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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
> 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'm still getting titles auto-translated, and started to get videos auto-dubbed a few weeks ago.
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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?
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.
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.
Average user is not multilingual. Target group is average user. End of story.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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 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!
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.
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 this 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.
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.
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?
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.
Standard American thing - thinking everyone speaks only one language, and that language being the language of the country you live in.
And the country is resolve by IP - which totally doesn't work with roaming - you also get the home country of your provider.
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.
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’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.
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.
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)"
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.
> 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.
> 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.
The same plugin for Chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/youtube-no-translat...
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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".
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
If only I could add this to the YouTube app on my TV (as well as uBlock Origin)
Can I get the same for Google Play store? I will always take original version over shit-tier automatic translation.
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?!
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.
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?
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
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‘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.
Is there any way to achieve this on mobile iOS?
Unfortunately the extensions are not available for android....
Extensions are in general not available for Android (or at least chrome for android)?
i dont mind the others, but the automatic audio switch is very offensive to the creators
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.
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.
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.
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!
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).
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.