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YouTube No Translation

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Re: YouTube No Translation

#131

Post by _Algernon_ »

cdrini wrote: post #118

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 _do…

Of course I would understand the other 75%. Automatic subtitles have been a thing for ages and they have the benefit of not cutting out all personality and humor in the video.

If I watch a foreign language movie I always prefer subtitles with original audio (and those are usually dubbed by human, professional dubbers, so much higher quality). Why would I treat YT any differently?

Re: YouTube No Translation

#135

Post by [deleted] »

CalRobert wrote: post #127
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 recall my British colleague’s disbelief when I told her there are many people in the US whose first language is not English…

[deleted]

Re: YouTube No Translation

#136

Post by janfoeh »

matsemann wrote: post #108
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 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.

And it would be _so, so, easy_.

Make reasonable assumptions or provide good defaults. Make them overrideable. Make user settings stick.

I have the same problem, by the way — my phone is in English, which means I get to enjoy Apples hilarious English pronunciation of German street names while navigating.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#137

Post by Leon_25 »

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…

Agree. We build custom video analytics tools at Axon, and syncing OCR with audio-based STT isn’t rocket science anymore, especially with modern models. YouTube has all the ingredients, but seems slow to apply them at scale. Even basic alignment of audio captions with hardcoded subs would fix so much UX noise.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#138

Post by DoingIsLearning »

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.

> Average user is not multilingual

I don't know your reality but literally anywhere in the 744 million users in Europe if you consider the technology literate average of internet users I guarantee that someone who is not even bilingual is precisely the exception.

I would hazard say the same is true in most of Asia and Africa perhaps less so in South America where Spanish/Portuguese are more monolithic.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#139

Post by klausa »

matsemann wrote: post #108
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 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.

On iOS, this is something you can can control on a per-app basis from the (system) Settings.app.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#140

Post by masswerk »

rtpg wrote: post #32
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…

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…

> How is there not at least an option…

Haven't we learned in the last 15 years or so that options are bad for users? ;-)

Moreover, watching videos in a foreign language with subtitles in that same language used to be a popular tool for learning languages. Clearly, the proliferation of language skills is a serious danger to the market for AI generated instant translations and must be stopped at all costs.

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