Anybody knows the business reason for this feature to exist? most people here and in other places are incredibly frustrated with auto-translate and the inability to turn it off. I include myself in that bunch.
There are two potential reasons in my mind:
- Youtube folks A/B tested it and it got more engagement - n/ views, time viewed per video, etc. (but were they tracking the right metrics? ie did they capture user frustration)
- Some 'guru' at Youtube decided "it's good UX" and "it's what everybody wants". In such case, the damage the 'guru' is doing is unbelievable. Millions of people annoyed across the world... every single day.
Well, surely the idea is that anyone can watch any video in any language. Especially enabling the non-English-speaking world to consume the much larger corpus of English-speaking content.
The idea is great. They just botched it at the UI level.
In practice it means clicking a video you think is in your native language but it's actually in English with low quality auto-subs, but there's no reason Youtube couldn't improve the UX here, like indicate that it's been auto-translated or let you easily filter out content that's not in your language.
If you can't turn it off, it destroys the platform as a host for language courses. I'm a native English speaker, I want the German language stuff to be presented in the original German as a way to learn German. I don't want the English stuff dubbed into German, because my German isn't good enough for e.g. PBS Space Time in German.
Hey I am trying to get back into German. What are some of the good channels that you've found? I remember Fokus Deutsch.
Spent 4 years in Germany but never took a course out of sheer laziness. I can read children's books but every native speaker sounds like they are zipping along at 2x speed.
> I can read children's books but every native speaker sounds like they are zipping along at 2x speed.
I generally play most of the podcasts at double-speed precisely because of this. Real speakers are much faster than the careful slow pace of most internet content, and double-speed playback forces me to develop gist-comprehension even if I miss the odd word here or there.
I think the idea is to eventually get machine translations just generally work, by start shooting in the general direction and pushing forward / throwing solutions at the wall and seeing which sticks. They must really not like how YouTube cross-language viewership currently work.
Yeah, and that's only for auto-dubbing which barely has any penetration. Most videos don't have that, just a translated title that doesn't match the audio track.
You gotta remember that "think of the average person, and then remember 50% are dumber than that".
By doing this, Youtube has probably 10x'd available content for "dumb" ppl to watch. Respectfully, my parents are in that cohort, and I suspect my father will happily watch AI translated and dubbed woodworking channels and not care at all. He "wins" here.
I have to acknowledge that there are probably more people like him then like me who want to have Japanese videos in Japanese in my US feed.
YT needs to make it configurable and I'm fine to turn it off, but the fact that I need an extension to do so is very much lame. As well as that I'm not sure uploaders are aware of their videos being displayed in this way.
I've disabled dubbing on my channel completely. I think the world was a better place when people made an effort to learn languages, and making material in any language available in any other removes some of the magic from the world.
Multilingual people not only exist, but they're the majority in the world, with some estimates reaching over 60% of the global population (others are low 50s).
Even the US, which is a pretentious bubble, has a great many multilingual people. English is by far the most common, but many people speak it as a second language or not at all.
Another issue is not all people, whether they are proficient in one language or more, speak the dominant language of the country they reside in. Which language does some geofence decide Indians speak? Do Eastern Canadians speak English or French? (Officially both, and bilingual signage is a legal requirement.)
Maybe I'm travelling in Japan and I only know very basic Japanese, but the geo-targeting decides everything should be in Japanese. Or maybe someone is immigrating to the US and doesn't speak English (which is not a legal requirement in any way). We have many non-English speakers who live in the US.
Honestly, if it gets to the point that it's providing pressure against the use of a language where it's commonly spoken, it could arguably be considered ethnic cleansing adjacent...
>What's dumb about watching dubbed woodworking videos?
Nothing necessarily as long as the user knows it's dubbed and not the original, and so has the potential to judge whether the content is reliable knowing things may be off. Doing everything as instructed, with just some mistranslated units can be at best frustrating and at worst very dangerous
Your comment appears very hostile considering the fact that the parent you’re replying to was actually doing exactly that, being considerate that there are many people that prefer things to be dubbed as they don’t master English all that well.
> And what part of watching japanese videos in japanese makes superior?
We do have to acknowledge that putting in the effort to learn a second language (whatever language) "takes more skill" than watching a dubbed video, ya?
I took up the hobby of learning a second language to challenge myself. If I watch the videos dubbed in English, where is the challenge?
> failing to acknowledge that the world is diverse and people have diverse needs that we can't even start to imagine.
I think you missed my point because I (lovingly) called my dad dumb -- Youtube has absolutely liberated him and given him access to a rich world of woodworking content that cable TV could never. This feature is helping him access more of that.
Youtube also gave me a world of Japanese content that I could never imagine, but this feature is hurting me by making it harder for me to get the content I'm looking for. Maybe I'm no longer Youtube's target audience, but 1 toggle switch to disable this feature and I'm back in the target audience.
Most Americans speak one language. Therefore American product designers think everyone speaks one language and only ever wants to hear everything in their one language...
I agree, it's annoying. I speak multiple languages and like to consume the original whenever possible.
Funny thing is that people are complaining with channel creators. Was in a discord where the moderators desperately asked people to explain it to them because people in English speaking countries most likely do not have this terrible experience and don't understand the rage.
I wouldn't mind and I would actually prefer if things were translated correctly, adapting to local slang, cultural references and the likes. As of now translations are weird if not outright cringey. This is a problem with LLMs in general (probably because they're trained mostly on English data), although to a lesser degree, but enough that I have to correct them daily.
My experience with LLMs (OpenAI) is that it translates Romanian very well (including local slang), but that Google Translate (which I assume is not LLM-based) is very bad. Take for example this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azwUg6cP9BQ .
Original title: "Swedish warm foundation for the house. Full construction process"
Actual title on YouTube in Romanian: "Fond de ten suedez cald pentru casa. Proces complet de construcție"
OpenAI translation: "Fundație suedeză caldă pentru casă. Procesul complet de construcție."
The OpenAI translation is perfect. The Google one is trash. It doesn't just omit diacritics, but translates "foundation" as "fond de ten" (literally "background of tan") a term used in makeup instead of "fundație".
LLMs have enough context here ("house", "construction") to know that "foundation" refers to the term used in construction not the one in makeup.
Maybe youtube push audience to view auto translated/dubbed foreign language content from regions where they don't have to pay out to creators, or pay as much. TBH the more content I can view the better, just give me a toggle to set default language and a button to native video language.
- some non-guru added a potentiality useful feature, but since there is no strong engineering culture around UI quality (which also translates into inability to do proper A/B or any other testing you capture the dissatisfaction in relevant metrics), the pain persists
It's extremely sinister. The grand prize is feeding people AI-generated content, and completely removing the human factor. Many platforms started as social media, but converted into content delivery platforms. Which is cool, except content creators can be problematic. If you remove them out of equation, you basically get audience to watch whatever slop you want them to watch, with zero human interaction at all. Spotify is already taking serious steps by promoting AI-generated music. In this context, forcing AI-generated translations onto people is a step towards getting them used to listening AI-generated voice. And you can market this easily by saying "we just want people to have more cross-cultural communication, no evil here".
I don't want to completely disregard AI-generated content. Some of it can be actually good, and I use AI as a talking companion. But at the same time it's a technology that can easily be abused. And it will be abused. And we'll love it. Except those few nutjobs who resist, but nobody will care. Free speech doesn't matter when nobody's listening.
AFAIK it's up to the video owner to choose whether or not they enable these translations. When I found this out, I lost respect for so many creators, because they turned on this shitty feature.
I have been using an untranslate add-on like this one and have been absolutely loving it. Since YouTube has been AI translating video titles and dubbing contents it has been suggesting foreign videos in users' home feed.
The way these untranslate add-ons work (layman's explanation) is that they fetch the original title and audio and reinsert it, but the recommendation for the video stays in your feed. This has resulted in loads of super interesting foreign language content in my feed which is just awesome.
Cars are one of my YouTube interests and seeing loads of cool old car content from different parts of the world has been fascinating. Not only were different models popular in different places but the things people value in a car are also wildly different across the globe. And I get to listen to a cool foreign language while discovering this!
One downside is that to the YouTube algorithm, it probably seems like I absolutely LOVE this autodubbing feature, going crazy for all these translated videos. That could not be further from the truth: my youtube feed has become completely unusable without an untranslate add-on since this update.
Unbelievable that YouTube has not made this feature configurable. I am a language learner and use YouTube to find target language content. It’s very difficult now because you can no longer trust the title of the video to tell you what language it was intended for. Would have been very simple to add a settings toggle. This is one of the worst app inconveniences I’ve come across in recent years.
This is what baffles me the most. It's not just that they're foisting machine translation on people to boost some nonsense KPI, but that they're assuming that everyone speaks only one language. Tech is awfully hegemonic, sure, but it is unimaginable that only oblivious monolingual people worked on this feature. Did they just ignore internal complaints about this before they shipped it? How does a feature even get built like this?
most open source clients allow you do pick the language and subtitle just fine. youtube backend is pretty decent, despite the frontend team being there just to add ads.
i recommend "PipePipe" on android.
if you are waiting for them to add that feature on the native player, remember google haven't added a single feature to gmail app besides reading email... you cannot even create a filter.
Google has always been a pain when it comes to internationalisation.
The number of hoops you have to jump through to get results from the actual Google page when you are outside of the US is mind boggling. I don’t even know if it’s still possible.
Not op. But my experience is both. It's impossible to get Google to search for a specific region in a specific language. DuckDuckGo is far better on this. You can use add regions to search for, and quickly toggle them.
Every time I find a video that was shot in my mother tongue auto-translated into English I want to bang my head against the wall. I've told Google in multiple ways that I'm multilingual and it just doesn't get it. It's worst on mobile, where you can't switch the audio channel to the original sound.
Respectfully, at this point, do we need Googlers to explain?
Structurally: launch-dependent levels/career advancement. Design wise: massive over reliance on A/B testing. Philosophically: a company hell bent on observing, categorizing, and exploiting us in extremis in exchange for only a tiny "relevant" slice of their potential deliverable.
Because of their focus on "scale", they have never cared about any individual user. The indifference of their technical systems is absolute.
After 25 you can’t really learn new languages without considerable investment and effort. Translating is the only option for the vast majority of people.
> After 25 you can’t really learn new languages without considerable investment and effort.
It takes considerable investment and effort before you’re 25, too, you just don’t notice it because it happens slowly over a long period in school and via immersion.
I move around a lot so I’ve had to learn a few new languages as an adult - at least to basic proficiency, if not approaching fluency - and I don’t think it’s really any more difficult than it was when I was a kid, except that I now recognize how difficult it is.
This is a misleading take. Do you consider the decade of language “learning” that a child does before they are “fluent” to not be a considerable effort?
Many people learn new languages all the time for a variety of reasons. In some regions of the world, it is expected of you to learn a half dozen languages throughout your lifetime.
I’m not against translating but it should not be the default in society if there is also no opt-out.
As someone who started learning a new language in my late 20s after a move across the world, I haven’t found it any more difficult than any other skill that requires diligent practice. Guitar, programming, driving; language is a skill. Since western humans tend to only learn them at a young age it can be easy to forget that.
>Translating is the only option for the vast majority of people.
The key word here being 'option'.
>After 25 you can’t really learn new languages without considerable investment and effort.
And by enabling this translation by default, without any obvious way to disable it, they are also making it harder for < 25 year-olds to be exposed to other languages, which will itself make it harder for them to learn them. For instance, consider the effect of TV and film dubbing on Spain's proficiency in English[0]:
«Spain and Portugal share many geographical and cultural traits. But the number of Spanish speakers is double that of Portuguese speakers. Again, maybe in part because of this, Portugal uses subtitling while in Spain television is dubbed. And, as a result, Portugal’s results in the TOEFL exams are much better than Spain’s.»
Not true at all. I've learned one language after I hit 39 and started leaning another when I hit 45, 7 months in learning it ~15 min a day and I'm bordering B1 level.
I am not alone in saying that I am a product of learning another language after 25, far after 25. It takes work for sure, and effort. But you're missing the point in that YouTube has now made that level of effort that needs to be committed, impossible.
One thing this kind of thing severely hurts is a lot of devices, services are affected by local laws, units, concepts, brands sometimes severely altering their function.
- Searching for a guide on say a car infotainment system would be totally different here from someone explaining in the USA or germany. Now I see a ton of titles in my language, only to find out it's information is completely useless to me because a menu, button or whatever doesen't even exist.
- Recommendations on cooking advice become almost worthless since a grading system for flours is arcane, brands I've never heard of, compounded by some imperial units in the mix. A recipe turns into a research project
- when searching for non-native content I may avoid content in my language, since I know the subject is definitely not relevant anywhere near me, so perfectly valid content will be missed
Worse yet, sometimes physical products claiming to have localized manual will instead have used some very inferior version to google translate and give dangerous advice about safe handling of the device.
- Searching for a guide on say a car infotainment system would be totally different here from someone explaining in the USA or germany. Now I see a ton of titles in my language, only to find out it's information is completely useless to me because a menu, button or whatever doesen't even exist.
This is so annoying. I can't believe they couldn't understand this, and there are many multilingual people.
YouTube settings are notoriously volatile even on the same device and being logged in. Subtitles are enabled every other day all of a sudden without any need (even for my natural language content).
Since they rolled out the auto-trabslation thing the same happens, I have to switch to original English every few days.
I _love_ when youtube auto-translates english titles to my native language and then asks me if I want to translate the rare comments in my native language to english.
It seem they just don't contemplate people speaking two or more languages, *even though the setting in the google account is there*.
Great! Dutch living in Austria and YouTube is randomly dubbing videos from one language to another with no way of turning it off, which is my real WTF here.
How did they fail to make this an option in the first place?
To be very clear, I don’t even want to translate videos in languages that YouTube know I don’t understand. Much less in videos languages I do understand.
Also I don’t think it’s a good idea to use AI in any part of this chain unless there is user driven corrections. Seems like even big TikTok/Instagram accounts use some auto subtitling machinery and it’s invariably wrong. Why even bother? Or why not just manually subtitle if it’s a 10 second English video and the text is in English? Why use automation at all for that?
YouTube apparently does not understand that bilingual people exist. I do not want translations between German and English, I understand both languages just fine.
I do not want to backwards translate some nonsense autogenerated YouTube translation to understand what some video title means. I do not ever want to watch an automatic dub where some AI voice replaces the actual language I understand.
Browsers got this right "never translate German" was enough to fix the auto translation feature. Somehow one of the most valuable companies in the world, managing one of the largest websites in the world can not implement something that basic.
Everyone I've spoken to in my circle hates this feature.
We're all fairly intelligent people — if we needed audio dubbing, we'd turn it on ourselves.
But to have auto-dub enabled by default is, frankly, incredulous.
If someone from Google could explain the rationale behind forcing this on users, I’d genuinely love to understand it.
I ll give you an even better idea for a youtube extension, if nobody makes it, i ll most certainly do. I need to pin a particular comment on a set of videos matching a criteria and change this pinned comment across all these videos every now and then, like for example when i put a new video out, i would like to link to this from the pinned comment of relevant videos. this is such a hassle doing manually in current times. i am amazed nobody has come up with a pinned comment manager for youtube yet
The fact that this needs to exist is a testament to how bad some things in YouTube are. They were able to make me quit being a paying customer with shitty things like that.
It’s crazy that an extension is needed to fix this. When I first saw that “feature” I thought it was some bug and YouTube would fix soon, but they don’t seem to care about it.
This really needs to be configurable on a per-account basis. I'm using YouTube mostly on mobile devices and TVs, without the possibility to use addons.
The required settings are quite simple (a lot of social media platforms have them): Setting a list of languages that should never be translated, and setting a preferred language the other ones should be translated to.
I guess the silicon valley people who develop YouTube can't grasp the concept that there are people out there who speak multiple languages.
Surprisingly, it isn't. You can change the language in your google account and it will take that into account for what to translate and into what language, but you can't turn it off completely.
I don't know who thought this was a good user experience, because it's one of the most frustrating features I've ever had to deal with. I'm german, but almost all of the things I watch are in english. So usually I will just ignore recommendations with german titles. Except I can't do that anymore, because there's no guarantee that youtube didn't randomly decide to translate the title of an english video into german. And recently, they've added auto-translated audio, which is even worse, because now I'm opening an english video and a terrible robotic german voice is talking to me and I manually need to switch to the original source.
It's also not consistent behavior. It's not like all videos on the front page are looking like they're in german. It's just some of them and afaik there's no way to tell.
And you genuinely can't turn it off completely. Incredibly frustrating and I'm just puzzled by the thought-process that lead to this decision. This would be a pretty cool feature if it was consistently applied and freely configurable.
Moreover I could still prefer movies in my native language *but properly dubbed by some voice actors*, not by some random AI that's going to mess up all the context.
Which is insane to me. Silicon Valley is filled to the brim with multi-lingual people. And yet so many decisions that are coming out have no understanding of languages
Even for the monolingual Google employees it's not uncommon for them to travel to other locales, even as part of their job, so they would be on the receiving end of this "experience" too. We've had 2 decades of experience with this being an issue. One would think that they'd incorporate this "edge case" into their design process matrix by now.
I wouldn't be surprised at all if they one day decided that to have an experience of having no user content automatically translated, you have to pay for the privilege. Call it a multilinguality tax.
I'm in France, but my Google, browsers and devices languages are English. So Youtube randomly auto-dubs (and auto-translates the title of) some French videos into English, and some English videos into French. But they're never the same videos depending on the devices or the browsers. However, the automatic subtitles during the preview remain in the original langage.
Do note that when rolling out features like these, they geoblock them, even on a per run basis, so it might be happening a lot throughout the world but it just hasn't reached your country. For an example, mobile YouTube in the US lets me minimize the video and multitask while still seeing a picture-in-picture window and the audio, while as soon as one lands on France that feature gets immediately disabled.
I've heard about different features in different regions, but GP is also in France.
I am also not connected to my account when I browse in Edge (it's my work PC, it also uses a separate IP), so I don't think it's related to the feature being rolled out on a per-account basis.
I'm in France, my devices are set to en-GB, I've watched only English videos (plus the odd French one) yet youtube decides to auto translate audio in German and lately in Spanish.
I'd love to have a robotic german voice. All I get is the clickbait MrBeast TikTok voice. I get a real reaction when I hear it. I try so hard to avoid the current social media content. It's unbearable. The shock is even greater when I do stumble across it.
Youtube is really the only website that is straight up unusable for me without a set of Addons (uBlock, sponsorBlock, Unhook).
> I don't know who thought this was a good user experience
Which youtube decision of recent years ever thought about user experience?
It's all "company bets" and "promotion tracks".
When it was a fight against TikTok you got Shorts that you can't get rid of.
Now you probably have to "show commitment to our AI offerings" or something. So you get autotranslated videos by a team which will get 500k bonuses and will move on in a month
> Except I can't do that anymore, because there's no guarantee that youtube didn't randomly decide to translate the title of an english video into german
Sp you clicked when you wouldn't have, somewhere an engagement graph went a notch up, and someone will get a pat on the back.
I am Russian but am also fluent in English so I watch videos in both these languages. This automatic translation doesn't happen that often with my usage of YouTube, but when it does, it frustrates the crap out of me. So yes, I did look for a setting to turn it off, but didn't find any.
Relatedly, Google and Microsoft insist on showing machine-translated developer docs by default. A translate button is fine, but doing it by default?! I struggle to understand who thought that this could possibly ever be a good idea.
You'd guess so but no. If you're bilingual you have to choose one language, and videos in the other will get this ridiculously bad literal auto-translation treatment. Pure insanity, and something that makes me mad daily.
Apparently not, or the setting is not easily accessible, and it baffles me it's the case and someone at YouTube probably is proud of it on top of getting their promotion for such a terrible feature.
On desktop you can at least change it at runtime (like auto-dubbing), but on mobile they have made this completely impossible. I keep running into (originally) german video's that have been auto-translated to english for me, which I really dislike, since I can perfectly understand german. There's no way to disable this and just get subs only (which can be toggled on/off)
I thought that yt-dlp uses the mobile interface, it shows the different language options and identifies the original one, the official mobile player must be making the choice of which one to use.
As a polish YouTube user who wants to watch content in both languages, it's an infuriating no. YouTube started translating titles recently for me, and the translations are pure nonsense. I'm not exaggerating, it's dumb word for word translation with no context. I have to reverse engineer titles now. Even more recently they turned audio translation on too with the most ear piercing voice possible, but that can be turned off. Title translation can't be turned off.
Yup. I look up videos with Polish titles precisely because I want local content made in Poland telling about things specific to Poland, not some other stuff which turns out to be in English made for other locales.
But I guess they see my frustration as "engagement".
> because I want local content made in Poland telling about things specific to Poland,
I used to use site:reddit.com as my go to must-use keyword whenever I wanted to look for something on Google, but since they introduced automated translation in my language (French) it has become a nightmare because I would find irrelevant content written for other places even when I type my search in French. You see, they had the great idea to not only automatically translate entire subreddits and comments but also have the translated forms be indexed by Google!
So now you would try to look for comments on, for example, great retail shops for niche products and click links that talk about shopping in the USA or Canada. Hateful.
I can't really describe how much I hate this without going into the most vulgar of expletives.
site:reddit.com was the last bastion of finding things quickly on google without stumbling upon ton of markov chain / copy paste crap content. Now it's being ruined by this translation nonsense + LLM bots.
Anybody knows the business reason for this feature to exist? most people here and in other places are incredibly frustrated with auto-translate and the inability to turn it off. I include myself in that bunch.
There are two potential reasons in my mind: - Youtube folks A/B tested it and it got more engagement - n/ views, time viewed per video, etc. (but were they tracking the right metrics? ie did they capture user frustration) - Some 'guru' at Youtube decided "it's good UX" and "it's what everybody wants". In such case, the damage the 'guru' is doing is unbelievable. Millions of people annoyed across the world... every single day.
Well, surely the idea is that anyone can watch any video in any language. Especially enabling the non-English-speaking world to consume the much larger corpus of English-speaking content.
The idea is great. They just botched it at the UI level.
In practice it means clicking a video you think is in your native language but it's actually in English with low quality auto-subs, but there's no reason Youtube couldn't improve the UX here, like indicate that it's been auto-translated or let you easily filter out content that's not in your language.
If you can't turn it off, it destroys the platform as a host for language courses. I'm a native English speaker, I want the German language stuff to be presented in the original German as a way to learn German. I don't want the English stuff dubbed into German, because my German isn't good enough for e.g. PBS Space Time in German.
Hey I am trying to get back into German. What are some of the good channels that you've found? I remember Fokus Deutsch.
Spent 4 years in Germany but never took a course out of sheer laziness. I can read children's books but every native speaker sounds like they are zipping along at 2x speed.
On YouTube, by far the best is Easy German. Their playlists also divide the content by levels from A1 to C2, as well as by theme: https://www.youtube.com/@EasyGerman/playlists
They also have podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/easy-german-learn-germ...
More generally, there's also good podcast content from:
• DW news: https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/langsam-gesprochene-na...
• Coffee Break German: https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/coffee-break-german/id...
> I can read children's books but every native speaker sounds like they are zipping along at 2x speed.
I generally play most of the podcasts at double-speed precisely because of this. Real speakers are much faster than the careful slow pace of most internet content, and double-speed playback forces me to develop gist-comprehension even if I miss the odd word here or there.
Sure, but it kills the UX for people who speak more than one language. Which is probably the majority of YouTube users (outside the US).
I think the idea is to eventually get machine translations just generally work, by start shooting in the general direction and pushing forward / throwing solutions at the wall and seeing which sticks. They must really not like how YouTube cross-language viewership currently work.
in my feed there is a small pill that reads "auto-dubbed". Easy to miss though.
Yeah, and that's only for auto-dubbing which barely has any penetration. Most videos don't have that, just a translated title that doesn't match the audio track.
You gotta remember that "think of the average person, and then remember 50% are dumber than that".
By doing this, Youtube has probably 10x'd available content for "dumb" ppl to watch. Respectfully, my parents are in that cohort, and I suspect my father will happily watch AI translated and dubbed woodworking channels and not care at all. He "wins" here.
I have to acknowledge that there are probably more people like him then like me who want to have Japanese videos in Japanese in my US feed.
YT needs to make it configurable and I'm fine to turn it off, but the fact that I need an extension to do so is very much lame. As well as that I'm not sure uploaders are aware of their videos being displayed in this way.
I've disabled dubbing on my channel completely. I think the world was a better place when people made an effort to learn languages, and making material in any language available in any other removes some of the magic from the world.
> By doing this, Youtube has probably 10x'd available content for "dumb" ppl to watch.
But is that content really watchable for them?
A generic algorithm is leaving money on the table if that’s the case.
What's dumb about watching dubbed woodworking videos? And what part of watching japanese videos in japanese makes superior?
You know what's dumb, though: failing to acknowledge that the world is diverse and people have diverse needs that we can't even start to imagine.
I'm happy for your dad that AI has opened for him the gates to even more content to watch from around the world about his hobby.
> And what part of watching japanese videos in japanese makes superior?
Bilingual people exist and the AI translation YouTube currently uses sounds very unnatural and destroys everything that isn't voice.
Multilingual people not only exist, but they're the majority in the world, with some estimates reaching over 60% of the global population (others are low 50s).
Even the US, which is a pretentious bubble, has a great many multilingual people. English is by far the most common, but many people speak it as a second language or not at all.
Another issue is not all people, whether they are proficient in one language or more, speak the dominant language of the country they reside in. Which language does some geofence decide Indians speak? Do Eastern Canadians speak English or French? (Officially both, and bilingual signage is a legal requirement.)
Maybe I'm travelling in Japan and I only know very basic Japanese, but the geo-targeting decides everything should be in Japanese. Or maybe someone is immigrating to the US and doesn't speak English (which is not a legal requirement in any way). We have many non-English speakers who live in the US.
Honestly, if it gets to the point that it's providing pressure against the use of a language where it's commonly spoken, it could arguably be considered ethnic cleansing adjacent...
Subtitles is way to go, esp. for likes of movies. For educainment I’m fine with dubbing. Obviously let me disable or enable multiple subtitles.
>What's dumb about watching dubbed woodworking videos?
Nothing necessarily as long as the user knows it's dubbed and not the original, and so has the potential to judge whether the content is reliable knowing things may be off. Doing everything as instructed, with just some mistranslated units can be at best frustrating and at worst very dangerous
Your comment appears very hostile considering the fact that the parent you’re replying to was actually doing exactly that, being considerate that there are many people that prefer things to be dubbed as they don’t master English all that well.
> And what part of watching japanese videos in japanese makes superior?
We do have to acknowledge that putting in the effort to learn a second language (whatever language) "takes more skill" than watching a dubbed video, ya?
I took up the hobby of learning a second language to challenge myself. If I watch the videos dubbed in English, where is the challenge?
> failing to acknowledge that the world is diverse and people have diverse needs that we can't even start to imagine.
I think you missed my point because I (lovingly) called my dad dumb -- Youtube has absolutely liberated him and given him access to a rich world of woodworking content that cable TV could never. This feature is helping him access more of that.
Youtube also gave me a world of Japanese content that I could never imagine, but this feature is hurting me by making it harder for me to get the content I'm looking for. Maybe I'm no longer Youtube's target audience, but 1 toggle switch to disable this feature and I'm back in the target audience.
Most Americans speak one language. Therefore American product designers think everyone speaks one language and only ever wants to hear everything in their one language...
I agree, it's annoying. I speak multiple languages and like to consume the original whenever possible.
[dead]
The execs want everyone focused on AI and building features related to AI. This is AI. So it is built.
Funny thing is that people are complaining with channel creators. Was in a discord where the moderators desperately asked people to explain it to them because people in English speaking countries most likely do not have this terrible experience and don't understand the rage.
I wouldn't mind and I would actually prefer if things were translated correctly, adapting to local slang, cultural references and the likes. As of now translations are weird if not outright cringey. This is a problem with LLMs in general (probably because they're trained mostly on English data), although to a lesser degree, but enough that I have to correct them daily.
My experience with LLMs (OpenAI) is that it translates Romanian very well (including local slang), but that Google Translate (which I assume is not LLM-based) is very bad. Take for example this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azwUg6cP9BQ .
Original title: "Swedish warm foundation for the house. Full construction process"
Actual title on YouTube in Romanian: "Fond de ten suedez cald pentru casa. Proces complet de construcție"
OpenAI translation: "Fundație suedeză caldă pentru casă. Procesul complet de construcție."
The OpenAI translation is perfect. The Google one is trash. It doesn't just omit diacritics, but translates "foundation" as "fond de ten" (literally "background of tan") a term used in makeup instead of "fundație".
LLMs have enough context here ("house", "construction") to know that "foundation" refers to the term used in construction not the one in makeup.
I want more of it. Just make it clear it is auto translated. It opens up a lot of views outside the english sphere
Maybe youtube push audience to view auto translated/dubbed foreign language content from regions where they don't have to pay out to creators, or pay as much. TBH the more content I can view the better, just give me a toggle to set default language and a button to native video language.
- some non-guru added a potentiality useful feature, but since there is no strong engineering culture around UI quality (which also translates into inability to do proper A/B or any other testing you capture the dissatisfaction in relevant metrics), the pain persists
It's extremely sinister. The grand prize is feeding people AI-generated content, and completely removing the human factor. Many platforms started as social media, but converted into content delivery platforms. Which is cool, except content creators can be problematic. If you remove them out of equation, you basically get audience to watch whatever slop you want them to watch, with zero human interaction at all. Spotify is already taking serious steps by promoting AI-generated music. In this context, forcing AI-generated translations onto people is a step towards getting them used to listening AI-generated voice. And you can market this easily by saying "we just want people to have more cross-cultural communication, no evil here".
I don't want to completely disregard AI-generated content. Some of it can be actually good, and I use AI as a talking companion. But at the same time it's a technology that can easily be abused. And it will be abused. And we'll love it. Except those few nutjobs who resist, but nobody will care. Free speech doesn't matter when nobody's listening.
AFAIK it's up to the video owner to choose whether or not they enable these translations. When I found this out, I lost respect for so many creators, because they turned on this shitty feature.
I have been using an untranslate add-on like this one and have been absolutely loving it. Since YouTube has been AI translating video titles and dubbing contents it has been suggesting foreign videos in users' home feed.
The way these untranslate add-ons work (layman's explanation) is that they fetch the original title and audio and reinsert it, but the recommendation for the video stays in your feed. This has resulted in loads of super interesting foreign language content in my feed which is just awesome.
Cars are one of my YouTube interests and seeing loads of cool old car content from different parts of the world has been fascinating. Not only were different models popular in different places but the things people value in a car are also wildly different across the globe. And I get to listen to a cool foreign language while discovering this!
One downside is that to the YouTube algorithm, it probably seems like I absolutely LOVE this autodubbing feature, going crazy for all these translated videos. That could not be further from the truth: my youtube feed has become completely unusable without an untranslate add-on since this update.
Unbelievable that YouTube has not made this feature configurable. I am a language learner and use YouTube to find target language content. It’s very difficult now because you can no longer trust the title of the video to tell you what language it was intended for. Would have been very simple to add a settings toggle. This is one of the worst app inconveniences I’ve come across in recent years.
I don't even need a configurable toggle. I just need YouTube to understand I am native Spanish and English speaker and leave those untouched.
This is what baffles me the most. It's not just that they're foisting machine translation on people to boost some nonsense KPI, but that they're assuming that everyone speaks only one language. Tech is awfully hegemonic, sure, but it is unimaginable that only oblivious monolingual people worked on this feature. Did they just ignore internal complaints about this before they shipped it? How does a feature even get built like this?
most open source clients allow you do pick the language and subtitle just fine. youtube backend is pretty decent, despite the frontend team being there just to add ads.
i recommend "PipePipe" on android.
if you are waiting for them to add that feature on the native player, remember google haven't added a single feature to gmail app besides reading email... you cannot even create a filter.
Google has always been a pain when it comes to internationalisation.
The number of hoops you have to jump through to get results from the actual Google page when you are outside of the US is mind boggling. I don’t even know if it’s still possible.
> The number of hoops you have to jump through to get results from the actual Google page when you are outside of the US is mind boggling.
Do you mean results in English, or results that are specifically US-centric?
Not op. But my experience is both. It's impossible to get Google to search for a specific region in a specific language. DuckDuckGo is far better on this. You can use add regions to search for, and quickly toggle them.
It's the same on Youtube, it's still impossible to search videos by language.
Every time I find a video that was shot in my mother tongue auto-translated into English I want to bang my head against the wall. I've told Google in multiple ways that I'm multilingual and it just doesn't get it. It's worst on mobile, where you can't switch the audio channel to the original sound.
Spent a week in Africa, now YT swears that I know Arabic.
I haven’t watched a single Arabic video.
Any Googlers here that can explain how Google can be so bad at designing products?
Respectfully, at this point, do we need Googlers to explain?
Structurally: launch-dependent levels/career advancement. Design wise: massive over reliance on A/B testing. Philosophically: a company hell bent on observing, categorizing, and exploiting us in extremis in exchange for only a tiny "relevant" slice of their potential deliverable.
Because of their focus on "scale", they have never cared about any individual user. The indifference of their technical systems is absolute.
But in this hyperpersonalisation era, we somehow give them a free pass when their A/B testing should catch these exact things.
Taking a vacation abroad cant be a new concept for them.
>Spent a week in Africa, now YT swears that I know Arabic.
Logged into Twitch in Ukraine once, now Twitch fills my recommendation with _russian_ channels.
Just came back home from a 3 week travel in south- and east-Europe. Visited 4 different countries. I have a newfound hatred for:
1. Sites/apps that automatically change language based on your location, and force that auto-translation onto you.
2. Reddit that translates reddit posts to your location based language. Those will quickly populate your search feed for almost any search you do.
Yep, reddit also does this. Since I am not native English speaker and I am expat in a European country, this is super frustrating.
The fact that this is needed and not configurable is so frustrating. I'm almost certain nobody even asked for this.
What a great way to stop people ever needing to learn another language. God forbid people use their brains for anything that 30 second shorts.
After 25 you can’t really learn new languages without considerable investment and effort. Translating is the only option for the vast majority of people.
> After 25 you can’t really learn new languages without considerable investment and effort.
It takes considerable investment and effort before you’re 25, too, you just don’t notice it because it happens slowly over a long period in school and via immersion.
I move around a lot so I’ve had to learn a few new languages as an adult - at least to basic proficiency, if not approaching fluency - and I don’t think it’s really any more difficult than it was when I was a kid, except that I now recognize how difficult it is.
This is a misleading take. Do you consider the decade of language “learning” that a child does before they are “fluent” to not be a considerable effort?
Many people learn new languages all the time for a variety of reasons. In some regions of the world, it is expected of you to learn a half dozen languages throughout your lifetime.
I’m not against translating but it should not be the default in society if there is also no opt-out.
As someone who started learning a new language in my late 20s after a move across the world, I haven’t found it any more difficult than any other skill that requires diligent practice. Guitar, programming, driving; language is a skill. Since western humans tend to only learn them at a young age it can be easy to forget that.
>Translating is the only option for the vast majority of people.
The key word here being 'option'.
>After 25 you can’t really learn new languages without considerable investment and effort.
And by enabling this translation by default, without any obvious way to disable it, they are also making it harder for < 25 year-olds to be exposed to other languages, which will itself make it harder for them to learn them. For instance, consider the effect of TV and film dubbing on Spain's proficiency in English[0]:
[0] https://www.gwern.net/docs/culture/2018-micola.pdfNot true at all. I've learned one language after I hit 39 and started leaning another when I hit 45, 7 months in learning it ~15 min a day and I'm bordering B1 level.
I am not alone in saying that I am a product of learning another language after 25, far after 25. It takes work for sure, and effort. But you're missing the point in that YouTube has now made that level of effort that needs to be committed, impossible.
One thing this kind of thing severely hurts is a lot of devices, services are affected by local laws, units, concepts, brands sometimes severely altering their function.
- Searching for a guide on say a car infotainment system would be totally different here from someone explaining in the USA or germany. Now I see a ton of titles in my language, only to find out it's information is completely useless to me because a menu, button or whatever doesen't even exist.
- Recommendations on cooking advice become almost worthless since a grading system for flours is arcane, brands I've never heard of, compounded by some imperial units in the mix. A recipe turns into a research project
- when searching for non-native content I may avoid content in my language, since I know the subject is definitely not relevant anywhere near me, so perfectly valid content will be missed
Worse yet, sometimes physical products claiming to have localized manual will instead have used some very inferior version to google translate and give dangerous advice about safe handling of the device.
- Searching for a guide on say a car infotainment system would be totally different here from someone explaining in the USA or germany. Now I see a ton of titles in my language, only to find out it's information is completely useless to me because a menu, button or whatever doesen't even exist.
This is so annoying. I can't believe they couldn't understand this, and there are many multilingual people.
YouTube settings are notoriously volatile even on the same device and being logged in. Subtitles are enabled every other day all of a sudden without any need (even for my natural language content). Since they rolled out the auto-trabslation thing the same happens, I have to switch to original English every few days.
Chrome/Brave: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/youtube-no-translat...
That looks very useful, thanks!
I _love_ when youtube auto-translates english titles to my native language and then asks me if I want to translate the rare comments in my native language to english.
It seem they just don't contemplate people speaking two or more languages, *even though the setting in the google account is there*.
Great! Dutch living in Austria and YouTube is randomly dubbing videos from one language to another with no way of turning it off, which is my real WTF here.
I just hope that one of the morons running youtube eventually sees these threads and fixes this.
How did they fail to make this an option in the first place?
To be very clear, I don’t even want to translate videos in languages that YouTube know I don’t understand. Much less in videos languages I do understand.
Also I don’t think it’s a good idea to use AI in any part of this chain unless there is user driven corrections. Seems like even big TikTok/Instagram accounts use some auto subtitling machinery and it’s invariably wrong. Why even bother? Or why not just manually subtitle if it’s a 10 second English video and the text is in English? Why use automation at all for that?
YouTube apparently does not understand that bilingual people exist. I do not want translations between German and English, I understand both languages just fine.
I do not want to backwards translate some nonsense autogenerated YouTube translation to understand what some video title means. I do not ever want to watch an automatic dub where some AI voice replaces the actual language I understand.
Browsers got this right "never translate German" was enough to fix the auto translation feature. Somehow one of the most valuable companies in the world, managing one of the largest websites in the world can not implement something that basic.
Everyone I've spoken to in my circle hates this feature. We're all fairly intelligent people — if we needed audio dubbing, we'd turn it on ourselves. But to have auto-dub enabled by default is, frankly, incredulous.
If someone from Google could explain the rationale behind forcing this on users, I’d genuinely love to understand it.
I ll give you an even better idea for a youtube extension, if nobody makes it, i ll most certainly do. I need to pin a particular comment on a set of videos matching a criteria and change this pinned comment across all these videos every now and then, like for example when i put a new video out, i would like to link to this from the pinned comment of relevant videos. this is such a hassle doing manually in current times. i am amazed nobody has come up with a pinned comment manager for youtube yet
The fact that this needs to exist is a testament to how bad some things in YouTube are. They were able to make me quit being a paying customer with shitty things like that.
Maybe enshitification is entering its dadaist phase? That's the best explanation I have for how youtube decided to implement this feature.
I have not seen any auto-translations, even in for videos where others have complained about auto translations to the uploader.
Is this a US only feature? I hope I'm never going to see it because it sounds horrible.
I prefer to keep my in-process extensions to a minimum. Is it possible to do the same thing with uBlock rules?
Looking for this was my first instinct as well. Mindboggling how there's no toggle for this
It’s crazy that an extension is needed to fix this. When I first saw that “feature” I thought it was some bug and YouTube would fix soon, but they don’t seem to care about it.
This really needs to be configurable on a per-account basis. I'm using YouTube mostly on mobile devices and TVs, without the possibility to use addons.
The required settings are quite simple (a lot of social media platforms have them): Setting a list of languages that should never be translated, and setting a preferred language the other ones should be translated to.
I guess the silicon valley people who develop YouTube can't grasp the concept that there are people out there who speak multiple languages.
As someone from a country where dubbing is not a thing (except for kids cartoons), YouTube behavior is very annoying...
Translated subtitles are useful though, even if often very bad.
I didn't know video translations were a thing. Is this not configurable?
Surprisingly, it isn't. You can change the language in your google account and it will take that into account for what to translate and into what language, but you can't turn it off completely.
I don't know who thought this was a good user experience, because it's one of the most frustrating features I've ever had to deal with. I'm german, but almost all of the things I watch are in english. So usually I will just ignore recommendations with german titles. Except I can't do that anymore, because there's no guarantee that youtube didn't randomly decide to translate the title of an english video into german. And recently, they've added auto-translated audio, which is even worse, because now I'm opening an english video and a terrible robotic german voice is talking to me and I manually need to switch to the original source.
It's also not consistent behavior. It's not like all videos on the front page are looking like they're in german. It's just some of them and afaik there's no way to tell.
And you genuinely can't turn it off completely. Incredibly frustrating and I'm just puzzled by the thought-process that lead to this decision. This would be a pretty cool feature if it was consistently applied and freely configurable.
> thought-process that lead to this decision
highly likely to be monolingual people as they cannot understand you would like movies to be in any other language than your mother tongue.
Moreover I could still prefer movies in my native language *but properly dubbed by some voice actors*, not by some random AI that's going to mess up all the context.
> highly likely to be monolingual people
Which is insane to me. Silicon Valley is filled to the brim with multi-lingual people. And yet so many decisions that are coming out have no understanding of languages
Even for the monolingual Google employees it's not uncommon for them to travel to other locales, even as part of their job, so they would be on the receiving end of this "experience" too. We've had 2 decades of experience with this being an issue. One would think that they'd incorporate this "edge case" into their design process matrix by now.
I wouldn't be surprised at all if they one day decided that to have an experience of having no user content automatically translated, you have to pay for the privilege. Call it a multilinguality tax.
I'm in France, but my Google, browsers and devices languages are English. So Youtube randomly auto-dubs (and auto-translates the title of) some French videos into English, and some English videos into French. But they're never the same videos depending on the devices or the browsers. However, the automatic subtitles during the preview remain in the original langage.
I'm in the same boat (living in France, browser and google account configured to use English) and I've never noticed this.
Now I'm not a hardcore Youtube user, but whenever I browse it, French-titled videos are in French, and the same for English.
I'm mostly using Firefox on Linux, and occasionally Edge on Windows.
Do note that when rolling out features like these, they geoblock them, even on a per run basis, so it might be happening a lot throughout the world but it just hasn't reached your country. For an example, mobile YouTube in the US lets me minimize the video and multitask while still seeing a picture-in-picture window and the audio, while as soon as one lands on France that feature gets immediately disabled.
I've heard about different features in different regions, but GP is also in France.
I am also not connected to my account when I browse in Edge (it's my work PC, it also uses a separate IP), so I don't think it's related to the feature being rolled out on a per-account basis.
I'm in France, my devices are set to en-GB, I've watched only English videos (plus the odd French one) yet youtube decides to auto translate audio in German and lately in Spanish.
Go figure.
I'd love to have a robotic german voice. All I get is the clickbait MrBeast TikTok voice. I get a real reaction when I hear it. I try so hard to avoid the current social media content. It's unbearable. The shock is even greater when I do stumble across it.
Youtube is really the only website that is straight up unusable for me without a set of Addons (uBlock, sponsorBlock, Unhook).
> I don't know who thought this was a good user experience
Which youtube decision of recent years ever thought about user experience?
It's all "company bets" and "promotion tracks".
When it was a fight against TikTok you got Shorts that you can't get rid of.
Now you probably have to "show commitment to our AI offerings" or something. So you get autotranslated videos by a team which will get 500k bonuses and will move on in a month
> I don't know who thought this was a good user experience
the product manager(s) and the team who needed to show impact in their performance reviews.
To add to that, the german translation most of the time is absolutely horrible and more clickbait then the original wording.
It should really be an option in the advanced search, or be able to say something like lang:de
> Except I can't do that anymore, because there's no guarantee that youtube didn't randomly decide to translate the title of an english video into german
Sp you clicked when you wouldn't have, somewhere an engagement graph went a notch up, and someone will get a pat on the back.
I am Russian but am also fluent in English so I watch videos in both these languages. This automatic translation doesn't happen that often with my usage of YouTube, but when it does, it frustrates the crap out of me. So yes, I did look for a setting to turn it off, but didn't find any.
Relatedly, Google and Microsoft insist on showing machine-translated developer docs by default. A translate button is fine, but doing it by default?! I struggle to understand who thought that this could possibly ever be a good idea.
You'd guess so but no. If you're bilingual you have to choose one language, and videos in the other will get this ridiculously bad literal auto-translation treatment. Pure insanity, and something that makes me mad daily.
Apparently not, or the setting is not easily accessible, and it baffles me it's the case and someone at YouTube probably is proud of it on top of getting their promotion for such a terrible feature.
On desktop you can at least change it at runtime (like auto-dubbing), but on mobile they have made this completely impossible. I keep running into (originally) german video's that have been auto-translated to english for me, which I really dislike, since I can perfectly understand german. There's no way to disable this and just get subs only (which can be toggled on/off)
I thought that yt-dlp uses the mobile interface, it shows the different language options and identifies the original one, the official mobile player must be making the choice of which one to use.
I have never experienced this, but then again I'm on web. Haven't faffed with the YT mobile app since I put GrapheneOS on my phone 3 years ago.
As a polish YouTube user who wants to watch content in both languages, it's an infuriating no. YouTube started translating titles recently for me, and the translations are pure nonsense. I'm not exaggerating, it's dumb word for word translation with no context. I have to reverse engineer titles now. Even more recently they turned audio translation on too with the most ear piercing voice possible, but that can be turned off. Title translation can't be turned off.
Yup. I look up videos with Polish titles precisely because I want local content made in Poland telling about things specific to Poland, not some other stuff which turns out to be in English made for other locales.
But I guess they see my frustration as "engagement".
> because I want local content made in Poland telling about things specific to Poland,
I used to use site:reddit.com as my go to must-use keyword whenever I wanted to look for something on Google, but since they introduced automated translation in my language (French) it has become a nightmare because I would find irrelevant content written for other places even when I type my search in French. You see, they had the great idea to not only automatically translate entire subreddits and comments but also have the translated forms be indexed by Google!
So now you would try to look for comments on, for example, great retail shops for niche products and click links that talk about shopping in the USA or Canada. Hateful.
I can't really describe how much I hate this without going into the most vulgar of expletives.
site:reddit.com was the last bastion of finding things quickly on google without stumbling upon ton of markov chain / copy paste crap content. Now it's being ruined by this translation nonsense + LLM bots.
Both duckduckgo and brave search have reddit index. Not as much complete, as google sometimes, but at least without this nonsense.
Of course not. Because the decision makers at Google can't fathom that anybody in the world might be bilingual.
Nope. I follow channels in English, Russian, Portuguese, and Spanish.
YouTube seems to randomly translate the titles and it's irritating.