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YouTube: Community contributions will be discontinued across all channels

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Re: YouTube: Community contributions will be discontinued across all channels

#121

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

spc476 wrote: post #92
reaperducer wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if there was a standard of moderation that would satisfy everyone, there’s too much to moderate. If only Google had a half a trillion dollars to spend on something other that spying on people. And if only there were 35 million people out of work. But, alas, poor sweet simple Google cannot possibly lie in the bed it made.

Some math shows that can't work. Half a trillion to 35 million is US$15,000 per person. For one year. And people will complain that US$15,000 is not enough to live on. What happens in year two?

Google goes bust?

That's not likely, is it?

Does Google have no concept of how YouTube drives ad sales and other synergies? Or of how much goodwill is worth?

Re: YouTube: Community contributions will be discontinued across all channels

#122

Post by qwerty456127 »

I have always wanted to edit the auto-generated subtitles and translations for some YouTube videos but never knew how. Perhaps the feature could be much more popular and really boost reach of some videos if they made it more visible and easy to use.

Re: YouTube: Community contributions will be discontinued across all channels

#123

Post by Tainnor »

ptx wrote: post #114
Tainnor wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Machine translation can never replace real translators, unless we develop an AI with actual understanding. 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 HT…

I agree in the general sense. The problem is that good human translation works as follows: The translator reads the text, decodes this into some mental representation, and then encodes that representation in the target language. Both decoding and encoding are also highly subjective (which is why works of literature can be translated in many different ways, see e.g. all the translations of works like the Bible, the Odyssey, etc.).

Machine translation still works by a straightforward source-to-target mapping. This assumes that there is somehow a 1:1 correspondence between concepts in one language and concepts in the other one.

There are some cases where this can yield OK results: when the languages are very closely related and/or if the material is very technical (e.g. instruction manuals), because in such cases, the concepts do tend to align a bit better.

But in general, I think the problem is intractable without solving general AI.

Re: YouTube: Community contributions will be discontinued across all channels

#124

Post by NoOneNew »

martinpw wrote: post #66
fakedang wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last time I checked, YouTube ads were a very profitable business. The parent to your comment chose revenue likely to note that Google makes money from the bed ie. it's not a service given away for free.

Where did you check this? AFAIK YouTube profits (if any) are not broken out anywhere. At least not as of early this year: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/03/google-still-isnt-telling-us... Alphabet said YouTube ad revenue in the first quarter reached $4.7 billion, while cloud sales came in at $2.6 billion. The company broke those numbers out for the first time, but it’s still not disclosing profit figures for the units.

Yea, but anyone that owns a small business understands how you hide profit so you get taxed less.

Given how quickly and easily the axe comes down on sub par Google products, I highly doubt they'd keep YouTube if it wasn't profitable.

Re: YouTube: Community contributions will be discontinued across all channels

#125

Post by polytely »

detaro wrote: post #112
MandieD wrote: post #108

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...

Same from English to Dutch, I wonder what triggers that, is it something the video owners has to enable? or does it only happen when there are good subtitles available (either community provided or auto-translated)

Re: YouTube: Community contributions will be discontinued across all channels

#126

Post by rjsw »

iagovar wrote: post #103
ohgodplsno wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're american or british, maybe yeah. That leaves aside all the people who do not speak it as a main language, those who use the captions to gather additional context from translators, those who cannot watch the video with sounds for any reason... The list is endless. Oh and, the automatic subs are absolute trash if whoever is speaking is not doing so with an american accent, in a perfectly clear room.

If you speak multiple languages (which isn't uncommon out of the anglosphere) it becomes very annoying to have YT putting subtitles and translating stuff for you. If I want subtitles or translation I should be the one deciding, or at least give an option to opt-out, which isn't doing it every video. And that was for subtitles, because that wasn't possible with titles and descriptions.

English is my first language and I don't want automatic subtitles or translation for stuff in other languages.

Re: YouTube: Community contributions will be discontinued across all channels

#127

Post by Flenser »

henrikschroder wrote: post #78
darthoctopus wrote: post #2

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.

> I don't think this functionality was as little-used as the support post represents. I've used it a little bit, and been watching a bunch of content that relied on it. That said, creating subtitles with their tools was an absolute shit experience. I've done my fair share of subtitling using other programs, and it's clear that whoever made the interface on YT hasn't really used the real deal, and doesn't understand w…

Sounds like they took the wrong message from seeing that it wasn't being used as much as they were hoping. Are there any other video hosting sites with a better subtitling experience? This might be an opportunity for them.

Re: YouTube: Community contributions will be discontinued across all channels

#128

Post by easton »

totetsu wrote: post #57

https://amara.org/en/ is an alternative service, but probably even less discoverable for most viewers.

Is there any way for me as a creator to pipe in subtitles from that service automatically into YouTube’s captions? Because then you could have one person go there, write the subtitles, have the creator approve it and then all of the viewers can see them.

Re: YouTube: Community contributions will be discontinued across all channels

#129

Post by chiefalchemist »

Tainnor wrote: post #96
numpad0 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't feel that it's deteriorating as much as that tech in general never properly understood how to do good localisation. There was a time when many apps I downloaded were apparently machine-translated in a very bad way, so much that it was almost impossible to understand what was meant. That hasn't occurred to me in a while now, which means that I either download higher quality apps, google has stopped pushing the…

> I don't feel that it's deteriorating as much as that tech in general never properly understood how to do good localisation.

Yes and no. The majority of my experience with localization is via WordPress. Frankly, it's a PITA. Another thing to know, and so on. It's not an extension so to speak, it's another mountain to climb, another silo to wrestle with.

Furthermore, and yes this is unique to WP, it make no effort to leverage it's scale. Certainly, once (e.g.) 'Add to Cart' has been translated and vetted, it doesn't need to be done again. You should be able to submit your language file, have it parsed and spit back fleshed out as much as possible. Then you need only to focus on the bits that didn't find a match.

Yes. Some increase in understanding is in order. But an updating and upgrading of the tool(s) is over due as well.

Re: YouTube: Community contributions will be discontinued across all channels

#130

Post by robin_reala »

ohgodplsno wrote: post #76
Curzel wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Automatically generated subs are good enough in most cases... Also, it is a very underused feature, you turn them on either because you have some hearing issues, or because you are watching something in a foreign language, both are probably pretty rare

If you're american or british, maybe yeah. That leaves aside all the people who do not speak it as a main language, those who use the captions to gather additional context from translators, those who cannot watch the video with sounds for any reason... The list is endless. Oh and, the automatic subs are absolute trash if whoever is speaking is not doing so with an american accent, in a perfectly clear room.

To be honest, YouTube’s captioning struggles with even British accents.
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