youtube-no-translation/lmkeolibdeeglfglnncmfleojmakecjb https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/youtube-no-translat...
miggol 1y ago
I have been using an untranslate add-on like this one and have been absolutely loving it. Since YouTube has been AI translating video titles and dubbing contents it has been suggesting foreign videos in users' home feed. The way these untranslate add-ons work (layman's explanation) is that they fetch the original title and audio and reinsert it, but the recommendation for the video stays in your feed. This has resulted in loads of super interesting foreign language content in my feed which is just awesome. Cars are one of my YouTube interests and seeing loads of cool old car content from different parts of the world has been fascinating. Not only were different models popular in different places but the things people value in a car are also wildly different across the globe. And I get to listen to a cool foreign language while discovering this! One downside is that to the YouTube algorithm, it probably seems like I absolutely LOVE this autodubbing feature, going crazy for all these translated videos. That could not be further from the truth: my youtube feed has become completely unusable without an untranslate add-on since this update.
sjmulder 1y ago
Great! Dutch living in Austria and YouTube is randomly dubbing videos from one language to another with no way of turning it off, which is my real WTF here.
rickcarlino 1y ago
Unbelievable that YouTube has not made this feature configurable. I am a language learner and use YouTube to find target language content. It’s very difficult now because you can no longer trust the title of the video to tell you what language it was intended for. Would have been very simple to add a settings toggle. This is one of the worst app inconveniences I’ve come across in recent years.
- RandomThoughts3 1y ago
  Google has always been a pain when it comes to internationalisation. The number of hoops you have to jump through to get results from the actual Google page when you are outside of the US is mind boggling. I don’t even know if it’s still possible.
  - culturestate 1y ago
    > The number of hoops you have to jump through to get results from the actual Google page when you are outside of the US is mind boggling. Do you mean results in English, or results that are specifically US-centric?
    - bombela 1y ago
      Not op. But my experience is both. It's impossible to get Google to search for a specific region in a specific language. DuckDuckGo is far better on this. You can use add regions to search for, and quickly toggle them.
      - realusername 1y ago
        It's the same on Youtube, it's still impossible to search videos by language.
- kaoD 1y ago
  I don't even need a configurable toggle. I just need YouTube to understand I am native Spanish and English speaker and leave those untouched.
Garlef 1y ago
Maybe enshitification is entering its dadaist phase? That's the best explanation I have for how youtube decided to implement this feature.
bilekas 1y ago
The fact that this is needed and not configurable is so frustrating. I'm almost certain nobody even asked for this. What a great way to stop people ever needing to learn another language. God forbid people use their brains for anything that 30 second shorts.
- dcow 1y ago
  After 25 you can’t really learn new languages without considerable investment and effort. Translating is the only option for the vast majority of people.
  - Andrew_nenakhov 1y ago
    Not true at all. I've learned one language after I hit 39 and started leaning another when I hit 45, 7 months in learning it ~15 min a day and I'm bordering B1 level.
  - culturestate 1y ago
    > After 25 you can’t really learn new languages without considerable investment and effort. It takes considerable investment and effort before you’re 25, too, you just don’t notice it because it happens slowly over a long period in school and via immersion. I move around a lot so I’ve had to learn a few new languages as an adult - at least to basic proficiency, if not approaching fluency - and I don’t think it’s really any more difficult than it was when I was a kid, except that I now recognize how difficult it is.
  - yurishimo 1y ago
    This is a misleading take. Do you consider the decade of language “learning” that a child does before they are “fluent” to not be a considerable effort? Many people learn new languages all the time for a variety of reasons. In some regions of the world, it is expected of you to learn a half dozen languages throughout your lifetime. I’m not against translating but it should not be the default in society if there is also no opt-out. As someone who started learning a new language in my late 20s after a move across the world, I haven’t found it any more difficult than any other skill that requires diligent practice. Guitar, programming, driving; language is a skill. Since western humans tend to only learn them at a young age it can be easy to forget that.
RaSoJo 1y ago
Everyone I've spoken to in my circle hates this feature. We're all fairly intelligent people — if we needed audio dubbing, we'd turn it on ourselves. But to have auto-dub enabled by default is, frankly, incredulous. If someone from Google could explain the rationale behind forcing this on users, I’d genuinely love to understand it.
ryanchoi 1y ago
Looking for this was my first instinct as well. Mindboggling how there's no toggle for this
zorrolovsky 1y ago
Anybody knows the business reason for this feature to exist? most people here and in other places are incredibly frustrated with auto-translate and the inability to turn it off. I include myself in that bunch. There are two potential reasons in my mind: - Youtube folks A/B tested it and it got more engagement - n/ views, time viewed per video, etc. (but were they tracking the right metrics? ie did they capture user frustration) - Some 'guru' at Youtube decided "it's good UX" and "it's what everybody wants". In such case, the damage the 'guru' is doing is unbelievable. Millions of people annoyed across the world... every single day.
- hombre_fatal 1y ago
  Well, surely the idea is that anyone can watch any video in any language. Especially enabling the non-English-speaking world to consume the much larger corpus of English-speaking content. The idea is great. They just botched it at the UI level. In practice it means clicking a video you think is in your native language but it's actually in English with low quality auto-subs, but there's no reason Youtube couldn't improve the UX here, like indicate that it's been auto-translated or let you easily filter out content that's not in your language.
  - lbotos 1y ago
    in my feed there is a small pill that reads "auto-dubbed". Easy to miss though.
    - hombre_fatal 1y ago
      Yeah, and that's only for auto-dubbing which barely has any penetration. Most videos don't have that, just a translated title that doesn't match the audio track.
  - andix 1y ago
    Sure, but it kills the UX for people who speak more than one language. Which is probably the majority of YouTube users (outside the US).
  - 1y ago
waschl 1y ago
YouTube settings are notoriously volatile even on the same device and being logged in. Subtitles are enabled every other day all of a sudden without any need (even for my natural language content). Since they rolled out the auto-trabslation thing the same happens, I have to switch to original English every few days.
andix 1y ago
This really needs to be configurable on a per-account basis. I'm using YouTube mostly on mobile devices and TVs, without the possibility to use addons. The required settings are quite simple (a lot of social media platforms have them): Setting a list of languages that should never be translated, and setting a preferred language the other ones should be translated to. I guess the silicon valley people who develop YouTube can't grasp the concept that there are people out there who speak multiple languages.
TrackerFF 1y ago
Just came back home from a 3 week travel in south- and east-Europe. Visited 4 different countries. I have a newfound hatred for: 1. Sites/apps that automatically change language based on your location, and force that auto-translation onto you. 2. Reddit that translates reddit posts to your location based language. Those will quickly populate your search feed for almost any search you do.
- OhHiMarkos 1y ago
  Yep, reddit also does this. Since I am not native English speaker and I am expat in a European country, this is super frustrating.
vivzkestrel 1y ago
I ll give you an even better idea for a youtube extension, if nobody makes it, i ll most certainly do. I need to pin a particular comment on a set of videos matching a criteria and change this pinned comment across all these videos every now and then, like for example when i put a new video out, i would like to link to this from the pinned comment of relevant videos. this is such a hassle doing manually in current times. i am amazed nobody has come up with a pinned comment manager for youtube yet
atum47 1y ago
The fact that this needs to exist is a testament to how bad some things in YouTube are. They were able to make me quit being a paying customer with shitty things like that.
alkonaut 1y ago
How did they fail to make this an option in the first place? To be very clear, I don’t even want to translate videos in languages that YouTube know I don’t understand. Much less in videos languages I do understand. Also I don’t think it’s a good idea to use AI in any part of this chain unless there is user driven corrections. Seems like even big TikTok/Instagram accounts use some auto subtitling machinery and it’s invariably wrong. Why even bother? Or why not just manually subtitle if it’s a 10 second English video and the text is in English? Why use automation at all for that?
SkiFire13 1y ago
That looks very useful, thanks! I _love_ when youtube auto-translates english titles to my native language and then asks me if I want to translate the rare comments in my native language to english. It seem they just don't contemplate people speaking two or more languages, *even though the setting in the google account is there*.
unpaydijk 1y ago
One thing this kind of thing severely hurts is a lot of devices, services are affected by local laws, units, concepts, brands sometimes severely altering their function. - Searching for a guide on say a car infotainment system would be totally different here from someone explaining in the USA or germany. Now I see a ton of titles in my language, only to find out it's information is completely useless to me because a menu, button or whatever doesen't even exist. - Recommendations on cooking advice become almost worthless since a grading system for flours is arcane, brands I've never heard of, compounded by some imperial units in the mix. A recipe turns into a research project - when searching for non-native content I may avoid content in my language, since I know the subject is definitely not relevant anywhere near me, so perfectly valid content will be missed Worse yet, sometimes physical products claiming to have localized manual will instead have used some very inferior version to google translate and give dangerous advice about safe handling of the device.
- spaniard89277 1y ago
  - Searching for a guide on say a car infotainment system would be totally different here from someone explaining in the USA or germany. Now I see a ton of titles in my language, only to find out it's information is completely useless to me because a menu, button or whatever doesen't even exist. This is so annoying. I can't believe they couldn't understand this, and there are many multilingual people.
polytely 1y ago
I just hope that one of the morons running youtube eventually sees these threads and fixes this.
david-gpu 1y ago
Every time I find a video that was shot in my mother tongue auto-translated into English I want to bang my head against the wall. I've told Google in multiple ways that I'm multilingual and it just doesn't get it. It's worst on mobile, where you can't switch the audio channel to the original sound.
- danielscrubs 1y ago
  Spent a week in Africa, now YT swears that I know Arabic. I haven’t watched a single Arabic video. Any Googlers here that can explain how Google can be so bad at designing products?
  - daniel_reetz 1y ago
    Respectfully, at this point, do we need Googlers to explain? Structurally: launch-dependent levels/career advancement. Design wise: massive over reliance on A/B testing. Philosophically: a company hell bent on observing, categorizing, and exploiting us in extremis in exchange for only a tiny "relevant" slice of their potential deliverable. Because of their focus on "scale", they have never cared about any individual user. The indifference of their technical systems is absolute.
    - danielscrubs 1y ago
      But in this hyperpersonalisation era, we somehow give them a free pass when their A/B testing should catch these exact things. Taking a vacation abroad cant be a new concept for them.
  - rasz 1y ago
    >Spent a week in Africa, now YT swears that I know Arabic. Logged into Twitch in Ukraine once, now Twitch fills my recommendation with _russian_ channels.
constantcrying 1y ago
YouTube apparently does not understand that bilingual people exist. I do not want translations between German and English, I understand both languages just fine. I do not want to backwards translate some nonsense autogenerated YouTube translation to understand what some video title means. I do not ever want to watch an automatic dub where some AI voice replaces the actual language I understand. Browsers got this right "never translate German" was enough to fix the auto translation feature. Somehow one of the most valuable companies in the world, managing one of the largest websites in the world can not implement something that basic.
climb_stealth 1y ago
I have not seen any auto-translations, even in for videos where others have complained about auto translations to the uploader. Is this a US only feature? I hope I'm never going to see it because it sounds horrible.
xorcist 1y ago
I prefer to keep my in-process extensions to a minimum. Is it possible to do the same thing with uBlock rules?

219 points by thefox 1y ago

As someone from a country where dubbing is not a thing (except for kids cartoons), YouTube behavior is very annoying... Translated subtitles are useful though, even if often very bad.

AiAi 1y ago

It’s crazy that an extension is needed to fix this. When I first saw that “feature” I thought it was some bug and YouTube would fix soon, but they don’t seem to care about it.

CivBase 1y ago

I didn't know video translations were a thing. Is this not configurable?

Zealotux 1y ago
Apparently not, or the setting is not easily accessible, and it baffles me it's the case and someone at YouTube probably is proud of it on top of getting their promotion for such a terrible feature.
- sigio 1y ago
  On desktop you can at least change it at runtime (like auto-dubbing), but on mobile they have made this completely impossible. I keep running into (originally) german video's that have been auto-translated to english for me, which I really dislike, since I can perfectly understand german. There's no way to disable this and just get subs only (which can be toggled on/off)
  - rjsw 1y ago
    I thought that yt-dlp uses the mobile interface, it shows the different language options and identifies the original one, the official mobile player must be making the choice of which one to use.
  - bitwize 1y ago
    I have never experienced this, but then again I'm on web. Haven't faffed with the YT mobile app since I put GrapheneOS on my phone 3 years ago.
Version467 1y ago
Surprisingly, it isn't. You can change the language in your google account and it will take that into account for what to translate and into what language, but you can't turn it off completely. I don't know who thought this was a good user experience, because it's one of the most frustrating features I've ever had to deal with. I'm german, but almost all of the things I watch are in english. So usually I will just ignore recommendations with german titles. Except I can't do that anymore, because there's no guarantee that youtube didn't randomly decide to translate the title of an english video into german. And recently, they've added auto-translated audio, which is even worse, because now I'm opening an english video and a terrible robotic german voice is talking to me and I manually need to switch to the original source. It's also not consistent behavior. It's not like all videos on the front page are looking like they're in german. It's just some of them and afaik there's no way to tell. And you genuinely can't turn it off completely. Incredibly frustrating and I'm just puzzled by the thought-process that lead to this decision. This would be a pretty cool feature if it was consistently applied and freely configurable.
- MrGilbert 1y ago
  To add to that, the german translation most of the time is absolutely horrible and more clickbait then the original wording.
- HPsquared 1y ago
  It should really be an option in the advanced search, or be able to say something like lang:de
- WHA8m 1y ago
  I'd love to have a robotic german voice. All I get is the clickbait MrBeast TikTok voice. I get a real reaction when I hear it. I try so hard to avoid the current social media content. It's unbearable. The shock is even greater when I do stumble across it. Youtube is really the only website that is straight up unusable for me without a set of Addons (uBlock, sponsorBlock, Unhook).
- chii 1y ago
  > I don't know who thought this was a good user experience the product manager(s) and the team who needed to show impact in their performance reviews.
thrance 1y ago
You'd guess so but no. If you're bilingual you have to choose one language, and videos in the other will get this ridiculously bad literal auto-translation treatment. Pure insanity, and something that makes me mad daily.
torlok 1y ago
As a polish YouTube user who wants to watch content in both languages, it's an infuriating no. YouTube started translating titles recently for me, and the translations are pure nonsense. I'm not exaggerating, it's dumb word for word translation with no context. I have to reverse engineer titles now. Even more recently they turned audio translation on too with the most ear piercing voice possible, but that can be turned off. Title translation can't be turned off.
- WesolyKubeczek 1y ago
  Yup. I look up videos with Polish titles precisely because I want local content made in Poland telling about things specific to Poland, not some other stuff which turns out to be in English made for other locales. But I guess they see my frustration as "engagement".
  - ntstr 1y ago
    > because I want local content made in Poland telling about things specific to Poland, I used to use site:reddit.com as my go to must-use keyword whenever I wanted to look for something on Google, but since they introduced automated translation in my language (French) it has become a nightmare because I would find irrelevant content written for other places even when I type my search in French. You see, they had the great idea to not only automatically translate entire subreddits and comments but also have the translated forms be indexed by Google! So now you would try to look for comments on, for example, great retail shops for niche products and click links that talk about shopping in the USA or Canada. Hateful. I can't really describe how much I hate this without going into the most vulgar of expletives. site:reddit.com was the last bastion of finding things quickly on google without stumbling upon ton of markov chain / copy paste crap content. Now it's being ruined by this translation nonsense + LLM bots.
    - deklin 1y ago
      Both duckduckgo and brave search have reddit index. Not as much complete, as google sometimes, but at least without this nonsense.
forinti 1y ago
Nope. I follow channels in English, Russian, Portuguese, and Spanish. YouTube seems to randomly translate the titles and it's irritating.
69tg69 1y ago
Of course not. Because the decision makers at Google can't fathom that anybody in the world might be bilingual.
grishka 1y ago
I am Russian but am also fluent in English so I watch videos in both these languages. This automatic translation doesn't happen that often with my usage of YouTube, but when it does, it frustrates the crap out of me. So yes, I did look for a setting to turn it off, but didn't find any. Relatedly, Google and Microsoft insist on showing machine-translated developer docs by default. A translate button is fine, but doing it by default?! I struggle to understand who thought that this could possibly ever be a good idea.

julius 1y ago

Chrome/Brave: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/youtube-no-translation/lmkeolibdeeglfglnncmfleojmakecjb https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/youtube-no-translat...

miggol 1y ago

I have been using an untranslate add-on like this one and have been absolutely loving it. Since YouTube has been AI translating video titles and dubbing contents it has been suggesting foreign videos in users' home feed. The way these untranslate add-ons work (layman's explanation) is that they fetch the original title and audio and reinsert it, but the recommendation for the video stays in your feed. This has resulted in loads of super interesting foreign language content in my feed which is just awesome. Cars are one of my YouTube interests and seeing loads of cool old car content from different parts of the world has been fascinating. Not only were different models popular in different places but the things people value in a car are also wildly different across the globe. And I get to listen to a cool foreign language while discovering this! One downside is that to the YouTube algorithm, it probably seems like I absolutely LOVE this autodubbing feature, going crazy for all these translated videos. That could not be further from the truth: my youtube feed has become completely unusable without an untranslate add-on since this update.

sjmulder 1y ago

Great! Dutch living in Austria and YouTube is randomly dubbing videos from one language to another with no way of turning it off, which is my real WTF here.

rickcarlino 1y ago

Unbelievable that YouTube has not made this feature configurable. I am a language learner and use YouTube to find target language content. It’s very difficult now because you can no longer trust the title of the video to tell you what language it was intended for. Would have been very simple to add a settings toggle. This is one of the worst app inconveniences I’ve come across in recent years.

RandomThoughts3 1y ago
Google has always been a pain when it comes to internationalisation. The number of hoops you have to jump through to get results from the actual Google page when you are outside of the US is mind boggling. I don’t even know if it’s still possible.
- culturestate 1y ago
  > The number of hoops you have to jump through to get results from the actual Google page when you are outside of the US is mind boggling. Do you mean results in English, or results that are specifically US-centric?
  - bombela 1y ago
    Not op. But my experience is both. It's impossible to get Google to search for a specific region in a specific language. DuckDuckGo is far better on this. You can use add regions to search for, and quickly toggle them.
    - realusername 1y ago
      It's the same on Youtube, it's still impossible to search videos by language.
kaoD 1y ago
I don't even need a configurable toggle. I just need YouTube to understand I am native Spanish and English speaker and leave those untouched.

Garlef 1y ago

Maybe enshitification is entering its dadaist phase? That's the best explanation I have for how youtube decided to implement this feature.

bilekas 1y ago

The fact that this is needed and not configurable is so frustrating. I'm almost certain nobody even asked for this. What a great way to stop people ever needing to learn another language. God forbid people use their brains for anything that 30 second shorts.

dcow 1y ago
After 25 you can’t really learn new languages without considerable investment and effort. Translating is the only option for the vast majority of people.
- Andrew_nenakhov 1y ago
  Not true at all. I've learned one language after I hit 39 and started leaning another when I hit 45, 7 months in learning it ~15 min a day and I'm bordering B1 level.
- culturestate 1y ago
  > After 25 you can’t really learn new languages without considerable investment and effort. It takes considerable investment and effort before you’re 25, too, you just don’t notice it because it happens slowly over a long period in school and via immersion. I move around a lot so I’ve had to learn a few new languages as an adult - at least to basic proficiency, if not approaching fluency - and I don’t think it’s really any more difficult than it was when I was a kid, except that I now recognize how difficult it is.
- yurishimo 1y ago
  This is a misleading take. Do you consider the decade of language “learning” that a child does before they are “fluent” to not be a considerable effort? Many people learn new languages all the time for a variety of reasons. In some regions of the world, it is expected of you to learn a half dozen languages throughout your lifetime. I’m not against translating but it should not be the default in society if there is also no opt-out. As someone who started learning a new language in my late 20s after a move across the world, I haven’t found it any more difficult than any other skill that requires diligent practice. Guitar, programming, driving; language is a skill. Since western humans tend to only learn them at a young age it can be easy to forget that.

RaSoJo 1y ago

Everyone I've spoken to in my circle hates this feature. We're all fairly intelligent people — if we needed audio dubbing, we'd turn it on ourselves. But to have auto-dub enabled by default is, frankly, incredulous. If someone from Google could explain the rationale behind forcing this on users, I’d genuinely love to understand it.

ryanchoi 1y ago

Looking for this was my first instinct as well. Mindboggling how there's no toggle for this

zorrolovsky 1y ago

Anybody knows the business reason for this feature to exist? most people here and in other places are incredibly frustrated with auto-translate and the inability to turn it off. I include myself in that bunch. There are two potential reasons in my mind: - Youtube folks A/B tested it and it got more engagement - n/ views, time viewed per video, etc. (but were they tracking the right metrics? ie did they capture user frustration) - Some 'guru' at Youtube decided "it's good UX" and "it's what everybody wants". In such case, the damage the 'guru' is doing is unbelievable. Millions of people annoyed across the world... every single day.

hombre_fatal 1y ago
Well, surely the idea is that anyone can watch any video in any language. Especially enabling the non-English-speaking world to consume the much larger corpus of English-speaking content. The idea is great. They just botched it at the UI level. In practice it means clicking a video you think is in your native language but it's actually in English with low quality auto-subs, but there's no reason Youtube couldn't improve the UX here, like indicate that it's been auto-translated or let you easily filter out content that's not in your language.
- lbotos 1y ago
  in my feed there is a small pill that reads "auto-dubbed". Easy to miss though.
  - hombre_fatal 1y ago
    Yeah, and that's only for auto-dubbing which barely has any penetration. Most videos don't have that, just a translated title that doesn't match the audio track.
- andix 1y ago
  Sure, but it kills the UX for people who speak more than one language. Which is probably the majority of YouTube users (outside the US).
- 1y ago

waschl 1y ago

YouTube settings are notoriously volatile even on the same device and being logged in. Subtitles are enabled every other day all of a sudden without any need (even for my natural language content). Since they rolled out the auto-trabslation thing the same happens, I have to switch to original English every few days.

andix 1y ago

This really needs to be configurable on a per-account basis. I'm using YouTube mostly on mobile devices and TVs, without the possibility to use addons. The required settings are quite simple (a lot of social media platforms have them): Setting a list of languages that should never be translated, and setting a preferred language the other ones should be translated to. I guess the silicon valley people who develop YouTube can't grasp the concept that there are people out there who speak multiple languages.

TrackerFF 1y ago

Just came back home from a 3 week travel in south- and east-Europe. Visited 4 different countries. I have a newfound hatred for: 1. Sites/apps that automatically change language based on your location, and force that auto-translation onto you. 2. Reddit that translates reddit posts to your location based language. Those will quickly populate your search feed for almost any search you do.

OhHiMarkos 1y ago
Yep, reddit also does this. Since I am not native English speaker and I am expat in a European country, this is super frustrating.

vivzkestrel 1y ago

I ll give you an even better idea for a youtube extension, if nobody makes it, i ll most certainly do. I need to pin a particular comment on a set of videos matching a criteria and change this pinned comment across all these videos every now and then, like for example when i put a new video out, i would like to link to this from the pinned comment of relevant videos. this is such a hassle doing manually in current times. i am amazed nobody has come up with a pinned comment manager for youtube yet

atum47 1y ago

The fact that this needs to exist is a testament to how bad some things in YouTube are. They were able to make me quit being a paying customer with shitty things like that.

alkonaut 1y ago

How did they fail to make this an option in the first place? To be very clear, I don’t even want to translate videos in languages that YouTube know I don’t understand. Much less in videos languages I do understand. Also I don’t think it’s a good idea to use AI in any part of this chain unless there is user driven corrections. Seems like even big TikTok/Instagram accounts use some auto subtitling machinery and it’s invariably wrong. Why even bother? Or why not just manually subtitle if it’s a 10 second English video and the text is in English? Why use automation at all for that?

SkiFire13 1y ago

That looks very useful, thanks! I _love_ when youtube auto-translates english titles to my native language and then asks me if I want to translate the rare comments in my native language to english. It seem they just don't contemplate people speaking two or more languages, *even though the setting in the google account is there*.

unpaydijk 1y ago

One thing this kind of thing severely hurts is a lot of devices, services are affected by local laws, units, concepts, brands sometimes severely altering their function. - Searching for a guide on say a car infotainment system would be totally different here from someone explaining in the USA or germany. Now I see a ton of titles in my language, only to find out it's information is completely useless to me because a menu, button or whatever doesen't even exist. - Recommendations on cooking advice become almost worthless since a grading system for flours is arcane, brands I've never heard of, compounded by some imperial units in the mix. A recipe turns into a research project - when searching for non-native content I may avoid content in my language, since I know the subject is definitely not relevant anywhere near me, so perfectly valid content will be missed Worse yet, sometimes physical products claiming to have localized manual will instead have used some very inferior version to google translate and give dangerous advice about safe handling of the device.

spaniard89277 1y ago
- Searching for a guide on say a car infotainment system would be totally different here from someone explaining in the USA or germany. Now I see a ton of titles in my language, only to find out it's information is completely useless to me because a menu, button or whatever doesen't even exist. This is so annoying. I can't believe they couldn't understand this, and there are many multilingual people.

polytely 1y ago

I just hope that one of the morons running youtube eventually sees these threads and fixes this.

david-gpu 1y ago

Every time I find a video that was shot in my mother tongue auto-translated into English I want to bang my head against the wall. I've told Google in multiple ways that I'm multilingual and it just doesn't get it. It's worst on mobile, where you can't switch the audio channel to the original sound.

danielscrubs 1y ago
Spent a week in Africa, now YT swears that I know Arabic. I haven’t watched a single Arabic video. Any Googlers here that can explain how Google can be so bad at designing products?
- daniel_reetz 1y ago
  Respectfully, at this point, do we need Googlers to explain? Structurally: launch-dependent levels/career advancement. Design wise: massive over reliance on A/B testing. Philosophically: a company hell bent on observing, categorizing, and exploiting us in extremis in exchange for only a tiny "relevant" slice of their potential deliverable. Because of their focus on "scale", they have never cared about any individual user. The indifference of their technical systems is absolute.
  - danielscrubs 1y ago
    But in this hyperpersonalisation era, we somehow give them a free pass when their A/B testing should catch these exact things. Taking a vacation abroad cant be a new concept for them.
- rasz 1y ago
  >Spent a week in Africa, now YT swears that I know Arabic. Logged into Twitch in Ukraine once, now Twitch fills my recommendation with _russian_ channels.

constantcrying 1y ago

YouTube apparently does not understand that bilingual people exist. I do not want translations between German and English, I understand both languages just fine. I do not want to backwards translate some nonsense autogenerated YouTube translation to understand what some video title means. I do not ever want to watch an automatic dub where some AI voice replaces the actual language I understand. Browsers got this right "never translate German" was enough to fix the auto translation feature. Somehow one of the most valuable companies in the world, managing one of the largest websites in the world can not implement something that basic.

climb_stealth 1y ago

I have not seen any auto-translations, even in for videos where others have complained about auto translations to the uploader. Is this a US only feature? I hope I'm never going to see it because it sounds horrible.

xorcist 1y ago

I prefer to keep my in-process extensions to a minimum. Is it possible to do the same thing with uBlock rules?