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

151–160 of 341 posts

Re: YouTube No Translation

#151

Post by cdrini »

GolDDranks wrote: post #145
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…

While I agree that good automatic translations are great, the fact that the current unconfigurable mess that doesn't even respect the user's settings (neither the settings of their Google Account nor the settings of their browser), makes it a grating experience to multilinguals, who are believed to be the majority in the world.

+1! That's a reasonable take. The takes on here saying Google is a shill for introducing this feature, that no one wants it, that it's useless, are the takes that I found frustrating in this comment thread.

But also I might just be lucky, I speak multiple languages and have traveled into various countries, and have never had youtube show me anything other than English wherever I go.

Edit: And although multilinguals are in the majority over monolinguals (I think, citation needed), I think being multilingual still makes you part of an even larger majority, which is humans who are unable to watch the majority of videos due to language.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#152

Post by jacek »

It is incredible how many addons I need to make YouTube usable. Here's my list (all Firefox):

- uBlock Origin - ad block

- SponsorBlock - to skip in video ads (some other nice features like highlights too)

- YouTube Row Fixer - for the tiles to adjust to the window

- Return YouTube Dislike - self explanatory

- YouTube No Translation - thanks for the suggestion!

Re: YouTube No Translation

#153

Post by addandsubtract »

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 had the opposite experience. I usually watch US/english content on Youtube, and only follow one or two german channels. Anyway, a new german video came out, but instead of their regular german content, it was in english. I thought it was a bit at first or a special video they tried to do for the english market. It wasn't until I logged in through another account that I noticed that Youtube had auto-translated the video to english - without any prior notice. Such an annoying and distracting thing to do unannounced.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#154

Post by addandsubtract »

jacek wrote: post #152

It is incredible how many addons I need to make YouTube usable. Here's my list (all Firefox): - uBlock Origin - ad block - SponsorBlock - to skip in video ads (some other nice features like highlights too) - YouTube Row Fixer - for the tiles to adjust to the window - Return YouTube Dislike - self explanatory - YouTube No Translation - thanks for the suggestion!

Also DeArrow to replace clickbait titles and thumbnails with more relevant ones.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#155

Post by danielspace23 »

I honestly can't wrap my head around what some users do just to have the "stock" experience.

In order to get a vaguely usable stock YouTube, you need to install at least UBlock, SponsorBlock, No Translation, and arguably DeArrow as well. And this only works for browsers, many people will cope with their mobile YouTube experience being hell on earth. Why do all this when you can get an alternative cross-platform client like GrayJay with all the same features (minus DeArrow for now), which works out of the box, has more privacy, and won't be completely useless the next time Google decides to shift things around a bit?

Same goes for Windows: you'll see people who go to great lengths to disable telemetry, remove Edge and sponsored content, often having to run random scripts from the internet with administrator privileges, just to have everything reset on the next Windows update. Remember how Windows users made fun of Linux users for having to open a command line for installing a browser (which isn't even true)?

I could go on: you can get Firefox and spend hours tweaking about:config to disable the anti-features, or you can get one of the dozen forks with the same patches pre-applied, yet some people will still defend the stock experience with their lives.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#156

Post by 11mariom »

Few days ago I was surprised when video started in dubbed mode… I always watch everything in original audio, and turn subtitles when needed. At least for audio I found a setting, but titles… WHY?!

Thanks for sharing addon :)

Re: YouTube No Translation

#157

Post by rjsw »

The interface to YouTube used by yt-dlp does still list the different audio tracks and labels the original one.

The problems reported by everyone in this thread sound to me like UI bugs of the player, official app or javascript in the browser, picking the wrong audio track automatically.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#158

Post by edarchis »

mdavid626 wrote: post #66

Standard American thing - thinking everyone speaks only one language, and that language being the language of the country you live in.

What drives me nuts with this is that they'll go for a weird guessing game instead of using the language settings that the browser is providing in every single request.

My browser states that I favour English, then French. My user profile on the website has "English" as language. Yet, when I get to the homepage, it tries to guess my language from my IP. NOOOO.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#159

Post by addandsubtract »

edarchis wrote: post #150

as pointed out by @addandsubtract, I misunderstood the extension, it's about audio translation, not just titles. Sorry about that. If you're using DeArrow, there is an option to disable those translations. DeArrow is from the same team as SponsorBlock, it removes the clickbait thumbnails and titles with more descriptive ones. It makes the experience sooo much better. https://dearrow.ajay.app/

No, DeArrow only disables the title translations. This post is about disabling the new AI audio translations that they're rolling out.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#160

Post by pbhjpbhj »

dgellow wrote: post #117
saretup wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Even if they had no experience, surely something like this would come out in user testing?
Post reply on HN