Autodubbing is probably the worst feature Google has ever implemented.
It's OK if they want to offer it, but at least let me disable it for specific languages.
And for those languages which I don't understand, let me choose a default autodubbing language. Because I assume that auto-generated translations from French to English will be far better than those from French to German or Spanish.
Also, the voices they use sound like from a decade ago.
It is terrible and took me a while to realize what was happening. I though some videos were generated spam.
Reddit does something similar now. It auto translates posts and they show up in Google in my native tongue. Really annoying since when I search in that language I specifically don't want English sites.
I live in the Netherlands and speak German in addition to English. My Dutch is ... not that great.
Thanks to the geniuses at Reddit, I now frequently find posts on /r/de or similar German subreddits translated from my native language into one I'm worse at!
The Reddit translations are so insanely terrible. They are so much harder to read the the original English posts. It's like every word has been translated independently
The problem isn't the the translation isn't done well enough, but rather its underhanded nature that tries to sell a translated website as a genuine discussion.
First time I saw an autodubbed video, within seconds I was literally screaming at my buddy to turn it off, TURN IT OFF! It's so unnatural and badly done, it creeps me the hell out and hurts my ears.
My friend thought a video was ai generated because it was translated to 17 languages. But the voices were natural, fit the pace of the video, and had emotion and impulse. They had been paid for.
The YouTube auto translation is not that. It's stilted and awkward, robotic voice with none of the context. It's not ready for release and it does a disservice to any creator that uses it because their vision is not going to be anywhere near correctly delivered.
It's surprising how hostile youtube is to multilingual users. Probably all in some attempt to show off their translation capability or to improve the experience for users who may want to access content in a language they don't speak? Or it's just as dumb as this was on some product managers "designed and implemented" line to get promoted?
But, surely someone sane there has to realize there is a large number of users out there who speak more than one language, and don't need Google do "help" them or "guess" for what language they like more.
I’ve been learning a new language, and I’m constantly encountering language-learning videos that get translated entirely into my native language, effectively useless until I revert the audio track.
Annoyingly, there’s not a native way to revert the translated description and title as far as I know. And this seems to be done without the knowledge of the creator!
I watched a language-learning YouTube short today that was entirely not in English. But YouTube was automatically dubbing it into English. A commenter replied with “but why the bad ai voice?” And the creator replied “it’s not, that’s my voice”
i18n and l10n are something that I have seen a company done right. It is easy developer to assume:
If your IP is coming from country X, you must want the content to be served in language X.
No, there are tourist from country Z, long term resident who prefer language A and people from country X want to learn language B.
- If your browser Accept-Language say X,Y, then you must want all the content to be served in X.
No, I want my search result to be predominantly in X, but when I search for things about Y, show me language Y, and when I search for this band from country Z, please show me in language X.
As a hongkonger (zh_hk + en_gb), living in Singapore (zh_cn + en?), following JPOP. This is the daily fight I have with browser.
I would rather all application, including web app just give me the option to choose and say, interface language, english, content language, follow origin.
I also have this problem with apps in my native language. I have my phone set to en,no because I prefer the English version over some bad auto-translated crap where some apps try to translate stuff. But then when I download a Norwegian app, then it prefers to use some badly maintained English translation instead, but here I would of course prefer the native version.
Really useful for Google maps. I generally prefer English but I want Japanese for google so I get local people's opinion over tourists who think every ramen is the best ramen they've ever tasted. I'm surprised it's not an option actually. Language aside, tourism and actually living somewhere are totally separate and reviews should reflect that.
And for some reason, Apple/iOS doesn't allow you to set this for some system apps. For example, Music (Apple Music) app on iOS doesn't offer this option, which I desperately need because I don't want the music metadata I listened got translated.
Make reasonable assumptions or provide good defaults.
Make them overrideable.
Make user settings stick.
I have the same problem, by the way — my phone is in English, which means I get to enjoy Apples hilarious English pronunciation of German street names while navigating.
Same here with Dutch: you could pretty much watch i18n degrade real time by observing the quality of the dutch translations for all major sites and tech products over the years.
Back in the 2000s, dutch wasn't very common but it usually was pretty good (my understanding is that one of the things that helped is that everyone followed the Microsoft style guide for dutch translations?)
Nowadays you get overly literal translations (meaning some form of MTL), translations that don't care for the length of the text (so it gets cut off with ... at the end for interface buttons) and so on and so forth. It all just reeks of automatic translation with little care put into the presentation. This is pretty much a universal experience across every single system I've ever used and why I usually just set all my devices to English. - It's simply not worth it to deal with the botched translations to try and figure out what was actually meant.
I've had the unfortunate mishap of having the perfectly fine English translation of a German site switch to auto translate Dutch crap due to one part using the language preference and the other the IP source, bit weird since as far as I know they usually only offer English. And I can perfectly fine read German so I usually immediately switch to that since some info is not available in English especially with the different Bundesambt websites.
What I would like is a browser and os which allows you to set which languages (multiple) never need translating and the site sticking to that.
Yeah, I think apps just should have a sorted list (/tiers) of languages they support, and pick whatever first has a match in the user preferences. If the app supports two languages equally well, then choose the one first in the user's preference list.
So for me having no,en (in the future where this works I would dare to have no first):
app is in english, has auto translated norwegian: choose english
app is in norwegian, has auto translated english: choose norwegian
app is in norwegian and english equally: choose norwegian
app is in french, has english translation: choose english
I live in Japan and am not yet fluent enough, so need to use a VPN to get the Google Search English results, otherwise it's totally unusable. Heck even for programming I pull my hair since I get the translated docs when searching. Just give me the (original) English ones please. I did search in English have Google set to English, but still get the Japanese ones even for those that have English resources.
Danskjævel here, and I feel your pain. MS Windows has always had a pretty terrible danish translation. Partly because a lot of tech language translates poorly to danish, and partly because MS are lazy and incompetent. Back in Windows 2000 days, I found instances where "Windows" the product name was translated to "vinduer", the danish word for an actual window. I actually found a ~25 year old screenshot I took --> https://0x0.st/80r5.png
Worse than that is, as you say, software that makes dumb assumptions about my language preferences. It gets especially interesting when graphic drivers translate strings like ambient occlusion, screen space reflections, temporal anti-aliasing, subsurface scattering. The result is incomprehensible gibberish - I mean levels far beyond the baseline gibberish danish already is :D
Win10 regional settings are so terrible, and it's pretty much impossible to set keyboard, date/number formatting and basically everything but display language to danish, while keeping the display language english (The King's English, thankyouverymuch). Thankfully Linux has the locale "en_DK.UTF-8" which instantly makes everything show like I want it.
I have all of my language settings configured to en_US. I've explicitly configured YouTube's country setting as well. I still get autotranslated titles for the local language in the search results. There are so many irrelevant results that YT search has become unusable. I'm increasingly noticing similar behavior in Google search, especially around news and current events.
> i18n and l10n are something that I have seen a company done right. It is easy developer to assume:
> If your IP is coming from country X, you must want the content to be served in language X.
I would assume there are multilingual speakers in mostly every single team at YouTube. Or at the very least enough nerds who just like some random content from another country.
People who would both want their UI to be in a language A but also to consume content from languages B, C...
I do not understand how that assumption holds in any product decision except in one where the YT product teams are entirely and totally separated from the engineering teams.
I get this a lot in restaurant menus nowadays. My phone is set to English because I am more familiar with techy terms in English than my native language with its weird translations. I go to a restaurant, open the QR menu and tell them what I want. But they don't understand what I want because the menu is set to English because of my phone settings. A lot of places have English names in their regular menu (because cool) so I am not talking about speaking English to a nonspeaker. Like sometimes a wrap is called a wrap and sometimes it's called whatever the native thing is. That kind of thing.
It baffles me that a ton of sites that have been translated into multiple languages still set the language based on IP rather than trying to determine it based on the client settings or defaulting to a set language with an easy way to switch it.
Countless times I landed on websites I use relatively frequently in foreign countries to see them in a language I don't understand, having to rely on my browser's translation functionality to find the language switcher. My operating system + browser are set to English, yet I still get served the one in the language I don't understand.
The worst offenders in my opinion are the ones assuming language based on IP for multi-lingual countries like Switzerland. People living in the French or Italian parts almost always get served the German content. It's bad UX.
But even setting the client right is not really possible. I'm danish. I understand english and german. Norwegian and swedish are similar enough to danish that I can read it without too much trouble. Websites, if they're translated at all, usually offer their native language plus an english translation. So if I visit a website in any language I understand, I'd prefer the original. But for any other language I want the english version.
If I set my accept-language to "da,en", I get a lot of horrible machine translated danish on a lot of websites. If I set it to "en,da", all danish government websites are now english. I can't win.
I used to think this way, i.e. assuming a misunderstanding on the product development side.
Nowadays I think its more of a conscious decision many times. Like "We know someone could travel to france as a tourist, but its a small fraction of french IP addresses so screw these people". etc.
Similarly, plenty of folk born in the UK whose first language isn't English. I have many friends who grew up speaking Scots, and a few whose first language is Gaelic.
that doesn't mean a single thing - google would auto-default to IP country resolution every step. It's funny in an awful way to have a road trip in Europe - every day it's a different language. While I speak 3 languages that's far from sufficient, morealso google translations leave a lot to be desired outside English (as everything is designed in US,incl. date formats [mm/dd], units - inches and miles, etc.)
Accept-language doesn't do anything at all for google, either.
It's gotten to the point where searching Google for word definitions is actively hampering me by defaulting to showing the definition in my "regional language" (which isn't correct in the first place since it's spoken by a majority in my country but not in the region where I live) as well as English when I only want the English meaning. Stuff like this has had me switch to DDG where even if the results are strictly worse, at least it's not going out of its way to annoy me
It doesn't work, you can set all the languages you speak on your Google account settings, and Youtube will still change every video title and audio track to either your default language on settings, or your system language. At this point I don't even know what stupid decision between the two above the Youtube backend is choosing.
I think you overestimate amount of multilingual users and tourists.
If you have 40 million country and you have 10 mil tourists over whole year given week you might 200k users that happen to be in that country.
Even if you have another 1mil expats living in that country. it still is 35mil of people vs 1mil of people for whom "your IP is from country X you get language X" is pretty good heuristic.
That said I am also pissed off by that approach but I do understand there is much more people who happen to use only that language in that country.
Optimizing for Expats or Tourists would be stupid as those are exceptions not the norm.
I'm a tourist 4 weeks per year. Excluding any business travel. That's 7.6% of the time. Now, I travel internationally more than most, but it's not out of the ordinary and it's 100x your estimate.
Of course, I'm multilingual even if I stay at home. Do we know how many people are multilingual? About half of Europeans speak more than one language. That's hundreds of millions of Youtube users. 22% of Americans for 76 million in the US. That's just numbers from Google's own Gemini (which is doing a bit of a half-assed job). Note that all EU countries except Ireland mandate second language teaching in schools (23 out of 27 mandate at least two foreign languages); you don't need to be an ex-pat, tourist, longterm resident or second generation immigrant to be multilingual.
Not taking input from multi-lingual users is not just bad practice from Google, it's actually impressive how they manage to ignore people they probably know and are working with.
> all EU countries except Ireland mandate second language teaching in schools
Ireland does mandate second language teaching in schools, it's just not a foreign language, it's Irish (separate language, not a dialect of English). And it's taught atrociously badly. The vast majority of graduates, after about 13 years of mandatory Irish classes, cannot functionally speak it.
Google as a whole is hostile to the user's browser's language settings. I have to append ?hl=en to every Google URL when connecting from an IP address that they determine is a non-English region.
> Or it's just as dumb as this was on some product managers "designed and implemented" line to get promoted?
I'd suspect it's something banal, such as: $goal --> translate by default --> enough users click through by mistake (AB test shows user interest) --> more preroll ads shown to users (AB test shows business value) --> promotion
Whether the $goal was {accessibility, show off translations, UX improvement} is quite irrelevant for a business that optimizes for revenue from ads.
I fear the future won't make us more educated but even dumber as the tech and ai tries to do all thinking for us, even thinking we don't want to learn languages as this is just one more "inefficiency" in humans to eradicate. And who is Ai trying to emulate? Right, people like these managers at Google resposnsible for such decisions (or like sama, not sure what's worse)
Right ? I am suprised that Facebook is actually the one leading in this UX: they clearly separate UX language ( singular ) and Languages which you don't need translation ( plural ).
Accept language header covers all that's needed. It's a ordered list of languages the user will understand in order of preference. You'd pick the first one as interface, don't translate anything that's in the list, and you can decide what to do with anything not in the list.
Sites that use ip of origin and just assume my language are such grating experiences.
I really, really want to have a way to tell Youtube that if I enable subtitles and the content is either English or Portuguese, then the subtitles should be shown in the original language (either subtitles created by the author or auto-generated subtitles - sometimes I can't do audio), but if it's another language, it should be shown in English (again, either subtitles authored by a person, or auto-generated ones)
This extension can control subtitles so maybe there is hope that this or another extension will offer this kind of fine granularity
The worst part about it is the half-translated effect on many sites. I'm fine in my native language and in english, but having a page written in both is a purge. Add to this the disappearance of a way to select language quiclky and the web is becoming shit these days wrt i18n.
I think statistics show that multilingual users are minority enough and most likely people who understand "help" or "guess" quit as soon when they see anything else so they don't consume the content. So YT doesn't care.
huh I don't seem to get it. Do you have a link where I can see it in action?
on edit: am in Denmark, I don't notice any automatic translation of the three languages I see most often - Danish, English, or Italian.
on second edit: but maybe I am just not observing it in action when it happens or maybe I don't watch the kind of videos they do it to - anyway I'd like to see it.
Doesn’t it just use the primary language you select in your account settings? Unless you’re talking about using it in incognito, in which case it does get annoying when it assumes a language based on region without asking.
If only it was that easy. I'm French living in France. My account settings are in English, my browsers and apps (phone, TV) are in English but my Youtube region is France. So Youtube serves me:
- French videos auto-dubbed with AI and with the titles auto-translated in English.
- English videos auto-dubbed with AI and with the titles auto-translated in French.
- French videos not dubbed, but with the titles auto-translated in English.
- English videos not dubbed, but with the titles auto-translated in French.
- French videos kept as is.
- English videos kept as is.
Also, Youtube keeps suggesting me French accents videos, even though I never watched a similar video (but watched videos on American accents and Spanish accents years ago)
My configured primary language is English, but I regularly watch contents in Chinese and Japanese, where I have sufficient mastery over to not need YouTube's subpar translation. YouTube's insistence in displaying video titles in English, starting a few months ago, and now also auto-dubbing in English, is incredibly annoying.
No it doesn't. It's mostly based on your location in my experience. Also, there is a clear distinction between the language you want for content and the language you use for the youtube UI. They shouldn't be conflated.
It really feels like the youtube team doesn't have any multilingual experience, which would be surprised if that's the case?
If you speak more than one language, which most non native language speakers do, you absolutely don't want your automatic translations. Hell, I don't want automatic translations even for languages I don't speak. If you want to allow me to have automatic subtitles go right ahead but forcing me to listen in one language is just absurd.
It also destroys language learning opportunities.
Google being anti user, probably so some director can boost AI numbers is pretty typical though.
Honestly, its infuriating. There are three languages that I speak and understand sufficiently well for consuming youtube videos. I don't ever want these to be translated.
And then, the translation of video titles etc. is often surprisingly bad, because (I think) they don't consider the video context / content while translating, so it almost looks like a translation-by-dictionary-lookup translation.
Most infuriating though is when you watch a video of a channel you watched for years and all of the sudden the audio is auto-translated into your primary language. So cringe.
I don't know your reality but literally anywhere in the 744 million users in Europe if you consider the technology literate average of internet users I guarantee that someone who is not even bilingual is precisely the exception.
I would hazard say the same is true in most of Asia and Africa perhaps less so in South America where Spanish/Portuguese are more monolithic.
I don't think you understand the proficiency needed to comfortably consume content in another language. Save for a few hotspots (Benelux, Nordics) most people say "yes, I speak a second language" because when they focus hard, they can say "me wants toilet" and that's enough for their use case (holiday abroad once a year). My mother is a teacher of English but when I brought a friend who only spoke English, I had to translate the conversation between them. This is the reality of bilingualism in small towns.
Most sources I can find claim that around 60% of the world's population is multilingual. I suspect that the number of internet users that are multilingual is probably pretty close to that.
I think it's more that the YouTube developers are US Americans who overwhelmingly speak only one language and naturally assume this is the case everywhere else.
This is a clear example where diversity of lived experiences make for a better product. I have no doubt that a young monolingual US developer can't imagine that many, if not most, people around the world are juggling between two or more languages multiple times a day. But it's obvious to anyone else.
There are some very complicated legal issues that come up with international video.
Movie companies sometimes don’t want things distributed on certain areas - ever. Like when there are different productions of the same movie for different areas.
The productions would compete against each other.
It’s one of the reasons DVD has multiple incompatible regions.
It's not even about it being a bad translation or not. If I am a native speaker, I WANT TO READ AND HEAR EVERYTHING IN THE ORIGINAL goddammit. Google juat became IBM in the 90s, it's depressing.
If I remember right YouTube already provides the tools for that and you can just outright region lock an upload (possibly depending on having the right creator bits as a studio/large channel)
Yes, for CMS channels, which would be your movie studios, TV studios, etc. They have an option to block certain countries from watching it. If you are around in YouTube often enough you will find a video or two that will say something like "this video isn't available in your region/country"
Youtube translations is such a dumb feature. I watch in german and english and have my language set to english. The english translations for german titles are most of the time garbage, because they translate names and fixed expressions we keep in english all to german. The result is just utter garbage - an complegtely unwanted. Especially since the underlying google account does support multiple languages, and I have set both languages that I speak there.
This. I could excuse them (or reddit for the matter) if their translations were in any capacity decent or at least understandable. In reality most of the time they're plain italian or french word salads. Their automatic audio translations engine could be easily renamed "Mechanical Italian Brainrot Generator".
It feels like they did not even test the feature before pushing it to production.
Reddit's one is crazy, I didn't know it exists until I was researching some tax laws in my country. I saw a Reddit thread in my language and it took me a while to realize it's a US-centric subreddit just automatically translated. Translating content about US laws makes 0 sense!
I mean, there are people living in the US, who are subject to the taxation there that don’t speak English.
As someone who also lives in a country where I don’t speak the language (and certainly not well enough to understand tax law); having that content translated is potentially useful IFF it’s clearly labeled as such.
It is insane to me that you cannot turn it off in the setting even as a premium user. Or better yet, make this opt-in for everyone.
I live in a German speaking country, yet my native language is other and German is almost never preferred when I watch some content. All my UIs are in English.
Yet, I open a video by a Brit and he is autodubbed to German. There really isn't any similar UX decision by any other reputed company that would be comparably stupid as this. Google even has large presence in Switzerland, that makes it even more puzzling.
But every speaker of swiss german is expected to also speak and write standard german. "swiss standard german over swiss german dialect" is enforced in school, sometimes even during breaks.
There's no formalized system for writing swiss german. (We even call swiss german "Mundart", literally translated "mouth type".)
Only with sms and social media written swiss german has become a thing amongst younger people.
I don't think youtube not serving content badly translated to swiss german is a problem, quite frankly I'm happy swiss german is "ours".
I just wish google realized that "German (Switzerland)" means no need to auto-correct anything to 'ß'
I know, but on the other hand you have many Swiss who, when spoken to in perfect Hochdeutsch, prefer to reply in English. No way you're gonna win over these people with autotranslate to what they consider a 'foreign' language.
I wouldn't fault youtube on that specific point. Swiss german isn't really recognized as a distinct language, and it is pretty fragmented by regions/cantons.
What is more complicated is more the fact that we have 4 official languages :)
I find it puzzling that they haven't any respect for user agency in relation to cultural and language preferences. Yet, in other areas we have been browbeaten with performative endorsement of other identity politics trends.
The user's personal computer is a personal space. You'd think that when users go out of the way to explicitly configure language and country preferences, they would respect it. Instead, everything is overridden by geolocation.
These days if there is a longform video I wish to watch, I download it. Typically I find it through other means than "recommendations" or search. YT as a platform for discovering content is becoming increasingly irrelevant.
I had the opposite experience. I usually watch US/english content on Youtube, and only follow one or two german channels. Anyway, a new german video came out, but instead of their regular german content, it was in english. I thought it was a bit at first or a special video they tried to do for the english market. It wasn't until I logged in through another account that I noticed that Youtube had auto-translated the video to english - without any prior notice. Such an annoying and distracting thing to do unannounced.
Their language detection is really bad. I have everything set in French, I am in France, I go to watch a video by a French guy but YouTube decides to serve me the English audio track, like hello YouTube? Happens to me more frequently when I watch on TV.
There are some cases where YouTube serves me Indonesian subtitles for some reason
German is my first language, but I prefer consuming English content in its original language.
The thing with youtube translated titles is that half of them aren't even propper German and half of that half is utterly nonsensical, because some English ideom has been translated too literally.
It's the same in portuguese. The last few months, for every brazilian video I need to play a guessing game and decide, based on the ridiculously "translated" english title, if I really want to watch it. Since I use Firefox on Android to consume Youtube, I need to open the video and then switch to Desktop mode to be able to change the audio track to the original pt-BR. There's no such option on Youtube mobile. I have lost count how many videos I decided the hassle wasn't worth it. Great job YouTube team, you're screwing your metrics in order to provide a horrible feature multilingual users never asked for.
Several times per week, the video starts in English - and then after a few seconds switches to a horrible robotic French auto-dub.
Even if the dubbing became magically parfect - and no doubt AI will manage to do it (while still falling flat on its face as soon as someone is a little creative with langage or cracks a joke/wordplay), I still want to be, you know able to set a setting to enable or disable it. Crazy, right?
I really just wish YouTube would detect captions embedded in their videos and stop displaying the same text (often incorrectly) on top of it. You do all this machine learning, why not put it into production? It's easy to cache the results and you're already scrubbing audio data and automatically doing STT, so extend it to do video to text and compare. It's not like this is an unsolved problem, even if imperfect. The audio provides a strong feedback for OCR errors
So you're saying that they should analyze both audio and video to increase the quality of the captions, if the video has hard-coded captions? I guess that's possible, just a question of effort vs. payoff.
Inaccurate auto-captions for videos with hard coded captions probably isn't a big enough pain to warrant big investments?
Agree. We build custom video analytics tools at Axon, and syncing OCR with audio-based STT isn’t rocket science anymore, especially with modern models. YouTube has all the ingredients, but seems slow to apply them at scale. Even basic alignment of audio captions with hardcoded subs would fix so much UX noise.
What drives me nuts with this is that they'll go for a weird guessing game instead of using the language settings that the browser is providing in every single request.
My browser states that I favour English, then French. My user profile on the website has "English" as language. Yet, when I get to the homepage, it tries to guess my language from my IP. NOOOO.
Yes, I know Sundar is Indian.
This doesn't stop Google from being one of the worst major tech companies I use at internationalisation and localisation.
Date formats, start of the week, 12/24h clock, auto translations, localised search results, language detection, it is all rubbish and clearly US-centric.
For all their (former) diversity dances, that company has very little to show for it.
Except both the head of YouTube and literally the CEO of Google are of Indian decent, have lived in India, and as such are almost certainly multilingual. Plus the fact that Google attracts developers from all of the world probably means very many developers at both Google and YouTube are multilingual. They obviously know how the world looks like, and still decided to do this.
Kudos to YouTube for making it to the list of a rare few websites that require browser extensions to deliver a half decent user experience. What's more? YouTube also leaves the competition in the dust in the sheer number of extensions required to achieve this. I hear that you extend this privilege uniformly to both unpaid guests and the subscribers of YouTube Premium alike. I'm sure that the lack of alternatives helped you a lot in achieving this coveted status.
I stopped using the site long ago because of what it's turned into, and only visit it for the occasional things I can't do with Invidious, yt-dlp, and a few shell scripts.
It's quite telling of how their developers "think" when they put the original language stream as the last one in the track list, instead of the sane first (zeroth?) position that it should occupy.
It’s unbelievable how broken YouTube is when it comes to language. I’m German. I want to see German content in German, and obviously I want to see English content in English. How is this not possible—especially when it worked perfectly for years? Is there a Chrome Variant of this?
If you use Chrome, you are at the whim of the same people who are messing up the platform in the first place anyway. You should probably see if you can transition to Firefox or some other non-Chromium browser.
YouTube on my phone automatically replaces English audio with machine-generated Japanese audio. YouTube on my desktop computer automatically replaces Japanese audio with machine-generated English audio.
It's embarrassing that something like this is needed. For some reason Youtube has always been weird about languages. They have language and location information, yet they won't let you search by language, will return other languages when you search, won't search by location, won't default to another language in videos and now they are force translating video titles/descriptions and force dubbing videos. Nobody asked for any of this. They have been asked plenty of times to provide options related to languages yet they have not implemented any of it. Super super weird. When did we start to accept such bullshit even in paid products?
I actually appreciate the YouTube's auto-translate feature a lot because it allows me to search through videos in languages I don't know but still like to view videos and listen to videos in. For example, I listen to a lot of city pop and anime title songs on YouTube and a lot of them have titles in Japanese only. I absolutely would not find it as easy as I do to search through this content and listen to the music if the auto-translation feature did not exist. It just makes it easier for people who don't know the language to view videos in that language. Sure the translation quality might not be the best but it makes search a whole lot easier. This is why I find some of the comments on this thread surprising.
Having said that I am against the automatic audio translation that some people are reporting. I have not experienced it myself but that seems poorly thought out. It should be easier for people to search through items in a foreign language but that content should be served in the content originally intended.
I do not understand how this got rolled out. Surely there are _loads_ of multilingual people working at YouTube. How is there not at least an option to flag multiple languages that you speak?
At least the audio translation I can turn off. I do not know how to get the actual title of a video or its description.
It's so frustrating that I've ended up just changing my UI language from English to another language so that at least those don't get butchered.
So is from external users. The only feedback that may be heard must be numeric and translate to $$$ KPI. Hint: Youtube viewers are not Googles customers.
Haven't we learned in the last 15 years or so that options are bad for users? ;-)
Moreover, watching videos in a foreign language with subtitles in that same language used to be a popular tool for learning languages. Clearly, the proliferation of language skills is a serious danger to the market for AI generated instant translations and must be stopped at all costs.
It got rolled out due to how MASSIVE the bounce rate is if the video is in a language users don't understand. I can easily see this on average providing a better experience and lead to less people bouncing. The false positives are not enough to counteract it.
Just feels relatively easy to change the language preference to be a multiselect though.... like ignoring user backlash, I'd assume _internal users of YT_ would just get extremely annoyed.
I don't really need magic, mainly want "if language not user's language" to turn into "if language not in user's language(s)"
> This is why I find some of the comments on this thread surprising.
Two words: Preference and choice. You prefer it one way and are happy. Other prefer it another way.
The fact that they are unhappy is not that you can do what makes you happy. It is that the choice isn’t easily available to choose to do what makes them happy.
I'm against auto-translate for the exact same argument.
I don't want japanese band's name to be translated. Nor I want my own music titles to be translated into other languages. There are many reasons why I wrote or said something in a specific language.
My main point was that I like the auto-translation because information retrieval was so much better. But the intent behind the video of the uploader has to be maintained and respected.
But you're arguing for auto-translation of a language you don't speak. The problem is when it does it for a language we speak. If it auto-translated japanese or polish or whatever for me I wouldn't mind as I don't speak those. But it auto-translates titles from English to my native language which is just bonkers. That's the difference here.
I use English while using any YT client so I didn't notice it as much. So I changed the language on my browser to German, went to a couple of American channels and now I get some of the outrage on this thread. Weirdly, some videos get their titles translated and some don't. Not only the titles but also the descriptions get translated. Honestly, I'm surprised they aren't translating the comments at this point.
I still do understand and like the feature a lot. It's a good way to push the engagement rates I guess. A simple solution would be to show a dialog with languages where the users can pick what they speak, not touch videos in those languages and translate everything else.
> This is why I find some of the comments on this thread surprising.
In general, some of the loudest voices in any given community are the ones who are dissatisfied with the thing in question. So, there are many people (or at least the two of us!) who are reasonably satisfied with this feature and find it helpful.
Well, it's not that I don't see how this feature can add value for others, it just doesn't add value for me (it directly detracts value, actually), and I would like to be able to disable it without installing a browser extension.
What's crazy is the US actually does have a decent proportion of multilingual speakers thanks to its history of immigration (a quick search reveals 20% of American residents are bilingual). Even Google staff should be a pretty multicultural bunch of people as they recruit globally.
Depends. English first language countries remain mostly monolingual. But the rest divides into:
- educated people are expected to learn English in school and end up consuming English media anyway (where you'd expect >50% multilingual, but not everyone)
- country has many official languages (many people are multilingual, but not necessarily in English; e.g. India, Indonesia, possibly China)
- country has literacy problems (not so many left now, maybe in sub-Saharan Africa)
- proud monoglots of a language that isn't English: Japan, France (but even here a lot of people consume English media anyway)
Maybe you can argue why it's not most countries? It seems obvious to me that it is, but I also come from a country where everyone is bilingual.
Many former European colonies are mostly bilingual, e.g. Africa is highly multilingual out of necessity. Much of Europe itself is also mostly bilingual. If you want to communicate outside your own little region and your native language isn't a lingua franca, you need to be bilingual in this world.
The main holdouts when it comes to bilingualism are former imperial powers who managed to both kill domestic language diversity (e.g. France, UK, Russia) while also spreading their national language as a lingua Franca. Another group of holdouts are settler colonies such as the US, which didn't have a dominant native population after the arrival of Europeans.
But even if e.g. Russia itself isn't super bilingual, the rest of the former Soviet Union certainly is, since that is just the reality if you live in a small and/or formerly colonised country.
Even if it is, Google is itself is very international and multilingual, including the literal head of YouTube. They obviously know what the world looks like, and decided to do this anyway.
the youtube translations aren't really good either. i'm constantly puzzled by videos with absolutely nonsensical titles until i remember that it's probably auto-translated and have to work out what the original meaning was.
for example, "more plates more dates" has been translated to "Mehr Teller mehr Termine".
not allowing this feature to be disabled is such an user hostile decision.
Oh my God this is auto translation business is so incredibly annoying. Especially for people that know multiple languages. But I imagine it is the worst for people who are trying to learn another language...
Yeah, short term.
Because power users that are used to switch between languages using internet slang do not like half baked polished translation in their IP-location language. So they leave. Remain mainly low quality users who couldn’t or didn’t wanted to switch between languages. A more powerful forever September again.
ah yes, and the auto translation on reddit broke a very useful trick I used all the time
- need information about something in general -> search in English
- need information about something specific for my home country (laws, local events, local shops, etc) -> search in my native language
now, I get weird auto translated content informing me about laws that are only applicable in the US and recommended products that are not even available in my home country.
When I first encountered this on Reddit I was really confused... They were (are?) translating even the text INSIDE an image. Can't believe how expensive that must've been across the entire frontpage.
But hey, another way to shoehorn AI into being "useful".
The worst part of this so-called “feature” is when very diligent creators from non-English-speaking countries already present in English language. But YouTube just assumes it's in their native language, so you have this horrible AI voiceover by default instead of their voice or VO artist that they use.
This is such a Google thing. I'm browsing from a German IP address, have my language set to English only and my region set to the US. This is still not enough for Google, and Youtube by extension, to not show me German search results. It is honestly incredibly frustrating. Same goes for the trending page on YT. This appears to only be based on your IP address.
This change has really been annoying me and as far as I tested, no extension worked. Quick look through network activity and it confirmed that it was done server side, no original titles were supplied anywhere. Only option was display language and titles were pre-translated to it. Just give me option to see original content, that is why I'm here
I've just installed this extension, and confirmed that -- at least for now -- it works. The translated titles will be flashed first, then replaced by the original titles.
<edit>
as pointed out by @addandsubtract, I misunderstood the extension, it's about audio translation, not just titles. Sorry about that.
</edit>
If you're using DeArrow, there is an option to disable those translations.
DeArrow is from the same team as SponsorBlock, it removes the clickbait thumbnails and titles with more descriptive ones. It makes the experience sooo much better. https://dearrow.ajay.app/
On the topic of multi-lingual - I frequently use airplay to cast to my apple tv from my laptop but a large number of videos now have alternative language tracks that apple decides to play and there's no way to change it. No language tracks show up. Worse is it changes language tracks after a few seconds.
Nowadays to use youtube efficiently with ADHD, you practically need all of:
(a) uBlock - this one is debatable but deals with the worst distractions especially if you're trying to learn from a video your professor put up and you have an exam to prepare for, (b) unhook - hides most of the "recommendations" that attempt to keep you on the site because you're planning to do the copmprehension questions your professor gave you for after the video, (c) something to disable "autoplay next" for the same reason as above (a uBlock rule will do it), (d) no translation. Soon we'll probably need (e) something to block AI.
The interface to YouTube used by yt-dlp does still list the different audio tracks and labels the original one.
The problems reported by everyone in this thread sound to me like UI bugs of the player, official app or javascript in the browser, picking the wrong audio track automatically.
Thanks for this! The automatic title translation are so low quality I'm surprised the same company created Google Translator.
In a lion share cases they are plain wrong, in most they are awkward, in all - they are misleading that the content somehow promises native experience.
As someone whose native language isn't English but uses English across devices and daily life, this add-on is incredibly useful. I still prefer seeing video titles in my own language.
I'm working on an app that's based around youtube videos for language learning. I had to solve the same problem of youtube automatically changing the audio track to match the device locale.
Even thought about making a spin off app with only the no-translate feature, that simply always uses the original title and audio. I guess revanced can do this too, but maybe there's enough people who don't use revanced, or don't know about this feature. Thoughts?
Few days ago I was surprised when video started in dubbed mode… I always watch everything in original audio, and turn subtitles when needed. At least for audio I found a setting, but titles… WHY?!
I can recommend the DeArrow extension for this. It has an option to always show the untranslated title. Plus, it has the intended features such as thumbnail replacement and crowd-sourced titles. DeArrow works in Android Firefox.
It's unfortunate that YouTube is only usable with these extensions, but here we are.
I honestly can't wrap my head around what some users do just to have the "stock" experience.
In order to get a vaguely usable stock YouTube, you need to install at least UBlock, SponsorBlock, No Translation, and arguably DeArrow as well. And this only works for browsers, many people will cope with their mobile YouTube experience being hell on earth.
Why do all this when you can get an alternative cross-platform client like GrayJay with all the same features (minus DeArrow for now), which works out of the box, has more privacy, and won't be completely useless the next time Google decides to shift things around a bit?
Same goes for Windows: you'll see people who go to great lengths to disable telemetry, remove Edge and sponsored content, often having to run random scripts from the internet with administrator privileges, just to have everything reset on the next Windows update. Remember how Windows users made fun of Linux users for having to open a command line for installing a browser (which isn't even true)?
I could go on: you can get Firefox and spend hours tweaking about:config to disable the anti-features, or you can get one of the dozen forks with the same patches pre-applied, yet some people will still defend the stock experience with their lives.
Google is the worst when it comes to i18n, I speak both Spanish and English, it translates reviews automatically to English, but at the same time will show me content in Spanish when I searched for something in English.
I feel like its profoundly American to assume everyone wants to see everything in one language.
I regularly consume content in two languages, my partner 3, and many of my friends are in the same boat. Please either allow me to just blacklist languages to not translate automatically or always keep content in the original language but allow changing after engaging with it. Its insane that this requires an extension for a company with as much resources as google.
The translations of video titles are absolutely atrocious and rarely mean anything near the intent of the original title.
Isnn't there any settings on Youtube to disable translation from Turkish into English? Why Youtube assumes that I am single lingual? It makes me crazy! I use Android and Youtube in English because it is thr original language. I watch sometimes Turksh videos from Turkish people but why the hell it translates into English?!
forced autotransation of anything is the worst. useless. whoever thought this was a good idea is just bored and seeking justification for their employment tbh
Is this an example of developers assuming they know what users want without actually engaging with and asking said users? Or are the people reaching for plugins like this actually in a minority?
The worst thing about this for me is not the language issue but that the translations are AI generated shite. If it was a case of multilingual channels producing videos in multiple languages then it makes sense that a user with language set to German would receive the German version by default. But to give users an AI generated translation by default? That's horrible.
I get the impression someone in Google/YouTube has this grand vision of it being like a Babel Fish just seamlessly translating voices into your own language. The trouble is Babel Fish is science fiction. Douglas Adams described it as "feeding" the speech centres of your brain directly, not translating the audio into a shitty generated copy.
I won't be contributing much to rational discussion, but this "feature" annoys me so much that I just have to rant for a bit.
----
Like, is nobody in Google multi-lingual? Who the fuck thought this -- not auto-translation, but forced auto-translation -- is a good idea? Surely for an organization that purportedly only hires the cream-of-the-crop, they'll have a larger fraction of employees that speak more than one language? Look, I'm resting-and-vesting like the rest of y'all, but if I were in the team that implemented this, I'd definitely speak up, and let them, up to my skip-level, know that this is terrible. The implication of either possibilities had occurred, yet the feature still shipped, is harrowing.
Even if the developers only speak one language, they must know at least three -- cream-of-the-crop, remember? -- programming languages, right? Imagine if, when you're first hired into Google, you declare your programming language of choice, say Go; then, henceforth whenever you check out the source code, irrespective of its original form, it gets auto-translated into Go, and you can't turn that off? Checking out Pixel first-stage bootloader code, almost certainly written in assembly -- nope! We know better: you're getting that in Go. Fuck, I shouldn't be giving them ideas!
Could they not imagine how horrible this would be, and by analogy when applied to human languages, be also just as horrid?
YouTube's often been cited as a great resource for learning new things. Well, now it's useless for, that's right, learning a second language! I wonder why this Spanish for beginners video's all in English? /s
Speaking about shit features, let's throw "Stable Volume" into the pile. At least this one remembers your preferences...most of the time. When I watch ASMR -- yes I'll admit in public I'm that guy -- videos, and am just about to fall asleep, I just love to be jolted awake by a loud robotic voice's rendition of tapping sounds. Maybe my grumpiness's due to my lack of sleep!
I‘m German, watching a German creator in a German-language recording.
Only that YouTube decides to use their Mickey Mouse sounding AI voice to deliver an English audio track. Not every time, but at least a third of the time. I have to hunt for the audio setting each time, because you cannot turn off AI voices permanently.
I only love it when their Mickey Mouse sounding AI voice turns ads into a real clown show.
Imagine how they spent big money developing a slogan for their brand or product and then AI comes around with a near literal translation that makes no sense whatsoever and that is what people hear.
That is the only positive side, otherwise it is what you wrote. A real pain.
Automatically translated titles are often just wrong and misleading, and there is no way to turn this "feature" off.
If you understand more than one language, you'll get half of the videos sloppily translated for no reason. There is no way to tell YouTube not to do this for specific languages.
I guess this extension is really aimed at multilingual viewers who don’t want English (or any language they already know) automatically translated into their native tongue.
A better solution would be a ‘blacklist’ of languages you understand—so YouTube only auto‑translates from languages you don’t speak, and always leaves familiar languages in their original form.
> A better solution would be a ‘blacklist’ of languages you understand—so YouTube only auto‑translates from languages you don’t speak, and always leaves familiar languages in their original form.
A better solution would have been to just not ship this disaster of a "feature" in the first place.
I wouldn't want my browser to automatically translate every page I go to (without my consent!) either, and that would've been a much easier job!
I don't know, maybe I didn't look hard enough but the last time it happened to me I couldn't find a way to hear the original.
It was a video in French over accents, so the automatic English translation kind of made it useless. I'm French anyway, why translate it to English? I don't even live in an English-speaking country either (not that translating to Dutch would have been better).
For example if you listen to music in a different language you may be familiar with the foriegn name of a song, but not the translation of it. This makes things confusing.
Also for the sound track sometimes there isn't even an option to disable it depending on what experiment or client you are using.
Oof a lot of hate for this feature. I agree more configuration would be nice, but at the same time, this is absolute science fiction come to life. Even for people who speak multiple languages: let's say you speak English, German, and French. That means you understand about 25%[1] of other people on the planet. That's 75% of videos which you would otherwise _never see or understand_. This feature is for people who _don't_ speak the most popular languages -- it lets _their_ videos get views when otherwise they would never be seen. And that's been my experience with the feature. I saw a recipe fully in Spanish because of the auto-dubbing. I actually want this enabled more globally, I want to see more fully non-English videos recommended to me from around the world.
And this feature is relatively new, I think they started rolling it out only a few months ago. I'm sure configuration options will pop up.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num... and assuming the videos in a language is ~proportional to L1+L2 speakers . That's a simplifying assumption, because I would guess English is more highly represented. Because people likely make more videos in English because there's a bigger audience for it. If only there was a way to allow more non-English speakers to be able to be understood/gain traction....
While I agree that good automatic translations are great, the fact that the current unconfigurable mess that doesn't even respect the user's settings (neither the settings of their Google Account nor the settings of their browser), makes it a grating experience to multilinguals, who are believed to be the majority in the world.
+1! That's a reasonable take. The takes on here saying Google is a shill for introducing this feature, that no one wants it, that it's useless, are the takes that I found frustrating in this comment thread.
But also I might just be lucky, I speak multiple languages and have traveled into various countries, and have never had youtube show me anything other than English wherever I go.
Edit: And although multilinguals are in the majority over monolinguals (I think, citation needed), I think being multilingual still makes you part of an even larger majority, which is humans who are unable to watch the majority of videos due to language.
Of course I would understand the other 75%. Automatic subtitles have been a thing for ages and they have the benefit of not cutting out all personality and humor in the video.
If I watch a foreign language movie I always prefer subtitles with original audio (and those are usually dubbed by human, professional dubbers, so much higher quality). Why would I treat YT any differently?
+1 for subtitles. I do think that subtitles don't gain the same level of traction; and people complain about auto-translated subtitles as well (and auto-subtitles on their own!). I think auto-dubbing might be more successful at allowing folks from smaller languages/communities the opportunity to gain audiences outside of those smaller languages/communities.
The main difference between youtube and foreign language films is most creators on youtube don't have a budget for professional dubbers, so you either only watch big creators who do have that budget, or you have to compromise.
+1 even if you don't understand the language, it's nice to hear the real voice.
This auto-dub-translation feature is also problematic in that viewers don't realise it's happening. I think that is unreasonably misleading. It could be great as an option, but it should really prompt you before switching it on.
That way people would not be forced to use it, and people would be aware of it.
Autodubbing is probably the worst feature Google has ever implemented.
It's OK if they want to offer it, but at least let me disable it for specific languages.
And for those languages which I don't understand, let me choose a default autodubbing language. Because I assume that auto-generated translations from French to English will be far better than those from French to German or Spanish.
Also, the voices they use sound like from a decade ago.
It is terrible and took me a while to realize what was happening. I though some videos were generated spam.
Reddit does something similar now. It auto translates posts and they show up in Google in my native tongue. Really annoying since when I search in that language I specifically don't want English sites.
I live in the Netherlands and speak German in addition to English. My Dutch is ... not that great.
Thanks to the geniuses at Reddit, I now frequently find posts on /r/de or similar German subreddits translated from my native language into one I'm worse at!
The Reddit translations are so insanely terrible. They are so much harder to read the the original English posts. It's like every word has been translated independently
The problem isn't the the translation isn't done well enough, but rather its underhanded nature that tries to sell a translated website as a genuine discussion.
First time I saw an autodubbed video, within seconds I was literally screaming at my buddy to turn it off, TURN IT OFF! It's so unnatural and badly done, it creeps me the hell out and hurts my ears.
My friend thought a video was ai generated because it was translated to 17 languages. But the voices were natural, fit the pace of the video, and had emotion and impulse. They had been paid for.
The YouTube auto translation is not that. It's stilted and awkward, robotic voice with none of the context. It's not ready for release and it does a disservice to any creator that uses it because their vision is not going to be anywhere near correctly delivered.
> at least let me disable it for specific languages.
At the very least make use of https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/...
... instead of relying on whatever stupid magic that places me in Germany when I live 5km from the border.
It can't be geoip because that IP is from a French ISP and has been in consistent use at this location for the past 5 years.
(but yeah even then it is horrible)
It's surprising how hostile youtube is to multilingual users. Probably all in some attempt to show off their translation capability or to improve the experience for users who may want to access content in a language they don't speak? Or it's just as dumb as this was on some product managers "designed and implemented" line to get promoted?
But, surely someone sane there has to realize there is a large number of users out there who speak more than one language, and don't need Google do "help" them or "guess" for what language they like more.
I’ve been learning a new language, and I’m constantly encountering language-learning videos that get translated entirely into my native language, effectively useless until I revert the audio track.
Annoyingly, there’s not a native way to revert the translated description and title as far as I know. And this seems to be done without the knowledge of the creator!
I watched a language-learning YouTube short today that was entirely not in English. But YouTube was automatically dubbing it into English. A commenter replied with “but why the bad ai voice?” And the creator replied “it’s not, that’s my voice”
Revanced on android has an option to force native language. It does not fix the translated titles and descriptions as far as I can tell.
i18n and l10n are something that I have seen a company done right. It is easy developer to assume:
If your IP is coming from country X, you must want the content to be served in language X.
No, there are tourist from country Z, long term resident who prefer language A and people from country X want to learn language B.
- If your browser Accept-Language say X,Y, then you must want all the content to be served in X.
No, I want my search result to be predominantly in X, but when I search for things about Y, show me language Y, and when I search for this band from country Z, please show me in language X.
As a hongkonger (zh_hk + en_gb), living in Singapore (zh_cn + en?), following JPOP. This is the daily fight I have with browser.
I would rather all application, including web app just give me the option to choose and say, interface language, english, content language, follow origin.
I also have this problem with apps in my native language. I have my phone set to en,no because I prefer the English version over some bad auto-translated crap where some apps try to translate stuff. But then when I download a Norwegian app, then it prefers to use some badly maintained English translation instead, but here I would of course prefer the native version.
Can't win.
On iOS, this is something you can can control on a per-app basis from the (system) Settings.app.
Really useful for Google maps. I generally prefer English but I want Japanese for google so I get local people's opinion over tourists who think every ramen is the best ramen they've ever tasted. I'm surprised it's not an option actually. Language aside, tourism and actually living somewhere are totally separate and reviews should reflect that.
Interesting use case! Why won't you just use Tabelog instead?
I don't feel like tabelog is that popular recently. But I could be wrong.
Android has it too.
And for some reason, Apple/iOS doesn't allow you to set this for some system apps. For example, Music (Apple Music) app on iOS doesn't offer this option, which I desperately need because I don't want the music metadata I listened got translated.
And it would be _so, so, easy_.
Make reasonable assumptions or provide good defaults. Make them overrideable. Make user settings stick.
I have the same problem, by the way — my phone is in English, which means I get to enjoy Apples hilarious English pronunciation of German street names while navigating.
Same here with Dutch: you could pretty much watch i18n degrade real time by observing the quality of the dutch translations for all major sites and tech products over the years.
Back in the 2000s, dutch wasn't very common but it usually was pretty good (my understanding is that one of the things that helped is that everyone followed the Microsoft style guide for dutch translations?)
Nowadays you get overly literal translations (meaning some form of MTL), translations that don't care for the length of the text (so it gets cut off with ... at the end for interface buttons) and so on and so forth. It all just reeks of automatic translation with little care put into the presentation. This is pretty much a universal experience across every single system I've ever used and why I usually just set all my devices to English. - It's simply not worth it to deal with the botched translations to try and figure out what was actually meant.
I've had the unfortunate mishap of having the perfectly fine English translation of a German site switch to auto translate Dutch crap due to one part using the language preference and the other the IP source, bit weird since as far as I know they usually only offer English. And I can perfectly fine read German so I usually immediately switch to that since some info is not available in English especially with the different Bundesambt websites.
What I would like is a browser and os which allows you to set which languages (multiple) never need translating and the site sticking to that.
Yeah, I think apps just should have a sorted list (/tiers) of languages they support, and pick whatever first has a match in the user preferences. If the app supports two languages equally well, then choose the one first in the user's preference list.
So for me having no,en (in the future where this works I would dare to have no first):
I live in Japan and am not yet fluent enough, so need to use a VPN to get the Google Search English results, otherwise it's totally unusable. Heck even for programming I pull my hair since I get the translated docs when searching. Just give me the (original) English ones please. I did search in English have Google set to English, but still get the Japanese ones even for those that have English resources.
Windows took a nosedive with recent Windows releases, due to the "apps".
Oh, you're using Norwegian keyboard layout? Well surely you want Norwegian display text to go with that.
Oh, you're using US keyboard layout? Well surely you'll want US date and time formatting to go with that, along with the display text.
All the while ignoring the setting that's been there for ages and worked reasonably well.
Danskjævel here, and I feel your pain. MS Windows has always had a pretty terrible danish translation. Partly because a lot of tech language translates poorly to danish, and partly because MS are lazy and incompetent. Back in Windows 2000 days, I found instances where "Windows" the product name was translated to "vinduer", the danish word for an actual window. I actually found a ~25 year old screenshot I took --> https://0x0.st/80r5.png
Worse than that is, as you say, software that makes dumb assumptions about my language preferences. It gets especially interesting when graphic drivers translate strings like ambient occlusion, screen space reflections, temporal anti-aliasing, subsurface scattering. The result is incomprehensible gibberish - I mean levels far beyond the baseline gibberish danish already is :D
Win10 regional settings are so terrible, and it's pretty much impossible to set keyboard, date/number formatting and basically everything but display language to danish, while keeping the display language english (The King's English, thankyouverymuch). Thankfully Linux has the locale "en_DK.UTF-8" which instantly makes everything show like I want it.
I have all of my language settings configured to en_US. I've explicitly configured YouTube's country setting as well. I still get autotranslated titles for the local language in the search results. There are so many irrelevant results that YT search has become unusable. I'm increasingly noticing similar behavior in Google search, especially around news and current events.
> i18n and l10n are something that I have seen a company done right. It is easy developer to assume:
> If your IP is coming from country X, you must want the content to be served in language X.
I would assume there are multilingual speakers in mostly every single team at YouTube. Or at the very least enough nerds who just like some random content from another country.
People who would both want their UI to be in a language A but also to consume content from languages B, C...
I do not understand how that assumption holds in any product decision except in one where the YT product teams are entirely and totally separated from the engineering teams.
I get this a lot in restaurant menus nowadays. My phone is set to English because I am more familiar with techy terms in English than my native language with its weird translations. I go to a restaurant, open the QR menu and tell them what I want. But they don't understand what I want because the menu is set to English because of my phone settings. A lot of places have English names in their regular menu (because cool) so I am not talking about speaking English to a nonspeaker. Like sometimes a wrap is called a wrap and sometimes it's called whatever the native thing is. That kind of thing.
It baffles me that a ton of sites that have been translated into multiple languages still set the language based on IP rather than trying to determine it based on the client settings or defaulting to a set language with an easy way to switch it.
Countless times I landed on websites I use relatively frequently in foreign countries to see them in a language I don't understand, having to rely on my browser's translation functionality to find the language switcher. My operating system + browser are set to English, yet I still get served the one in the language I don't understand.
The worst offenders in my opinion are the ones assuming language based on IP for multi-lingual countries like Switzerland. People living in the French or Italian parts almost always get served the German content. It's bad UX.
>client settings
But even setting the client right is not really possible. I'm danish. I understand english and german. Norwegian and swedish are similar enough to danish that I can read it without too much trouble. Websites, if they're translated at all, usually offer their native language plus an english translation. So if I visit a website in any language I understand, I'd prefer the original. But for any other language I want the english version.
If I set my accept-language to "da,en", I get a lot of horrible machine translated danish on a lot of websites. If I set it to "en,da", all danish government websites are now english. I can't win.
I used to think this way, i.e. assuming a misunderstanding on the product development side.
Nowadays I think its more of a conscious decision many times. Like "We know someone could travel to france as a tourist, but its a small fraction of french IP addresses so screw these people". etc.
I recall my British colleague’s disbelief when I told her there are many people in the US whose first language is not English…
Similarly, plenty of folk born in the UK whose first language isn't English. I have many friends who grew up speaking Scots, and a few whose first language is Gaelic.
No need to do these assumptions, youtube accounts are google accounts and google already supports setting multiple languages that you speak/read.
that doesn't mean a single thing - google would auto-default to IP country resolution every step. It's funny in an awful way to have a road trip in Europe - every day it's a different language. While I speak 3 languages that's far from sufficient, morealso google translations leave a lot to be desired outside English (as everything is designed in US,incl. date formats [mm/dd], units - inches and miles, etc.)
Accept-language doesn't do anything at all for google, either.
Would be great if they actually use it in their products instead of showing me some insane mixup of stuff I don't want :)
It's gotten to the point where searching Google for word definitions is actively hampering me by defaulting to showing the definition in my "regional language" (which isn't correct in the first place since it's spoken by a majority in my country but not in the region where I live) as well as English when I only want the English meaning. Stuff like this has had me switch to DDG where even if the results are strictly worse, at least it's not going out of its way to annoy me
It doesn't work, you can set all the languages you speak on your Google account settings, and Youtube will still change every video title and audio track to either your default language on settings, or your system language. At this point I don't even know what stupid decision between the two above the Youtube backend is choosing.
Yes, this. Google still doesn't get even the Accept-Language header right, which is shocking, because they're Google.
> As a hongkonger (zh_hk + en_gb), living in Singapore (zh_cn + en?), following JPOP. This is the daily fight I have with browser.
Ah yes as a Korean living in Japan with locale set to English, this truly is a daily fight.
> I would rather all application, including web app just give me the option to choose
I've left websites for other competitors because they wouldn't have a button to change language.
I think you overestimate amount of multilingual users and tourists.
If you have 40 million country and you have 10 mil tourists over whole year given week you might 200k users that happen to be in that country.
Even if you have another 1mil expats living in that country. it still is 35mil of people vs 1mil of people for whom "your IP is from country X you get language X" is pretty good heuristic.
That said I am also pissed off by that approach but I do understand there is much more people who happen to use only that language in that country.
Optimizing for Expats or Tourists would be stupid as those are exceptions not the norm.
I'm a tourist 4 weeks per year. Excluding any business travel. That's 7.6% of the time. Now, I travel internationally more than most, but it's not out of the ordinary and it's 100x your estimate.
Of course, I'm multilingual even if I stay at home. Do we know how many people are multilingual? About half of Europeans speak more than one language. That's hundreds of millions of Youtube users. 22% of Americans for 76 million in the US. That's just numbers from Google's own Gemini (which is doing a bit of a half-assed job). Note that all EU countries except Ireland mandate second language teaching in schools (23 out of 27 mandate at least two foreign languages); you don't need to be an ex-pat, tourist, longterm resident or second generation immigrant to be multilingual.
Not taking input from multi-lingual users is not just bad practice from Google, it's actually impressive how they manage to ignore people they probably know and are working with.
> all EU countries except Ireland mandate second language teaching in schools
Ireland does mandate second language teaching in schools, it's just not a foreign language, it's Irish (separate language, not a dialect of English). And it's taught atrociously badly. The vast majority of graduates, after about 13 years of mandatory Irish classes, cannot functionally speak it.
> separate language, not a dialect of English
Of all the languages spoken in the UK and Ireland that argument attracts, I've never heard anyone claim that about Irish - an actual Gaelic language.
> The vast majority of graduates, after about 13 years of mandatory Irish classes, cannot functionally speak it.
They just need to get out their word book - that's right, their focal leabhair
♫ oh get out your focal leabhair, get out your focal leabhair
and we'll have you speaking Irish in a half-an-hour
Sea means yes and Níl means no
get out your focal leabhair and we'll all have a go ♫
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYNZbmrMg7M
> And it's taught atrociously badly. The vast majority of graduates, after about 13 years of mandatory Irish classes, cannot functionally speak it.
I grew up in a country where we had mandatory lessons in a little-used local language imposed on us by politicians.
That I learned nothing isn’t the teachers’ fault - they were simply set an impossible task.
Huh, basically every European aged <~40 is going to know their native language + English at the very least.
Google as a whole is hostile to the user's browser's language settings. I have to append ?hl=en to every Google URL when connecting from an IP address that they determine is a non-English region.
While logged into Google with your own regional settings, try Google Flights in any country- the currency is always set to that country's currency.
I have no idea what a flight costing 781,667 blergs is, Google. Is that a lot?
If I knew what blergs are worth, I'd set my regional settings to blergs.
So you set the currency to your own. Then navigate away, then come back. Now it's blergs again.
> Or it's just as dumb as this was on some product managers "designed and implemented" line to get promoted?
I'd suspect it's something banal, such as: $goal --> translate by default --> enough users click through by mistake (AB test shows user interest) --> more preroll ads shown to users (AB test shows business value) --> promotion
Whether the $goal was {accessibility, show off translations, UX improvement} is quite irrelevant for a business that optimizes for revenue from ads.
I'm lucky enough that I mostly only consume English content on Youtube and not my native language, so I just set everything to English.
But yeah, it's incredibly stupid.
I did this too, but then YouTube translated videos in my native language to English.
I'm still getting titles auto-translated, and started to get videos auto-dubbed a few weeks ago.
It is a setting managed by the content creators. That is why it is very random
Thanks, I wasn't aware that was the case
[dead]
I fear the future won't make us more educated but even dumber as the tech and ai tries to do all thinking for us, even thinking we don't want to learn languages as this is just one more "inefficiency" in humans to eradicate. And who is Ai trying to emulate? Right, people like these managers at Google resposnsible for such decisions (or like sama, not sure what's worse)
Right ? I am suprised that Facebook is actually the one leading in this UX: they clearly separate UX language ( singular ) and Languages which you don't need translation ( plural ).
Accept language header covers all that's needed. It's a ordered list of languages the user will understand in order of preference. You'd pick the first one as interface, don't translate anything that's in the list, and you can decide what to do with anything not in the list.
Sites that use ip of origin and just assume my language are such grating experiences.
I really, really want to have a way to tell Youtube that if I enable subtitles and the content is either English or Portuguese, then the subtitles should be shown in the original language (either subtitles created by the author or auto-generated subtitles - sometimes I can't do audio), but if it's another language, it should be shown in English (again, either subtitles authored by a person, or auto-generated ones)
This extension can control subtitles so maybe there is hope that this or another extension will offer this kind of fine granularity
This used to work some time ago. They just didn't automatically enable translation and picked the default language.
Google has that preference as well, YouTube just doesn't care to honor it, which is somehow even more frustrating.
The worst part about it is the half-translated effect on many sites. I'm fine in my native language and in english, but having a page written in both is a purge. Add to this the disappearance of a way to select language quiclky and the web is becoming shit these days wrt i18n.
I think statistics show that multilingual users are minority enough and most likely people who understand "help" or "guess" quit as soon when they see anything else so they don't consume the content. So YT doesn't care.
>I think statistics show that multilingual users are minority enough
I think that depends on the country. And maybe region of the country.
At any rate I can turn off subtitles in my YouTube - can other people not do that?
They are doing automated voice over now and automated translation of video titles.
huh I don't seem to get it. Do you have a link where I can see it in action?
on edit: am in Denmark, I don't notice any automatic translation of the three languages I see most often - Danish, English, or Italian.
on second edit: but maybe I am just not observing it in action when it happens or maybe I don't watch the kind of videos they do it to - anyway I'd like to see it.
Doesn’t it just use the primary language you select in your account settings? Unless you’re talking about using it in incognito, in which case it does get annoying when it assumes a language based on region without asking.
If only it was that easy. I'm French living in France. My account settings are in English, my browsers and apps (phone, TV) are in English but my Youtube region is France. So Youtube serves me:
- French videos auto-dubbed with AI and with the titles auto-translated in English.
- English videos auto-dubbed with AI and with the titles auto-translated in French.
- French videos not dubbed, but with the titles auto-translated in English.
- English videos not dubbed, but with the titles auto-translated in French.
- French videos kept as is.
- English videos kept as is.
Also, Youtube keeps suggesting me French accents videos, even though I never watched a similar video (but watched videos on American accents and Spanish accents years ago)
My configured primary language is English, but I regularly watch contents in Chinese and Japanese, where I have sufficient mastery over to not need YouTube's subpar translation. YouTube's insistence in displaying video titles in English, starting a few months ago, and now also auto-dubbing in English, is incredibly annoying.
No it doesn't. It's mostly based on your location in my experience. Also, there is a clear distinction between the language you want for content and the language you use for the youtube UI. They shouldn't be conflated.
It really feels like the youtube team doesn't have any multilingual experience, which would be surprised if that's the case?
Even if they had no experience, surely something like this would come out in user testing?
If you speak more than one language, which most non native language speakers do, you absolutely don't want your automatic translations. Hell, I don't want automatic translations even for languages I don't speak. If you want to allow me to have automatic subtitles go right ahead but forcing me to listen in one language is just absurd.
It also destroys language learning opportunities.
Google being anti user, probably so some director can boost AI numbers is pretty typical though.
Honestly, its infuriating. There are three languages that I speak and understand sufficiently well for consuming youtube videos. I don't ever want these to be translated.
And then, the translation of video titles etc. is often surprisingly bad, because (I think) they don't consider the video context / content while translating, so it almost looks like a translation-by-dictionary-lookup translation.
Most infuriating though is when you watch a video of a channel you watched for years and all of the sudden the audio is auto-translated into your primary language. So cringe.
Average user is not multilingual. Target group is average user. End of story.
> Average user is not multilingual
I don't know your reality but literally anywhere in the 744 million users in Europe if you consider the technology literate average of internet users I guarantee that someone who is not even bilingual is precisely the exception.
I would hazard say the same is true in most of Asia and Africa perhaps less so in South America where Spanish/Portuguese are more monolithic.
I don't think you understand the proficiency needed to comfortably consume content in another language. Save for a few hotspots (Benelux, Nordics) most people say "yes, I speak a second language" because when they focus hard, they can say "me wants toilet" and that's enough for their use case (holiday abroad once a year). My mother is a teacher of English but when I brought a friend who only spoke English, I had to translate the conversation between them. This is the reality of bilingualism in small towns.
Maybe in those countries. In any case, it's considerably easier to read and listen than write and speak.
Most sources I can find claim that around 60% of the world's population is multilingual. I suspect that the number of internet users that are multilingual is probably pretty close to that.
> Average user is not multilingual.
[citation needed]
I think it's more that the YouTube developers are US Americans who overwhelmingly speak only one language and naturally assume this is the case everywhere else.
This is a clear example where diversity of lived experiences make for a better product. I have no doubt that a young monolingual US developer can't imagine that many, if not most, people around the world are juggling between two or more languages multiple times a day. But it's obvious to anyone else.
There are some very complicated legal issues that come up with international video.
Movie companies sometimes don’t want things distributed on certain areas - ever. Like when there are different productions of the same movie for different areas.
The productions would compete against each other.
It’s one of the reasons DVD has multiple incompatible regions.
I don’t know if this is YouTube’s reasoning.
No, the complaint is opposite of that. They're seeking ways to escape their translation efforts because it's so bad.
It has nothing to do with difficulties of offering translations. It's about declining complimentary ketchup squeeze on latte.
It's not even about it being a bad translation or not. If I am a native speaker, I WANT TO READ AND HEAR EVERYTHING IN THE ORIGINAL goddammit. Google juat became IBM in the 90s, it's depressing.
It's not just Youtube, if there wasn't a google.com/ncr, I'd have to seek alternatives a long time ago.
And many other sites that confuse country with language (geizhals.eu, ... etc)
If I remember right YouTube already provides the tools for that and you can just outright region lock an upload (possibly depending on having the right creator bits as a studio/large channel)
Yes, for CMS channels, which would be your movie studios, TV studios, etc. They have an option to block certain countries from watching it. If you are around in YouTube often enough you will find a video or two that will say something like "this video isn't available in your region/country"
I really hate YouTube translations. I DO NOT want YouTube in Italian because I don’t care about Italian content or watching videos in Italian!
Youtube translations is such a dumb feature. I watch in german and english and have my language set to english. The english translations for german titles are most of the time garbage, because they translate names and fixed expressions we keep in english all to german. The result is just utter garbage - an complegtely unwanted. Especially since the underlying google account does support multiple languages, and I have set both languages that I speak there.
This. I could excuse them (or reddit for the matter) if their translations were in any capacity decent or at least understandable. In reality most of the time they're plain italian or french word salads. Their automatic audio translations engine could be easily renamed "Mechanical Italian Brainrot Generator".
It feels like they did not even test the feature before pushing it to production.
Reddit's one is crazy, I didn't know it exists until I was researching some tax laws in my country. I saw a Reddit thread in my language and it took me a while to realize it's a US-centric subreddit just automatically translated. Translating content about US laws makes 0 sense!
I mean, there are people living in the US, who are subject to the taxation there that don’t speak English.
As someone who also lives in a country where I don’t speak the language (and certainly not well enough to understand tax law); having that content translated is potentially useful IFF it’s clearly labeled as such.
It is insane to me that you cannot turn it off in the setting even as a premium user. Or better yet, make this opt-in for everyone.
I live in a German speaking country, yet my native language is other and German is almost never preferred when I watch some content. All my UIs are in English.
Yet, I open a video by a Brit and he is autodubbed to German. There really isn't any similar UX decision by any other reputed company that would be comparably stupid as this. Google even has large presence in Switzerland, that makes it even more puzzling.
Adding to my previous comment, in Switzerland, people speak very specific Swiss German, yet the videos are autodubbed to 'hoch' (standard) German.
It's a bit of an exaggeration, but it is as if a person is Lisbon would get their videos dubbed to Spanish.
But every speaker of swiss german is expected to also speak and write standard german. "swiss standard german over swiss german dialect" is enforced in school, sometimes even during breaks.
There's no formalized system for writing swiss german. (We even call swiss german "Mundart", literally translated "mouth type".) Only with sms and social media written swiss german has become a thing amongst younger people.
I don't think youtube not serving content badly translated to swiss german is a problem, quite frankly I'm happy swiss german is "ours".
I just wish google realized that "German (Switzerland)" means no need to auto-correct anything to 'ß'
I know, but on the other hand you have many Swiss who, when spoken to in perfect Hochdeutsch, prefer to reply in English. No way you're gonna win over these people with autotranslate to what they consider a 'foreign' language.
I wouldn't fault youtube on that specific point. Swiss german isn't really recognized as a distinct language, and it is pretty fragmented by regions/cantons.
What is more complicated is more the fact that we have 4 official languages :)
I find it puzzling that they haven't any respect for user agency in relation to cultural and language preferences. Yet, in other areas we have been browbeaten with performative endorsement of other identity politics trends.
The user's personal computer is a personal space. You'd think that when users go out of the way to explicitly configure language and country preferences, they would respect it. Instead, everything is overridden by geolocation.
These days if there is a longform video I wish to watch, I download it. Typically I find it through other means than "recommendations" or search. YT as a platform for discovering content is becoming increasingly irrelevant.
I had the opposite experience. I usually watch US/english content on Youtube, and only follow one or two german channels. Anyway, a new german video came out, but instead of their regular german content, it was in english. I thought it was a bit at first or a special video they tried to do for the english market. It wasn't until I logged in through another account that I noticed that Youtube had auto-translated the video to english - without any prior notice. Such an annoying and distracting thing to do unannounced.
Their language detection is really bad. I have everything set in French, I am in France, I go to watch a video by a French guy but YouTube decides to serve me the English audio track, like hello YouTube? Happens to me more frequently when I watch on TV.
There are some cases where YouTube serves me Indonesian subtitles for some reason
German is my first language, but I prefer consuming English content in its original language.
The thing with youtube translated titles is that half of them aren't even propper German and half of that half is utterly nonsensical, because some English ideom has been translated too literally.
It's the same in portuguese. The last few months, for every brazilian video I need to play a guessing game and decide, based on the ridiculously "translated" english title, if I really want to watch it. Since I use Firefox on Android to consume Youtube, I need to open the video and then switch to Desktop mode to be able to change the audio track to the original pt-BR. There's no such option on Youtube mobile. I have lost count how many videos I decided the hassle wasn't worth it. Great job YouTube team, you're screwing your metrics in order to provide a horrible feature multilingual users never asked for.
Want to hear something worse?
Several times per week, the video starts in English - and then after a few seconds switches to a horrible robotic French auto-dub.
Even if the dubbing became magically parfect - and no doubt AI will manage to do it (while still falling flat on its face as soon as someone is a little creative with langage or cracks a joke/wordplay), I still want to be, you know able to set a setting to enable or disable it. Crazy, right?
Yes! It is inconsistent, you think that finally reason prevailed and they nuked the 'feature', but then it appears randomly again.
I really just wish YouTube would detect captions embedded in their videos and stop displaying the same text (often incorrectly) on top of it. You do all this machine learning, why not put it into production? It's easy to cache the results and you're already scrubbing audio data and automatically doing STT, so extend it to do video to text and compare. It's not like this is an unsolved problem, even if imperfect. The audio provides a strong feedback for OCR errors
I think the engineers at Google know and want this, but Google has a monopoly here so without a strong financial reason nothing will happen.
So you're saying that they should analyze both audio and video to increase the quality of the captions, if the video has hard-coded captions? I guess that's possible, just a question of effort vs. payoff.
Inaccurate auto-captions for videos with hard coded captions probably isn't a big enough pain to warrant big investments?
Agree. We build custom video analytics tools at Axon, and syncing OCR with audio-based STT isn’t rocket science anymore, especially with modern models. YouTube has all the ingredients, but seems slow to apply them at scale. Even basic alignment of audio captions with hardcoded subs would fix so much UX noise.
Standard American thing - thinking everyone speaks only one language, and that language being the language of the country you live in.
What drives me nuts with this is that they'll go for a weird guessing game instead of using the language settings that the browser is providing in every single request.
My browser states that I favour English, then French. My user profile on the website has "English" as language. Yet, when I get to the homepage, it tries to guess my language from my IP. NOOOO.
Yes, I know Sundar is Indian. This doesn't stop Google from being one of the worst major tech companies I use at internationalisation and localisation.
Date formats, start of the week, 12/24h clock, auto translations, localised search results, language detection, it is all rubbish and clearly US-centric.
For all their (former) diversity dances, that company has very little to show for it.
I agree that the way it's implemented at YouTube right now is utter garbage.
However i haven't noticed this to be a problem with Google in general. All the Google products i've been using have been properly localised.
Except both the head of YouTube and literally the CEO of Google are of Indian decent, have lived in India, and as such are almost certainly multilingual. Plus the fact that Google attracts developers from all of the world probably means very many developers at both Google and YouTube are multilingual. They obviously know how the world looks like, and still decided to do this.
And the country is resolved by IP - which totally doesn't work with roaming - you also get the home country of your provider.
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14175238
Isn't Spanish spoken alot in USA?
Kudos to YouTube for making it to the list of a rare few websites that require browser extensions to deliver a half decent user experience. What's more? YouTube also leaves the competition in the dust in the sheer number of extensions required to achieve this. I hear that you extend this privilege uniformly to both unpaid guests and the subscribers of YouTube Premium alike. I'm sure that the lack of alternatives helped you a lot in achieving this coveted status.
I stopped using the site long ago because of what it's turned into, and only visit it for the occasional things I can't do with Invidious, yt-dlp, and a few shell scripts.
It's quite telling of how their developers "think" when they put the original language stream as the last one in the track list, instead of the sane first (zeroth?) position that it should occupy.
Yeah, Yandex browser also has this and its annoying. Terrible actually even if their auto-dub is way better than youtube's.
It’s unbelievable how broken YouTube is when it comes to language. I’m German. I want to see German content in German, and obviously I want to see English content in English. How is this not possible—especially when it worked perfectly for years? Is there a Chrome Variant of this?
If you use Chrome, you are at the whim of the same people who are messing up the platform in the first place anyway. You should probably see if you can transition to Firefox or some other non-Chromium browser.
Google is not the only provider of Chrome extensions (yet?).
Yes: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/youtube-no-translat...
Or better yet, switching to firefox
YouTube on my phone automatically replaces English audio with machine-generated Japanese audio. YouTube on my desktop computer automatically replaces Japanese audio with machine-generated English audio.
It's honestly quite incredible.
It is incredible how many addons I need to make YouTube usable. Here's my list (all Firefox):
- uBlock Origin - ad block
- SponsorBlock - to skip in video ads (some other nice features like highlights too)
- YouTube Row Fixer - for the tiles to adjust to the window
- Return YouTube Dislike - self explanatory
- YouTube No Translation - thanks for the suggestion!
Also DeArrow to replace clickbait titles and thumbnails with more relevant ones.
I use BlockTube. If channels advertise that their content is trash via clickbait thumbnails and video titles, I can get rid of them once and for all.
Also "Enhancer for Youtube" which allows
- Hiding Reels
- Setting a default playback speed
It's embarrassing that something like this is needed. For some reason Youtube has always been weird about languages. They have language and location information, yet they won't let you search by language, will return other languages when you search, won't search by location, won't default to another language in videos and now they are force translating video titles/descriptions and force dubbing videos. Nobody asked for any of this. They have been asked plenty of times to provide options related to languages yet they have not implemented any of it. Super super weird. When did we start to accept such bullshit even in paid products?
I actually appreciate the YouTube's auto-translate feature a lot because it allows me to search through videos in languages I don't know but still like to view videos and listen to videos in. For example, I listen to a lot of city pop and anime title songs on YouTube and a lot of them have titles in Japanese only. I absolutely would not find it as easy as I do to search through this content and listen to the music if the auto-translation feature did not exist. It just makes it easier for people who don't know the language to view videos in that language. Sure the translation quality might not be the best but it makes search a whole lot easier. This is why I find some of the comments on this thread surprising.
Having said that I am against the automatic audio translation that some people are reporting. I have not experienced it myself but that seems poorly thought out. It should be easier for people to search through items in a foreign language but that content should be served in the content originally intended.
I do not understand how this got rolled out. Surely there are _loads_ of multilingual people working at YouTube. How is there not at least an option to flag multiple languages that you speak?
At least the audio translation I can turn off. I do not know how to get the actual title of a video or its description.
It's so frustrating that I've ended up just changing my UI language from English to another language so that at least those don't get butchered.
>I do not understand how this got rolled out. Surely there are _loads_ of multilingual people working at YouTube.
Simple - at Google, feedback from internal users is ignored.
So is from external users. The only feedback that may be heard must be numeric and translate to $$$ KPI. Hint: Youtube viewers are not Googles customers.
> How is there not at least an option…
Haven't we learned in the last 15 years or so that options are bad for users? ;-)
Moreover, watching videos in a foreign language with subtitles in that same language used to be a popular tool for learning languages. Clearly, the proliferation of language skills is a serious danger to the market for AI generated instant translations and must be stopped at all costs.
Google knows which languages we speak... right? Surely...
Also, advertisers get that option, because they're the only users YT cares about.
It got rolled out due to how MASSIVE the bounce rate is if the video is in a language users don't understand. I can easily see this on average providing a better experience and lead to less people bouncing. The false positives are not enough to counteract it.
Just feels relatively easy to change the language preference to be a multiselect though.... like ignoring user backlash, I'd assume _internal users of YT_ would just get extremely annoyed.
I don't really need magic, mainly want "if language not user's language" to turn into "if language not in user's language(s)"
> This is why I find some of the comments on this thread surprising.
Two words: Preference and choice. You prefer it one way and are happy. Other prefer it another way.
The fact that they are unhappy is not that you can do what makes you happy. It is that the choice isn’t easily available to choose to do what makes them happy.
I'm against auto-translate for the exact same argument. I don't want japanese band's name to be translated. Nor I want my own music titles to be translated into other languages. There are many reasons why I wrote or said something in a specific language.
That's a fair argument to make.
My main point was that I like the auto-translation because information retrieval was so much better. But the intent behind the video of the uploader has to be maintained and respected.
But you're arguing for auto-translation of a language you don't speak. The problem is when it does it for a language we speak. If it auto-translated japanese or polish or whatever for me I wouldn't mind as I don't speak those. But it auto-translates titles from English to my native language which is just bonkers. That's the difference here.
That's a fair point.
I use English while using any YT client so I didn't notice it as much. So I changed the language on my browser to German, went to a couple of American channels and now I get some of the outrage on this thread. Weirdly, some videos get their titles translated and some don't. Not only the titles but also the descriptions get translated. Honestly, I'm surprised they aren't translating the comments at this point.
I still do understand and like the feature a lot. It's a good way to push the engagement rates I guess. A simple solution would be to show a dialog with languages where the users can pick what they speak, not touch videos in those languages and translate everything else.
> This is why I find some of the comments on this thread surprising.
In general, some of the loudest voices in any given community are the ones who are dissatisfied with the thing in question. So, there are many people (or at least the two of us!) who are reasonably satisfied with this feature and find it helpful.
Well, it's not that I don't see how this feature can add value for others, it just doesn't add value for me (it directly detracts value, actually), and I would like to be able to disable it without installing a browser extension.
So Google assumes that its user only speaks one language and needs translation for everything else. Is this the educational standard in America?
What's crazy is the US actually does have a decent proportion of multilingual speakers thanks to its history of immigration (a quick search reveals 20% of American residents are bilingual). Even Google staff should be a pretty multicultural bunch of people as they recruit globally.
I mean... 20% is not really a lot. It's probably a lot closer to 100% in most countries of the world.
Is it? That doesn’t sound right.
Depends. English first language countries remain mostly monolingual. But the rest divides into:
- educated people are expected to learn English in school and end up consuming English media anyway (where you'd expect >50% multilingual, but not everyone)
- country has many official languages (many people are multilingual, but not necessarily in English; e.g. India, Indonesia, possibly China)
- country has literacy problems (not so many left now, maybe in sub-Saharan Africa)
- proud monoglots of a language that isn't English: Japan, France (but even here a lot of people consume English media anyway)
90 % of Norwegians speak English according to a quick search I just did. 89 % in Sweden.
That’s not “most countries”.
Maybe you can argue why it's not most countries? It seems obvious to me that it is, but I also come from a country where everyone is bilingual.
Many former European colonies are mostly bilingual, e.g. Africa is highly multilingual out of necessity. Much of Europe itself is also mostly bilingual. If you want to communicate outside your own little region and your native language isn't a lingua franca, you need to be bilingual in this world.
The main holdouts when it comes to bilingualism are former imperial powers who managed to both kill domestic language diversity (e.g. France, UK, Russia) while also spreading their national language as a lingua Franca. Another group of holdouts are settler colonies such as the US, which didn't have a dominant native population after the arrival of Europeans.
But even if e.g. Russia itself isn't super bilingual, the rest of the former Soviet Union certainly is, since that is just the reality if you live in a small and/or formerly colonised country.
Is this the educational standard in America?
Even if it is, Google is itself is very international and multilingual, including the literal head of YouTube. They obviously know what the world looks like, and decided to do this anyway.
the youtube translations aren't really good either. i'm constantly puzzled by videos with absolutely nonsensical titles until i remember that it's probably auto-translated and have to work out what the original meaning was.
for example, "more plates more dates" has been translated to "Mehr Teller mehr Termine".
not allowing this feature to be disabled is such an user hostile decision.
Oh my God this is auto translation business is so incredibly annoying. Especially for people that know multiple languages. But I imagine it is the worst for people who are trying to learn another language...
I wish there were a YouTube app with this + no reels, I have YouTube premium, I am already paying, stop forcing stuff on me.
Revanced lets you remove reels
Reddit is the worst offender. I really wonder what goes through the mind of the management clerks at these companies.
I really wonder what goes through the mind of the management clerks at these companies.
"More $$$!!1"
Yeah, short term. Because power users that are used to switch between languages using internet slang do not like half baked polished translation in their IP-location language. So they leave. Remain mainly low quality users who couldn’t or didn’t wanted to switch between languages. A more powerful forever September again.
While it is annoying, reddit at lest gives you option to see original text.
ah yes, and the auto translation on reddit broke a very useful trick I used all the time
- need information about something in general -> search in English - need information about something specific for my home country (laws, local events, local shops, etc) -> search in my native language
now, I get weird auto translated content informing me about laws that are only applicable in the US and recommended products that are not even available in my home country.
Right. This was incredibly useful.
When I first encountered this on Reddit I was really confused... They were (are?) translating even the text INSIDE an image. Can't believe how expensive that must've been across the entire frontpage.
But hey, another way to shoehorn AI into being "useful".
The fact that there's a massive delay for auto dubbing is crazy to me, it's not done in real-time, why have the delay?
The worst part of this so-called “feature” is when very diligent creators from non-English-speaking countries already present in English language. But YouTube just assumes it's in their native language, so you have this horrible AI voiceover by default instead of their voice or VO artist that they use.
The same plugin for Chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/youtube-no-translat...
This is such a Google thing. I'm browsing from a German IP address, have my language set to English only and my region set to the US. This is still not enough for Google, and Youtube by extension, to not show me German search results. It is honestly incredibly frustrating. Same goes for the trending page on YT. This appears to only be based on your IP address.
This change has really been annoying me and as far as I tested, no extension worked. Quick look through network activity and it confirmed that it was done server side, no original titles were supplied anywhere. Only option was display language and titles were pre-translated to it. Just give me option to see original content, that is why I'm here
I've just installed this extension, and confirmed that -- at least for now -- it works. The translated titles will be flashed first, then replaced by the original titles.
<edit> as pointed out by @addandsubtract, I misunderstood the extension, it's about audio translation, not just titles. Sorry about that. </edit>
If you're using DeArrow, there is an option to disable those translations.
DeArrow is from the same team as SponsorBlock, it removes the clickbait thumbnails and titles with more descriptive ones. It makes the experience sooo much better. https://dearrow.ajay.app/
No, DeArrow only disables the title translations. This post is about disabling the new AI audio translations that they're rolling out.
I've been using "YouTube Anti Translate" for a year or two. I think the developer figured out all the bugs and quirks by now and it's pretty good.
Not surprised it's unfathomable for Google drones that for 74 % of English speakers it's their second language.
Google's stupidity knows no bounds.
On the topic of multi-lingual - I frequently use airplay to cast to my apple tv from my laptop but a large number of videos now have alternative language tracks that apple decides to play and there's no way to change it. No language tracks show up. Worse is it changes language tracks after a few seconds.
Any have any idea how to fix this?
Nowadays to use youtube efficiently with ADHD, you practically need all of:
(a) uBlock - this one is debatable but deals with the worst distractions especially if you're trying to learn from a video your professor put up and you have an exam to prepare for, (b) unhook - hides most of the "recommendations" that attempt to keep you on the site because you're planning to do the copmprehension questions your professor gave you for after the video, (c) something to disable "autoplay next" for the same reason as above (a uBlock rule will do it), (d) no translation. Soon we'll probably need (e) something to block AI.
Autoplay next can be simply turned off and I've had it off for years.
I would add sponsorblock to this list.
The interface to YouTube used by yt-dlp does still list the different audio tracks and labels the original one.
The problems reported by everyone in this thread sound to me like UI bugs of the player, official app or javascript in the browser, picking the wrong audio track automatically.
Thanks for this! The automatic title translation are so low quality I'm surprised the same company created Google Translator. In a lion share cases they are plain wrong, in most they are awkward, in all - they are misleading that the content somehow promises native experience.
As someone whose native language isn't English but uses English across devices and daily life, this add-on is incredibly useful. I still prefer seeing video titles in my own language.
I'm working on an app that's based around youtube videos for language learning. I had to solve the same problem of youtube automatically changing the audio track to match the device locale.
Even thought about making a spin off app with only the no-translate feature, that simply always uses the original title and audio. I guess revanced can do this too, but maybe there's enough people who don't use revanced, or don't know about this feature. Thoughts?
Few days ago I was surprised when video started in dubbed mode… I always watch everything in original audio, and turn subtitles when needed. At least for audio I found a setting, but titles… WHY?!
Thanks for sharing addon :)
I can recommend the DeArrow extension for this. It has an option to always show the untranslated title. Plus, it has the intended features such as thumbnail replacement and crowd-sourced titles. DeArrow works in Android Firefox.
It's unfortunate that YouTube is only usable with these extensions, but here we are.
I honestly can't wrap my head around what some users do just to have the "stock" experience.
In order to get a vaguely usable stock YouTube, you need to install at least UBlock, SponsorBlock, No Translation, and arguably DeArrow as well. And this only works for browsers, many people will cope with their mobile YouTube experience being hell on earth. Why do all this when you can get an alternative cross-platform client like GrayJay with all the same features (minus DeArrow for now), which works out of the box, has more privacy, and won't be completely useless the next time Google decides to shift things around a bit?
Same goes for Windows: you'll see people who go to great lengths to disable telemetry, remove Edge and sponsored content, often having to run random scripts from the internet with administrator privileges, just to have everything reset on the next Windows update. Remember how Windows users made fun of Linux users for having to open a command line for installing a browser (which isn't even true)?
I could go on: you can get Firefox and spend hours tweaking about:config to disable the anti-features, or you can get one of the dozen forks with the same patches pre-applied, yet some people will still defend the stock experience with their lives.
Google is the worst when it comes to i18n, I speak both Spanish and English, it translates reviews automatically to English, but at the same time will show me content in Spanish when I searched for something in English.
Can I get the same for Google Play store? I will always take original version over shit-tier automatic translation.
If only I could add this to the YouTube app on my TV (as well as uBlock Origin)
I‘ve seen YT randomly deciding to translate videos shown in the the Telegram iOS client. No way around it other than view it on YT directly.
Via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44413749
i dont mind the others, but the automatic audio switch is very offensive to the creators
I think creators have the option to turn them off in the video settings. Unfortunately, many do not.
I want the option but i don't want it to be the default even after i repeatedly switch to the original audio
Unfortunately the extensions are not available for android....
Extensions are in general not available for Android (or at least chrome for android)?
Is there any way to achieve this on mobile iOS?
Thank you!
I feel like its profoundly American to assume everyone wants to see everything in one language.
I regularly consume content in two languages, my partner 3, and many of my friends are in the same boat. Please either allow me to just blacklist languages to not translate automatically or always keep content in the original language but allow changing after engaging with it. Its insane that this requires an extension for a company with as much resources as google.
The translations of video titles are absolutely atrocious and rarely mean anything near the intent of the original title.
Currently the extension doesn't work in Firefox for Android. I hope this feature is added in the future.
thanks
Isnn't there any settings on Youtube to disable translation from Turkish into English? Why Youtube assumes that I am single lingual? It makes me crazy! I use Android and Youtube in English because it is thr original language. I watch sometimes Turksh videos from Turkish people but why the hell it translates into English?!
forced autotransation of anything is the worst. useless. whoever thought this was a good idea is just bored and seeking justification for their employment tbh
Is this an example of developers assuming they know what users want without actually engaging with and asking said users? Or are the people reaching for plugins like this actually in a minority?
The worst thing about this for me is not the language issue but that the translations are AI generated shite. If it was a case of multilingual channels producing videos in multiple languages then it makes sense that a user with language set to German would receive the German version by default. But to give users an AI generated translation by default? That's horrible.
I get the impression someone in Google/YouTube has this grand vision of it being like a Babel Fish just seamlessly translating voices into your own language. The trouble is Babel Fish is science fiction. Douglas Adams described it as "feeding" the speech centres of your brain directly, not translating the audio into a shitty generated copy.
I won't be contributing much to rational discussion, but this "feature" annoys me so much that I just have to rant for a bit.
----
Like, is nobody in Google multi-lingual? Who the fuck thought this -- not auto-translation, but forced auto-translation -- is a good idea? Surely for an organization that purportedly only hires the cream-of-the-crop, they'll have a larger fraction of employees that speak more than one language? Look, I'm resting-and-vesting like the rest of y'all, but if I were in the team that implemented this, I'd definitely speak up, and let them, up to my skip-level, know that this is terrible. The implication of either possibilities had occurred, yet the feature still shipped, is harrowing.
Even if the developers only speak one language, they must know at least three -- cream-of-the-crop, remember? -- programming languages, right? Imagine if, when you're first hired into Google, you declare your programming language of choice, say Go; then, henceforth whenever you check out the source code, irrespective of its original form, it gets auto-translated into Go, and you can't turn that off? Checking out Pixel first-stage bootloader code, almost certainly written in assembly -- nope! We know better: you're getting that in Go. Fuck, I shouldn't be giving them ideas!
Could they not imagine how horrible this would be, and by analogy when applied to human languages, be also just as horrid?
YouTube's often been cited as a great resource for learning new things. Well, now it's useless for, that's right, learning a second language! I wonder why this Spanish for beginners video's all in English? /s
Speaking about shit features, let's throw "Stable Volume" into the pile. At least this one remembers your preferences...most of the time. When I watch ASMR -- yes I'll admit in public I'm that guy -- videos, and am just about to fall asleep, I just love to be jolted awake by a loud robotic voice's rendition of tapping sounds. Maybe my grumpiness's due to my lack of sleep!
Why would I want this? I watched a translated YouTube video and it was great.
If I don't want the translated sound track there's a button right there in settings to change it. Why do I need this extension?
I‘m German, watching a German creator in a German-language recording.
Only that YouTube decides to use their Mickey Mouse sounding AI voice to deliver an English audio track. Not every time, but at least a third of the time. I have to hunt for the audio setting each time, because you cannot turn off AI voices permanently.
Tell me again how I‘m wrong.
When using Brave, the audio setting does not exist on the Youtube website. I have to go into iOS settings and change the language there. Unbelievable.
I only love it when their Mickey Mouse sounding AI voice turns ads into a real clown show.
Imagine how they spent big money developing a slogan for their brand or product and then AI comes around with a near literal translation that makes no sense whatsoever and that is what people hear.
That is the only positive side, otherwise it is what you wrote. A real pain.
Automatically translated titles are often just wrong and misleading, and there is no way to turn this "feature" off.
If you understand more than one language, you'll get half of the videos sloppily translated for no reason. There is no way to tell YouTube not to do this for specific languages.
It is beyond annoying.
How about "if you want the translated sound track there's a button for you in settings to change it" instead?
I guess this extension is really aimed at multilingual viewers who don’t want English (or any language they already know) automatically translated into their native tongue.
A better solution would be a ‘blacklist’ of languages you understand—so YouTube only auto‑translates from languages you don’t speak, and always leaves familiar languages in their original form.
> who don’t want English (or any language they already know) automatically translated into their native tongue.
It‘s even the other way around!
> A better solution would be a ‘blacklist’ of languages you understand—so YouTube only auto‑translates from languages you don’t speak, and always leaves familiar languages in their original form.
A better solution would have been to just not ship this disaster of a "feature" in the first place.
I wouldn't want my browser to automatically translate every page I go to (without my consent!) either, and that would've been a much easier job!
I don't know, maybe I didn't look hard enough but the last time it happened to me I couldn't find a way to hear the original.
It was a video in French over accents, so the automatic English translation kind of made it useless. I'm French anyway, why translate it to English? I don't even live in an English-speaking country either (not that translating to Dutch would have been better).
There is no option on mobile.
Some people speak multiple languages, and don't need every video not in their language translated.
>People make free things for other people who need it
>"Why would I want this?"
Having the option is fine.
But showing me bad English translations of video titles from my native language without option to disable is stupid.
Defaulting to auto dubbed videos for a language I speak and having to hit that small button each time is annoying.
It's cool for some stuff, when I don't speak the language, and where the content is valuable, but it has to be an option.
(Also, I for one pay for YouTube premium)
Because displaced honorifics alone is too much. Translated audio railroads is match was a draw. worse.
For example if you listen to music in a different language you may be familiar with the foriegn name of a song, but not the translation of it. This makes things confusing.
Also for the sound track sometimes there isn't even an option to disable it depending on what experiment or client you are using.
Oof a lot of hate for this feature. I agree more configuration would be nice, but at the same time, this is absolute science fiction come to life. Even for people who speak multiple languages: let's say you speak English, German, and French. That means you understand about 25%[1] of other people on the planet. That's 75% of videos which you would otherwise _never see or understand_. This feature is for people who _don't_ speak the most popular languages -- it lets _their_ videos get views when otherwise they would never be seen. And that's been my experience with the feature. I saw a recipe fully in Spanish because of the auto-dubbing. I actually want this enabled more globally, I want to see more fully non-English videos recommended to me from around the world.
And this feature is relatively new, I think they started rolling it out only a few months ago. I'm sure configuration options will pop up.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num... and assuming the videos in a language is ~proportional to L1+L2 speakers . That's a simplifying assumption, because I would guess English is more highly represented. Because people likely make more videos in English because there's a bigger audience for it. If only there was a way to allow more non-English speakers to be able to be understood/gain traction....
While I agree that good automatic translations are great, the fact that the current unconfigurable mess that doesn't even respect the user's settings (neither the settings of their Google Account nor the settings of their browser), makes it a grating experience to multilinguals, who are believed to be the majority in the world.
+1! That's a reasonable take. The takes on here saying Google is a shill for introducing this feature, that no one wants it, that it's useless, are the takes that I found frustrating in this comment thread.
But also I might just be lucky, I speak multiple languages and have traveled into various countries, and have never had youtube show me anything other than English wherever I go.
Edit: And although multilinguals are in the majority over monolinguals (I think, citation needed), I think being multilingual still makes you part of an even larger majority, which is humans who are unable to watch the majority of videos due to language.
Of course I would understand the other 75%. Automatic subtitles have been a thing for ages and they have the benefit of not cutting out all personality and humor in the video.
If I watch a foreign language movie I always prefer subtitles with original audio (and those are usually dubbed by human, professional dubbers, so much higher quality). Why would I treat YT any differently?
+1 for subtitles. I do think that subtitles don't gain the same level of traction; and people complain about auto-translated subtitles as well (and auto-subtitles on their own!). I think auto-dubbing might be more successful at allowing folks from smaller languages/communities the opportunity to gain audiences outside of those smaller languages/communities.
The main difference between youtube and foreign language films is most creators on youtube don't have a budget for professional dubbers, so you either only watch big creators who do have that budget, or you have to compromise.
+1 even if you don't understand the language, it's nice to hear the real voice.
This auto-dub-translation feature is also problematic in that viewers don't realise it's happening. I think that is unreasonably misleading. It could be great as an option, but it should really prompt you before switching it on.
That way people would not be forced to use it, and people would be aware of it.