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

101–106 of 106 posts

Re: YouTube No Translation

#101

Post by tirutiru »

ben_w wrote: post #58
hombre_fatal wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, surely the idea is that anyone can watch any video in any language. Especially enabling the non-English-speaking world to consume the much larger corpus of English-speaking content. The idea is great. They just botched it at the UI level. In practice it means clicking a video you think is in your native language but it's actually in English with low quality auto-subs, but there's no reason Youtube couldn't impr…

If you can't turn it off, it destroys the platform as a host for language courses. I'm a native English speaker, I want the German language stuff to be presented in the original German as a way to learn German. I don't want the English stuff dubbed into German, because my German isn't good enough for e.g. PBS Space Time in German.

Hey I am trying to get back into German. What are some of the good channels that you've found? I remember Fokus Deutsch.

Spent 4 years in Germany but never took a course out of sheer laziness. I can read children's books but every native speaker sounds like they are zipping along at 2x speed.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#102

Post by eviks »

zorrolovsky wrote: post #31

Anybody knows the business reason for this feature to exist? most people here and in other places are incredibly frustrated with auto-translate and the inability to turn it off. I include myself in that bunch. There are two potential reasons in my mind: - Youtube folks A/B tested it and it got more engagement - n/ views, time viewed per video, etc. (but were they tracking the right metrics? ie did they capture user f…

- some non-guru added a potentiality useful feature, but since there is no strong engineering culture around UI quality (which also translates into inability to do proper A/B or any other testing you capture the dissatisfaction in relevant metrics), the pain persists

Re: YouTube No Translation

#103

Post by ben_w »

tirutiru wrote: post #101
ben_w wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can't turn it off, it destroys the platform as a host for language courses. I'm a native English speaker, I want the German language stuff to be presented in the original German as a way to learn German. I don't want the English stuff dubbed into German, because my German isn't good enough for e.g. PBS Space Time in German.

Hey I am trying to get back into German. What are some of the good channels that you've found? I remember Fokus Deutsch. Spent 4 years in Germany but never took a course out of sheer laziness. I can read children's books but every native speaker sounds like they are zipping along at 2x speed.

On YouTube, by far the best is Easy German. Their playlists also divide the content by levels from A1 to C2, as well as by theme: https://www.youtube.com/@EasyGerman/playlists

They also have podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/easy-german-learn-germ...

More generally, there's also good podcast content from:

• DW news: https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/langsam-gesprochene-na...

• Coffee Break German: https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/coffee-break-german/id...

> I can read children's books but every native speaker sounds like they are zipping along at 2x speed.

I generally play most of the podcasts at double-speed precisely because of this. Real speakers are much faster than the careful slow pace of most internet content, and double-speed playback forces me to develop gist-comprehension even if I miss the odd word here or there.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#104

Post by [deleted] »

ben_w wrote: post #58
hombre_fatal wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, surely the idea is that anyone can watch any video in any language. Especially enabling the non-English-speaking world to consume the much larger corpus of English-speaking content. The idea is great. They just botched it at the UI level. In practice it means clicking a video you think is in your native language but it's actually in English with low quality auto-subs, but there's no reason Youtube couldn't impr…

If you can't turn it off, it destroys the platform as a host for language courses. I'm a native English speaker, I want the German language stuff to be presented in the original German as a way to learn German. I don't want the English stuff dubbed into German, because my German isn't good enough for e.g. PBS Space Time in German.

[deleted]

Re: YouTube No Translation

#105

Post by 7bit »

zorrolovsky wrote: post #31

Anybody knows the business reason for this feature to exist? most people here and in other places are incredibly frustrated with auto-translate and the inability to turn it off. I include myself in that bunch. There are two potential reasons in my mind: - Youtube folks A/B tested it and it got more engagement - n/ views, time viewed per video, etc. (but were they tracking the right metrics? ie did they capture user f…

AFAIK it's up to the video owner to choose whether or not they enable these translations. When I found this out, I lost respect for so many creators, because they turned on this shitty feature.
Post reply on HN