Maybe enshitification is entering its dadaist phase? That's the best explanation I have for how youtube decided to implement this feature.
YouTube No Translation
21–30 of 106 posts
Re: YouTube No Translation
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Surprisingly, it isn't. You can change the language in your google account and it will take that into account for what to translate and into what language, but you can't turn it off completely. I don't know who thought this was a good user experience, because it's one of the most frustrating features I've ever had to deal with. I'm german, but almost all of the things I watch are in english. So usually I will just ig…
I'm in France, but my Google, browsers and devices languages are English. So Youtube randomly auto-dubs (and auto-translates the title of) some French videos into English, and some English videos into French. But they're never the same videos depending on the devices or the browsers. However, the automatic subtitles during the preview remain in the original langage.
I'm in the same boat (living in France, browser and google account configured to use English) and I've never noticed this.
Now I'm not a hardcore Youtube user, but whenever I browse it, French-titled videos are in French, and the same for English.
I'm mostly using Firefox on Linux, and occasionally Edge on Windows.
Re: YouTube No Translation
#23The fact that this is needed and not configurable is so frustrating. I'm almost certain nobody even asked for this.
What a great way to stop people ever needing to learn another language. God forbid people use their brains for anything that 30 second shorts.
Re: YouTube No Translation
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
> thought-process that lead to this decision highly likely to be monolingual people as they cannot understand you would like movies to be in any other language than your mother tongue.
> highly likely to be monolingual people Which is insane to me. Silicon Valley is filled to the brim with multi-lingual people. And yet so many decisions that are coming out have no understanding of languages
I wouldn't be surprised at all if they one day decided that to have an experience of having no user content automatically translated, you have to pay for the privilege. Call it a multilinguality tax.
Re: YouTube No Translation
#25I didn't know video translations were a thing. Is this not configurable?
Surprisingly, it isn't. You can change the language in your google account and it will take that into account for what to translate and into what language, but you can't turn it off completely. I don't know who thought this was a good user experience, because it's one of the most frustrating features I've ever had to deal with. I'm german, but almost all of the things I watch are in english. So usually I will just ig…
> Except I can't do that anymore, because there's no guarantee that youtube didn't randomly decide to translate the title of an english video into german
Sp you clicked when you wouldn't have, somewhere an engagement graph went a notch up, and someone will get a pat on the back.
Re: YouTube No Translation
#26I didn't know video translations were a thing. Is this not configurable?
As a polish YouTube user who wants to watch content in both languages, it's an infuriating no. YouTube started translating titles recently for me, and the translations are pure nonsense. I'm not exaggerating, it's dumb word for word translation with no context. I have to reverse engineer titles now. Even more recently they turned audio translation on too with the most ear piercing voice possible, but that can be turn…
Yup. I look up videos with Polish titles precisely because I want local content made in Poland telling about things specific to Poland, not some other stuff which turns out to be in English made for other locales.
But I guess they see my frustration as "engagement".
Re: YouTube No Translation
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Surprisingly, it isn't. You can change the language in your google account and it will take that into account for what to translate and into what language, but you can't turn it off completely. I don't know who thought this was a good user experience, because it's one of the most frustrating features I've ever had to deal with. I'm german, but almost all of the things I watch are in english. So usually I will just ig…
I'm in France, but my Google, browsers and devices languages are English. So Youtube randomly auto-dubs (and auto-translates the title of) some French videos into English, and some English videos into French. But they're never the same videos depending on the devices or the browsers. However, the automatic subtitles during the preview remain in the original langage.
I'm in France, my devices are set to en-GB, I've watched only English videos (plus the odd French one) yet youtube decides to auto translate audio in German and lately in Spanish.
Go figure.
Re: YouTube No Translation
#28Everyone I've spoken to in my circle hates this feature.
We're all fairly intelligent people — if we needed audio dubbing, we'd turn it on ourselves.
But to have auto-dub enabled by default is, frankly, incredulous.
If someone from Google could explain the rationale behind forcing this on users, I’d genuinely love to understand it.
Re: YouTube No Translation
#29Unbelievable that YouTube has not made this feature configurable. I am a language learner and use YouTube to find target language content. It’s very difficult now because you can no longer trust the title of the video to tell you what language it was intended for. Would have been very simple to add a settings toggle. This is one of the worst app inconveniences I’ve come across in recent years.
Google has always been a pain when it comes to internationalisation.
The number of hoops you have to jump through to get results from the actual Google page when you are outside of the US is mind boggling. I don’t even know if it’s still possible.
Re: YouTube No Translation
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a polish YouTube user who wants to watch content in both languages, it's an infuriating no. YouTube started translating titles recently for me, and the translations are pure nonsense. I'm not exaggerating, it's dumb word for word translation with no context. I have to reverse engineer titles now. Even more recently they turned audio translation on too with the most ear piercing voice possible, but that can be turn…
Yup. I look up videos with Polish titles precisely because I want local content made in Poland telling about things specific to Poland, not some other stuff which turns out to be in English made for other locales. But I guess they see my frustration as "engagement".
> because I want local content made in Poland telling about things specific to Poland,
I used to use site:reddit.com as my go to must-use keyword whenever I wanted to look for something on Google, but since they introduced automated translation in my language (French) it has become a nightmare because I would find irrelevant content written for other places even when I type my search in French. You see, they had the great idea to not only automatically translate entire subreddits and comments but also have the translated forms be indexed by Google!
So now you would try to look for comments on, for example, great retail shops for niche products and click links that talk about shopping in the USA or Canada. Hateful.
I can't really describe how much I hate this without going into the most vulgar of expletives.
site:reddit.com was the last bastion of finding things quickly on google without stumbling upon ton of markov chain / copy paste crap content. Now it's being ruined by this translation nonsense + LLM bots.