Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

YouTube No Translation

addons.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 341 posts

Re: YouTube No Translation

#61

Post by kikokikokiko »

littlecranky67 wrote: post #56
phantomathkg wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No need to do these assumptions, youtube accounts are google accounts and google already supports setting multiple languages that you speak/read.

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.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#62

Post by kikokikokiko »

numpad0 wrote: post #29
pyuser583 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#63

Post by kikokikokiko »

atoav wrote: post #53
lajosbacs wrote: post #50

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 co…

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.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#64

Post by Ezhik »

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.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#65

Post by trzeci »

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.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#69

Post by isaacremuant »

saretup wrote: post #36
rdtsc wrote: post #8

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…

Doesn’t it just use the primary language you select in your account settings? Unless you’re talking about using it in incognito, in which case it does get annoying when it assumes a language based on region without asking.

If 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.

Post reply on HN