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YouTube No Translation

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Re: YouTube No Translation

#171
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

I know, but on the other hand you have many Swiss who, when spoken to in perfect Hochdeutsch, prefer to reply in English. No way you're gonna win over these people with autotranslate to what they consider a 'foreign' language.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#172
post #7
post #4

Why would I want this? I watched a translated YouTube video and it was great. If I don't want the translated sound track there's a button right there in settings to change it. Why do I need this extension?

I guess this extension is really aimed at multilingual viewers who don’t want English (or any language they already know) automatically translated into their native tongue. A better solution would be a ‘blacklist’ of languages you understand—so YouTube only auto‑translates from languages you don’t speak, and always leaves familiar languages in their original form.

> A better solution would be a ‘blacklist’ of languages you understand—so YouTube only auto‑translates from languages you don’t speak, and always leaves familiar languages in their original form.

A better solution would have been to just not ship this disaster of a "feature" in the first place.

I wouldn't want my browser to automatically translate every page I go to (without my consent!) either, and that would've been a much easier job!

Re: YouTube No Translation

#173
post #115

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 en…

Yes! It is inconsistent, you think that finally reason prevailed and they nuked the 'feature', but then it appears randomly again.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#174
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 did this too, but then YouTube translated videos in my native language to English.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#175

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

Yes, I know Sundar is Indian. This doesn't stop Google from being one of the worst major tech companies I use at internationalisation and localisation. Date formats, start of the week, 12/24h clock, auto translations, localised search results, language detection, it is all rubbish and clearly US-centric. For all their (former) diversity dances, that company has very little to show for it.

I agree that the way it's implemented at YouTube right now is utter garbage.

However i haven't noticed this to be a problem with Google in general. All the Google products i've been using have been properly localised.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#176
Autodubbing is probably the worst feature Google has ever implemented.

It's OK if they want to offer it, but at least let me disable it for specific languages.

And for those languages which I don't understand, let me choose a default autodubbing language. Because I assume that auto-generated translations from French to English will be far better than those from French to German or Spanish.

Also, the voices they use sound like from a decade ago.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#177
post #91

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'm against auto-translate for the exact same argument. I don't want japanese band's name to be translated. Nor I want my own music titles to be translated into other languages. There are many reasons why I wrote or said something in a specific language.

That's a fair argument to make.

My main point was that I like the auto-translation because information retrieval was so much better. But the intent behind the video of the uploader has to be maintained and respected.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#179
post #10
post #4

Why would I want this? I watched a translated YouTube video and it was great. If I don't want the translated sound track there's a button right there in settings to change it. Why do I need this extension?

I‘m German, watching a German creator in a German-language recording. Only that YouTube decides to use their Mickey Mouse sounding AI voice to deliver an English audio track. Not every time, but at least a third of the time. I have to hunt for the audio setting each time, because you cannot turn off AI voices permanently. Tell me again how I‘m wrong.

When using Brave, the audio setting does not exist on the Youtube website. I have to go into iOS settings and change the language there. Unbelievable.
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