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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

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.
rtsil 1y ago
I'm in France, but my Google, browsers and devices languages are English. So Youtube randomly auto-dubs (and auto-translates the title of) some French videos into English, and some English videos into French. But they're never the same videos depending on the devices or the browsers. However, the automatic subtitles during the preview remain in the original langage.
- vladvasiliu 1y ago
  I'm in the same boat (living in France, browser and google account configured to use English) and I've never noticed this. Now I'm not a hardcore Youtube user, but whenever I browse it, French-titled videos are in French, and the same for English. I'm mostly using Firefox on Linux, and occasionally Edge on Windows.
  - estebank 1y ago
    Do note that when rolling out features like these, they geoblock them, even on a per run basis, so it might be happening a lot throughout the world but it just hasn't reached your country. For an example, mobile YouTube in the US lets me minimize the video and multitask while still seeing a picture-in-picture window and the audio, while as soon as one lands on France that feature gets immediately disabled.
    - vladvasiliu 1y ago
      I've heard about different features in different regions, but GP is also in France. I am also not connected to my account when I browse in Edge (it's my work PC, it also uses a separate IP), so I don't think it's related to the feature being rolled out on a per-account basis.
- lloeki 1y ago
  I'm in France, my devices are set to en-GB, I've watched only English videos (plus the odd French one) yet youtube decides to auto translate audio in German and lately in Spanish. Go figure.
silvestrov 1y ago
> thought-process that lead to this decision highly likely to be monolingual people as they cannot understand you would like movies to be in any other language than your mother tongue.
- troupo 1y ago
  > highly likely to be monolingual people Which is insane to me. Silicon Valley is filled to the brim with multi-lingual people. And yet so many decisions that are coming out have no understanding of languages
  - WesolyKubeczek 1y ago
    I wouldn't be surprised at all if they one day decided that to have an experience of having no user content automatically translated, you have to pay for the privilege. Call it a multilinguality tax.
  - estebank 1y ago
    Even for the monolingual Google employees it's not uncommon for them to travel to other locales, even as part of their job, so they would be on the receiving end of this "experience" too. We've had 2 decades of experience with this being an issue. One would think that they'd incorporate this "edge case" into their design process matrix by now.
- SkiFire13 1y ago
  Moreover I could still prefer movies in my native language *but properly dubbed by some voice actors*, not by some random AI that's going to mess up all the context.
troupo 1y ago
> I don't know who thought this was a good user experience Which youtube decision of recent years ever thought about user experience? It's all "company bets" and "promotion tracks". When it was a fight against TikTok you got Shorts that you can't get rid of. Now you probably have to "show commitment to our AI offerings" or something. So you get autotranslated videos by a team which will get 500k bonuses and will move on in a month
lloeki 1y ago
> 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 Sp you clicked when you wouldn't have, somewhere an engagement graph went a notch up, and someone will get a pat on the back.

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.

rtsil 1y ago

I'm in France, but my Google, browsers and devices languages are English. So Youtube randomly auto-dubs (and auto-translates the title of) some French videos into English, and some English videos into French. But they're never the same videos depending on the devices or the browsers. However, the automatic subtitles during the preview remain in the original langage.

vladvasiliu 1y ago
I'm in the same boat (living in France, browser and google account configured to use English) and I've never noticed this. Now I'm not a hardcore Youtube user, but whenever I browse it, French-titled videos are in French, and the same for English. I'm mostly using Firefox on Linux, and occasionally Edge on Windows.
- estebank 1y ago
  Do note that when rolling out features like these, they geoblock them, even on a per run basis, so it might be happening a lot throughout the world but it just hasn't reached your country. For an example, mobile YouTube in the US lets me minimize the video and multitask while still seeing a picture-in-picture window and the audio, while as soon as one lands on France that feature gets immediately disabled.
  - vladvasiliu 1y ago
    I've heard about different features in different regions, but GP is also in France. I am also not connected to my account when I browse in Edge (it's my work PC, it also uses a separate IP), so I don't think it's related to the feature being rolled out on a per-account basis.
lloeki 1y ago
I'm in France, my devices are set to en-GB, I've watched only English videos (plus the odd French one) yet youtube decides to auto translate audio in German and lately in Spanish. Go figure.

silvestrov 1y ago

> thought-process that lead to this decision highly likely to be monolingual people as they cannot understand you would like movies to be in any other language than your mother tongue.

troupo 1y ago
> highly likely to be monolingual people Which is insane to me. Silicon Valley is filled to the brim with multi-lingual people. And yet so many decisions that are coming out have no understanding of languages
- WesolyKubeczek 1y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised at all if they one day decided that to have an experience of having no user content automatically translated, you have to pay for the privilege. Call it a multilinguality tax.
- estebank 1y ago
  Even for the monolingual Google employees it's not uncommon for them to travel to other locales, even as part of their job, so they would be on the receiving end of this "experience" too. We've had 2 decades of experience with this being an issue. One would think that they'd incorporate this "edge case" into their design process matrix by now.
SkiFire13 1y ago
Moreover I could still prefer movies in my native language *but properly dubbed by some voice actors*, not by some random AI that's going to mess up all the context.

troupo 1y ago

> I don't know who thought this was a good user experience Which youtube decision of recent years ever thought about user experience? It's all "company bets" and "promotion tracks". When it was a fight against TikTok you got Shorts that you can't get rid of. Now you probably have to "show commitment to our AI offerings" or something. So you get autotranslated videos by a team which will get 500k bonuses and will move on in a month

lloeki 1y ago

> 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 Sp you clicked when you wouldn't have, somewhere an engagement graph went a notch up, and someone will get a pat on the back.