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YouTube No Translation

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Re: YouTube No Translation

#261

Post by kivle »

matsemann wrote: post #141
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.

Yeah, I think apps just should have a sorted list (/tiers) of languages they support, and pick whatever first has a match in the user preferences. If the app supports two languages equally well, then choose the one first in the user's preference list. So for me having no,en (in the future where this works I would dare to have no first): app is in english, has auto translated norwegian: choose english app is in norweg…

People figured this out when they specified HTTP 1.1 in 1997. A prioritized list of the languages the user knows. They even allow a q-factor weighing so the user can specify a factor of how comfortable they are with a language. All modern browsers already support this, but 99% of websites fail to use it properly including Google.

It's like modern apps have forgotten all lessons learned about internationalization.

Same in Windows. The "modern" system apps use just one setting (Windows language) for internationalization, ignoring the old date format and time format settings. So if I set my Windows language to English, I get AM/PM and dot as decimal separator in some parts of the UI and not in others.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/...

Re: YouTube No Translation

#263

Post by ben_w »

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…

We've got lists of falsehoods programmers believe about all kinds of things, we could probably do the same for all groups, including falsehoods the British believe about the USA, or about languages.

I think the UK is something like 9% English as a second language, and the USA is 22% ESL?

(Wnes i fy ngradd prifysgol yn Aberystwyth).

Re: YouTube No Translation

#264

Post by sunaookami »

Akronymus wrote: post #244
saubeidl wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in the Netherlands and speak German in addition to English. My Dutch is ... not that great. Thanks to the geniuses at Reddit, I now frequently find posts on /r/de or similar German subreddits translated from my native language into one I'm worse at!

you can use old.reddit.com to avoid having stuff be translated.

Doesn't work for Google, it shows the translated titles and descriptions.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#265

Post by rightbyte »

josefx wrote: post #255
rightbyte wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For reddit things get even worse: not all commenters realize that the original post has been translated, so you get a flood of comments from people commenting in their native language. Getting modern day tower of babel vibes from that.

Ye it is some sort of dark pattern and deception to auto-translate like that.

It took me some minutes to realize what was happening. At first I though it was some language specific sub before too many post had strange language.

Fake culture and putting things in the a strange cultural context and trying to hide it.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#266

Post by makeitdouble »

avereveard wrote: post #81
hnthrowaway_423 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right ? I am suprised that Facebook is actually the one leading in this UX: they clearly separate UX language ( singular ) and Languages which you don't need translation ( plural ).

Accept language header covers all that's needed. It's a ordered list of languages the user will understand in order of preference. You'd pick the first one as interface, don't translate anything that's in the list, and you can decide what to do with anything not in the list. Sites that use ip of origin and just assume my language are such grating experiences.

No.

Accept language is set at the browser level, where you usually want a single default with granular per-site (or even per-content) control.

There will be whole sites and apps that I want in a specific language that aren't my first preference. E.g. I might want my news and browser user interface in English but Google Maps in a local language, Netflix in the language of the content I watch the most etc.

Reality is just too complex for a single ordered list IMHO, having the default set to whatever heuristics that best matches the site, and give a very easy, prominent and persistent way to change the language is I think the best approach.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#267

Post by masswerk »

addandsubtract wrote: post #161
masswerk wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Google knows which languages we speak... right? Surely... Also, advertisers get that option, because they're the only users YT cares about.

Ah, well, the content has to fit localized ads! That's it!

(You don't want that distracting break in languages between revenue earning productions and embedding media fluff. I guess, in this context, the plug-in is as evil as ad-blockers are.)

Re: YouTube No Translation

#268

Post by AlchemistCamp »

bravesoul2 wrote: post #134
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.

Isn't Spanish spoken alot in USA?

Yes. In America, there are over 60 million fluent Spanish speakers, which is more than the entire population of Spain. In many southern and southwestern parts of the country you can do just about anything you need to in Spanish and being bilingual is a big plus for any kind of public-facing work.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#269

Post by ben_w »

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…

> Note that all EU countries except Ireland mandate second language teaching in schools (23 out of 27 mandate at least two foreign languages); you don't need to be an ex-pat, tourist, longterm resident or second generation immigrant to be multilingual.

Yes, but learned at school doesn't necessarily count for much. I grew up in the UK, secondary school was post-Maastricht so I was in the EU at the time; French was mandatory, but my grasp of the language is still so bad that when I tried to say "I don't speak French" in French in front of a French person, she couldn't tell if I was trying to say "I can" or "I can't".

I have pushed myself quite a bit in other languages since school, but I'm also a nerd who likes learning for its own sake. I suspect a lot of people are only just about barely able to function in tourist settings in the languages they learned at school.

That said, auto-translation of videos is kinda an existential threat to hosting a language course on YouTube.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#270

Post by Tor3 »

franciscop wrote: post #196
matsemann wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I live in Japan and am not yet fluent enough, so need to use a VPN to get the Google Search English results, otherwise it's totally unusable. Heck even for programming I pull my hair since I get the translated docs when searching. Just give me the (original) English ones please. I did search in English have Google set to English, but still get the Japanese ones even for those that have English resources.

Hm.. I don't seem to have that particular problem. I use VPN sometimes, but for other reasons, so I don't normally do my searches there. With the native IP I get both English and Japanese results, depending on what it finds, but for multi-language sites in Japan I actually get English sometimes. If I only want results from Japan I prefix my Google search with site:.jp, or whatever for other places. I never get auto-translated documents. I get what I would expect, actually. With a bias from the country (in this case Japan) I am in, but that's about it.
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