111–120 of 219 posts
People have been "contributing" legit looking subtitles and then inserting some spam in the middle for self promotion. Most big youtube channels e.g. pewdiepie has disabled community contributed subtitles.
Just noticed that Google Maps translates a lot of German business names into English, which is exactly what I don't want when I’m driving along, looking for their sign. There’s enough “Denglish” (intentional use of English-like terms) in use by Germans themselves that this adds rather than removes confusion for non-native German speakers. For example, “Stoffe Bauer” into “Fabric Farmer” - Bauer is a common family nam…
Youtube also seems to randomly machine translate video titles into German for me, but weirdly enough only sometimes, for some videos. And has a similar problem that short labels etc just don't work if translated by something not optimized for it - and that a German channel probably would use English words in many cases...
Just noticed that Google Maps translates a lot of German business names into English, which is exactly what I don't want when I’m driving along, looking for their sign. There’s enough “Denglish” (intentional use of English-like terms) in use by Germans themselves that this adds rather than removes confusion for non-native German speakers. For example, “Stoffe Bauer” into “Fabric Farmer” - Bauer is a common family nam…
lol, that's terrible. And a great example of lacking context. Youtube also seems to randomly machine translate video titles into German for me, but weirdly enough only sometimes, for some videos. And has a similar problem that short labels etc just don't work if translated by something not optimized for it - and that a German channel probably would use English words in many cases...
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I don't feel this way at all. Videos have automatic subtitles which you can automatically translate into the language of your choice, speech recognition is so good that the right tool will let you program with it, text to speech is a button-click away for basically any Web page (all I need is an extension). Post-processing for color blindness is amazing, left-to-right languages render readably on a consistent basis.…
Automatic subtitles for videos in a different language are basically a joke currently. I agree that we're progressing fast, but fully automated machine translation is IMHO still lightyears away (if at all feasible). And to automate subtitle generation in a foreign language, you first need to have speech to text, which is also still error-prone, so now you have two sources of errors. We're seeing the uncanny valley pr…
Even with human-translated texts it's usually noticeable when the translator didn't understand the subject. To make sense of the translated text you then have to try to reverse-engineer the translator's mapping to figure out what the text would have said in the original.
Much like how you can't properly parse HTML using only regular expressions and string substitution, you can't truly translate human languages without understanding. You have to parse the input language, process the meaning of what was said and finally serialize to the target language.
Seems like they have enough resources to train their translation NN and speech-to-text NN. I don't think google has introduced those features for the users in the first place but they were a means to get training data.
Somehow this minor feature stands as proof for me that Google doesn’t know its customers and doesn’t care. And yet they will be financially successful. Maybe they are too big.
Having said that, I agree that Google should know better. They base their entire strategy on pure data, but I fear that in this way they are forgetting to factor in things that are not (yet) measurable or measured.
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> I don’t think this functionality was as little used Based on what? Because you used this feature a few times, it became widely used? We have no idea if this feature was used by more or less than 1 channel in a thousand, or these accounted for more than 1 view in a thousand. > Clearly more options exist for managing spam Yeah, I’ve heard this one before from well meaning people who start out with “why don’t you just…
> We have no idea if this feature was used by more or less than 1 channel in a thousand, or these accounted for more than 1 view in a thousand. If you really take all of YouTube into account then yes, the actual number was probably very small, considering how many cat videos, fail compilations, music videos, wedding videos etc. there are. "Last Christmas" doesn't need Cantonese subtitles but surely makes up for a lot…
> I'm subscribed to about 100 channels
How often have you actually relied on community generated subtitles? Note that even if you used subtitles, those could have been auto-generated.
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> I don’t think this functionality was as little used Based on what? Because you used this feature a few times, it became widely used? We have no idea if this feature was used by more or less than 1 channel in a thousand, or these accounted for more than 1 view in a thousand. > Clearly more options exist for managing spam Yeah, I’ve heard this one before from well meaning people who start out with “why don’t you just…
"little used" is a stupid argument from YT. It may be little used on a global scale but vital to some specific groups. By this reasonning all that will be left on YT would be music and cat videos.
You have to make hard choices sometimes. If this is a feature that only a tiny minority cares about, then the team has to pull the plug on it.
Alternative Free video hosting sites : https://www.dailymotion.com/ https://lbry.tv/ https://d.tube/ https://dlive.tv/ https://www.bitchute.com/
The federation of peertube instances, which I feel will eventually be the most critical alternative of all: https://instances.joinpeertube.org/instances
Can I run a background task on my machine to help in some way with making the content of some instance more available to people, or would I have to run my own instance?
community-contributed subtitles are an essential part of the appeal of YouTube for me, particularly with non-English videos from small operations who may not have the resources to provide quality transcriptions/translations. I don't think this functionality was as little-used as the support post represents. Clearly more options exist for managing spam than just shutting down the feature altogether.
Is i18n deteriorating at a global scale? I’m seeing more and more nonsense machine translations and systemic errors in manual translations over few years in my language. Once I’ve seen a story about a corporate turning down “should” and “should not” swapped in documentation as a non reproducible issue, other times I see semi-sensical expressions that has 1:n relationships between English and Translated that needs con…
Also you get tremendously worse translations when you translate a document (pdf, doc) vs the "scan/import" an image of text function.
It's a real bummer because hypertext and mobile UI should be excellent mediums for presenting multiple candidate translations and letting the reader indicate the best translation.