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YouTube No Translation

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Re: YouTube No Translation

#121

Post by yunusabd »

godelski wrote: post #97

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…

So you're saying that they should analyze both audio and video to increase the quality of the captions, if the video has hard-coded captions? I guess that's possible, just a question of effort vs. payoff.

Inaccurate auto-captions for videos with hard coded captions probably isn't a big enough pain to warrant big investments?

Re: YouTube No Translation

#122

Post by matsemann »

chartered_stack wrote: post #31

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…

But you're arguing for auto-translation of a language you don't speak. The problem is when it does it for a language we speak. If it auto-translated japanese or polish or whatever for me I wouldn't mind as I don't speak those. But it auto-translates titles from English to my native language which is just bonkers. That's the difference here.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#123

Post by ThatMedicIsASpy »

dgellow wrote: post #114
Sander_Marechal wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is a setting managed by the content creators. That is why it is very random

Re: YouTube No Translation

#124

Post by fossilwater »

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…

Their language detection is really bad. I have everything set in French, I am in France, I go to watch a video by a French guy but YouTube decides to serve me the English audio track, like hello YouTube? Happens to me more frequently when I watch on TV.

There are some cases where YouTube serves me Indonesian subtitles for some reason

Re: YouTube No Translation

#125

Post by bux93 »

ozim wrote: post #104
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…

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…

I'm a tourist 4 weeks per year. Excluding any business travel. That's 7.6% of the time. Now, I travel internationally more than most, but it's not out of the ordinary and it's 100x your estimate.

Of course, I'm multilingual even if I stay at home. Do we know how many people are multilingual? About half of Europeans speak more than one language. That's hundreds of millions of Youtube users. 22% of Americans for 76 million in the US. That's just numbers from Google's own Gemini (which is doing a bit of a half-assed job). Note that all EU countries except Ireland mandate second language teaching in schools (23 out of 27 mandate at least two foreign languages); you don't need to be an ex-pat, tourist, longterm resident or second generation immigrant to be multilingual.

Not taking input from multi-lingual users is not just bad practice from Google, it's actually impressive how they manage to ignore people they probably know and are working with.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#126

Post by snailmailman »

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’ve been learning a new language, and I’m constantly encountering language-learning videos that get translated entirely into my native language, effectively useless until I revert the audio track.

Annoyingly, there’s not a native way to revert the translated description and title as far as I know. And this seems to be done without the knowledge of the creator!

I watched a language-learning YouTube short today that was entirely not in English. But YouTube was automatically dubbing it into English. A commenter replied with “but why the bad ai voice?” And the creator replied “it’s not, that’s my voice”

Re: YouTube No Translation

#127

Post by CalRobert »

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 recall my British colleague’s disbelief when I told her there are many people in the US whose first language is not English…

Re: YouTube No Translation

#128

Post by matsemann »

mslansn wrote: post #78
simongray wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

90 % of Norwegians speak English according to a quick search I just did. 89 % in Sweden.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#129

Post by dgellow »

lajosbacs wrote: post #80
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…

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.

I wouldn't fault youtube on that specific point. Swiss german isn't really recognized as a distinct language, and it is pretty fragmented by regions/cantons.

What is more complicated is more the fact that we have 4 official languages :)

Re: YouTube No Translation

#130

Post by nic547 »

lajosbacs wrote: post #80
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…

Adding to my previous comment, in Switzerland, people speak very specific Swiss German, yet the videos are autodubbed to 'hoch' (standard) German. It's a bit of an exaggeration, but it is as if a person is Lisbon would get their videos dubbed to Spanish.

But every speaker of swiss german is expected to also speak and write standard german. "swiss standard german over swiss german dialect" is enforced in school, sometimes even during breaks.

There's no formalized system for writing swiss german. (We even call swiss german "Mundart", literally translated "mouth type".) Only with sms and social media written swiss german has become a thing amongst younger people.

I don't think youtube not serving content badly translated to swiss german is a problem, quite frankly I'm happy swiss german is "ours".

I just wish google realized that "German (Switzerland)" means no need to auto-correct anything to 'ß'

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