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YouTube No Translation

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Re: YouTube No Translation

#221
post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really useful for Google maps. I generally prefer English but I want Japanese for google so I get local people's opinion over tourists who think every ramen is the best ramen they've ever tasted. I'm surprised it's not an option actually. Language aside, tourism and actually living somewhere are totally separate and reviews should reflect that.

Interesting use case! Why won't you just use Tabelog instead?

I don't feel like tabelog is that popular recently. But I could be wrong.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#222
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>I do not understand how this got rolled out. Surely there are _loads_ of multilingual people working at YouTube. Simple - at Google, feedback from internal users is ignored.

So is from external users. The only feedback that may be heard must be numeric and translate to $$$ KPI. Hint: Youtube viewers are not Googles customers.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That’s not “most countries”.

Maybe you can argue why it's not most countries? It seems obvious to me that it is, but I also come from a country where everyone is bilingual.

Many former European colonies are mostly bilingual, e.g. Africa is highly multilingual out of necessity. Much of Europe itself is also mostly bilingual. If you want to communicate outside your own little region and your native language isn't a lingua franca, you need to be bilingual in this world.

The main holdouts when it comes to bilingualism are former imperial powers who managed to both kill domestic language diversity (e.g. France, UK, Russia) while also spreading their national language as a lingua Franca. Another group of holdouts are settler colonies such as the US, which didn't have a dominant native population after the arrival of Europeans.

But even if e.g. Russia itself isn't super bilingual, the rest of the former Soviet Union certainly is, since that is just the reality if you live in a small and/or formerly colonised country.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#224

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…

Similarly, plenty of folk born in the UK whose first language isn't English. I have many friends who grew up speaking Scots, and a few whose first language is Gaelic.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#226
post #199

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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.

The Reddit translations are so insanely terrible. They are so much harder to read the the original English posts. It's like every word has been translated independently

The problem isn't the the translation isn't done well enough, but rather its underhanded nature that tries to sell a translated website as a genuine discussion.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#227
post #195

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…

It baffles me that a ton of sites that have been translated into multiple languages still set the language based on IP rather than trying to determine it based on the client settings or defaulting to a set language with an easy way to switch it. Countless times I landed on websites I use relatively frequently in foreign countries to see them in a language I don't understand, having to rely on my browser's translation…

>client settings

But even setting the client right is not really possible. I'm danish. I understand english and german. Norwegian and swedish are similar enough to danish that I can read it without too much trouble. Websites, if they're translated at all, usually offer their native language plus an english translation. So if I visit a website in any language I understand, I'd prefer the original. But for any other language I want the english version.

If I set my accept-language to "da,en", I get a lot of horrible machine translated danish on a lot of websites. If I set it to "en,da", all danish government websites are now english. I can't win.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#228
post #104

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…

Huh, basically every European aged <~40 is going to know their native language + English at the very least.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#229
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> And it's taught atrociously badly. The vast majority of graduates, after about 13 years of mandatory Irish classes, cannot functionally speak it.

I grew up in a country where we had mandatory lessons in a little-used local language imposed on us by politicians.

That I learned nothing isn’t the teachers’ fault - they were simply set an impossible task.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#230
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…

Google as a whole is hostile to the user's browser's language settings. I have to append ?hl=en to every Google URL when connecting from an IP address that they determine is a non-English region.

While logged into Google with your own regional settings, try Google Flights in any country- the currency is always set to that country's currency.

I have no idea what a flight costing 781,667 blergs is, Google. Is that a lot?

If I knew what blergs are worth, I'd set my regional settings to blergs.

So you set the currency to your own. Then navigate away, then come back. Now it's blergs again.

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