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

111–120 of 341 posts

Re: YouTube No Translation

#111

Post by palmfacehn »

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…

I find it puzzling that they haven't any respect for user agency in relation to cultural and language preferences. Yet, in other areas we have been browbeaten with performative endorsement of other identity politics trends.

The user's personal computer is a personal space. You'd think that when users go out of the way to explicitly configure language and country preferences, they would respect it. Instead, everything is overridden by geolocation.

These days if there is a longform video I wish to watch, I download it. Typically I find it through other means than "recommendations" or search. YT as a platform for discovering content is becoming increasingly irrelevant.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#112

Post by lawik »

mailund wrote: post #107
oc1 wrote: post #20

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…

Right. This was incredibly useful.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#113

Post by darkhorn »

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?!

Re: YouTube No Translation

#114

Post by dgellow »

Sander_Marechal wrote: post #79
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…

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.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#115

Post by aredox »

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…

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?

Re: YouTube No Translation

#116

Post by wirrbel »

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…

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.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#117

Post by dgellow »

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.

No it doesn't. It's mostly based on your location in my experience. Also, there is a clear distinction between the language you want for content and the language you use for the youtube UI. They shouldn't be conflated.

It really feels like the youtube team doesn't have any multilingual experience, which would be surprised if that's the case?

Re: YouTube No Translation

#118

Post by cdrini »

Oof a lot of hate for this feature. I agree more configuration would be nice, but at the same time, this is absolute science fiction come to life. Even for people who speak multiple languages: let's say you speak English, German, and French. That means you understand about 25%[1] of other people on the planet. That's 75% of videos which you would otherwise _never see or understand_. This feature is for people who _don't_ speak the most popular languages -- it lets _their_ videos get views when otherwise they would never be seen. And that's been my experience with the feature. I saw a recipe fully in Spanish because of the auto-dubbing. I actually want this enabled more globally, I want to see more fully non-English videos recommended to me from around the world.

And this feature is relatively new, I think they started rolling it out only a few months ago. I'm sure configuration options will pop up.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num... and assuming the videos in a language is ~proportional to L1+L2 speakers . That's a simplifying assumption, because I would guess English is more highly represented. Because people likely make more videos in English because there's a bigger audience for it. If only there was a way to allow more non-English speakers to be able to be understood/gain traction....

Re: YouTube No Translation

#119

Post by wirrbel »

phantomathkg wrote: post #28
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…

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 used to think this way, i.e. assuming a misunderstanding on the product development side.

Nowadays I think its more of a conscious decision many times. Like "We know someone could travel to france as a tourist, but its a small fraction of french IP addresses so screw these people". etc.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#120

Post by cubefox »

anal_reactor wrote: post #109
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…

Average user is not multilingual. Target group is average user. End of story.

I think it's more that the YouTube developers are US Americans who overwhelmingly speak only one language and naturally assume this is the case everywhere else.
Post reply on HN