YouTube No Translation • Hacker News Board

Re: YouTube No Translation

#181

Post by rtsil » Tue, Jul 01, 2025, 9:32 AM UTC

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.

If only it was that easy. I'm French living in France. My account settings are in English, my browsers and apps (phone, TV) are in English but my Youtube region is France. So Youtube serves me:

- French videos auto-dubbed with AI and with the titles auto-translated in English.

- English videos auto-dubbed with AI and with the titles auto-translated in French.

- French videos not dubbed, but with the titles auto-translated in English.

- English videos not dubbed, but with the titles auto-translated in French.

- French videos kept as is.

- English videos kept as is.

Also, Youtube keeps suggesting me French accents videos, even though I never watched a similar video (but watched videos on American accents and Spanish accents years ago)

Re: YouTube No Translation

#182

Post by wheybags » Tue, Jul 01, 2025, 9:33 AM UTC

bux93 wrote: post #125

ozim wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mil…

> all EU countries except Ireland mandate second language teaching in schools

Ireland does mandate second language teaching in schools, it's just not a foreign language, it's Irish (separate language, not a dialect of English). And it's taught atrociously badly. The vast majority of graduates, after about 13 years of mandatory Irish classes, cannot functionally speak it.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#183

Post by rauli_ » Tue, Jul 01, 2025, 9:35 AM UTC

red_admiral wrote: post #94

Nowadays to use youtube efficiently with ADHD, you practically need all of: (a) uBlock - this one is debatable but deals with the worst distractions especially if you're trying to learn from a video your professor put up and you have an exam to prepare for, (b) unhook - hides most of the "recommendations" that attempt to keep you on the site because you're planning to do the copmprehension questions your professor ga…

I would add sponsorblock to this list.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#184

Post by bryanrasmussen » Tue, Jul 01, 2025, 9:37 AM UTC

ozim wrote: post #146

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think statistics show that multilingual users are minority enough I think that depends on the country. And maybe region of the country. At any rate I can turn off subtitles in my YouTube - can other people not do that?

They are doing automated voice over now and automated translation of video titles.

huh I don't seem to get it. Do you have a link where I can see it in action?

on edit: am in Denmark, I don't notice any automatic translation of the three languages I see most often - Danish, English, or Italian.

on second edit: but maybe I am just not observing it in action when it happens or maybe I don't watch the kind of videos they do it to - anyway I'd like to see it.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#185

Post by aniforprez » Tue, Jul 01, 2025, 9:45 AM UTC

ozim wrote: post #105

littlecranky67 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No need to do these assumptions, youtube accounts are google accounts and google already supports setting multiple languages that you speak/read.

Would be great if they actually use it in their products instead of showing me some insane mixup of stuff I don't want :)

It's gotten to the point where searching Google for word definitions is actively hampering me by defaulting to showing the definition in my "regional language" (which isn't correct in the first place since it's spoken by a majority in my country but not in the region where I live) as well as English when I only want the English meaning. Stuff like this has had me switch to DDG where even if the results are strictly worse, at least it's not going out of its way to annoy me

Re: YouTube No Translation

#186

Post by anal_reactor » Tue, Jul 01, 2025, 9:51 AM UTC

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #138

anal_reactor wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think you understand the proficiency needed to comfortably consume content in another language. Save for a few hotspots (Benelux, Nordics) most people say "yes, I speak a second language" because when they focus hard, they can say "me wants toilet" and that's enough for their use case (holiday abroad once a year). My mother is a teacher of English but when I brought a friend who only spoke English, I had to translate the conversation between them. This is the reality of bilingualism in small towns.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#187

Post by rightbyte » Tue, Jul 01, 2025, 9:52 AM UTC

qwertox wrote: post #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 s…

It is terrible and took me a while to realize what was happening. I though some videos were generated spam.

Reddit does something similar now. It auto translates posts and they show up in Google in my native tongue. Really annoying since when I search in that language I specifically don't want English sites.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#188

Post by oc1 » Tue, Jul 01, 2025, 9:53 AM UTC

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 fear the future won't make us more educated but even dumber as the tech and ai tries to do all thinking for us, even thinking we don't want to learn languages as this is just one more "inefficiency" in humans to eradicate. And who is Ai trying to emulate? Right, people like these managers at Google resposnsible for such decisions (or like sama, not sure what's worse)

Re: YouTube No Translation

#189

Post by consp » Tue, Jul 01, 2025, 9:54 AM UTC

noirscape wrote: post #166

janfoeh wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Same here with Dutch: you could pretty much watch i18n degrade real time by observing the quality of the dutch translations for all major sites and tech products over the years. Back in the 2000s, dutch wasn't very common but it usually was pretty good (my understanding is that one of the things that helped is that everyone followed the Microsoft style guide for dutch translations?) Nowadays you get overly literal tr…

I've had the unfortunate mishap of having the perfectly fine English translation of a German site switch to auto translate Dutch crap due to one part using the language preference and the other the IP source, bit weird since as far as I know they usually only offer English. And I can perfectly fine read German so I usually immediately switch to that since some info is not available in English especially with the different Bundesambt websites.

What I would like is a browser and os which allows you to set which languages (multiple) never need translating and the site sticking to that.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#190

Post by VGHN7XDuOXPAzol » Tue, Jul 01, 2025, 9:56 AM UTC

_Algernon_ wrote: post #131

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?

+1 even if you don't understand the language, it's nice to hear the real voice.

This auto-dub-translation feature is also problematic in that viewers don't realise it's happening. I think that is unreasonably misleading. It could be great as an option, but it should really prompt you before switching it on.

That way people would not be forced to use it, and people would be aware of it.