Live data from Hacker News

YouTube No Translation

addons.mozilla.org

51–60 of 106 posts

Re: YouTube No Translation

#51
Just came back home from a 3 week travel in south- and east-Europe. Visited 4 different countries. I have a newfound hatred for:

1. Sites/apps that automatically change language based on your location, and force that auto-translation onto you.

2. Reddit that translates reddit posts to your location based language. Those will quickly populate your search feed for almost any search you do.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#52
post #41
post #23

The 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.

After 25 you can’t really learn new languages without considerable investment and effort. Translating is the only option for the vast majority of people.

>Translating is the only option for the vast majority of people.

The key word here being 'option'.

>After 25 you can’t really learn new languages without considerable investment and effort.

And by enabling this translation by default, without any obvious way to disable it, they are also making it harder for

    «Spain and Portugal share many geographical and cultural traits. But the number of Spanish speakers is double that of Portuguese speakers. Again, maybe in part because of this, Portugal uses subtitling while in Spain television is dubbed. And, as a result, Portugal’s results in the TOEFL exams are much better than Spain’s.»
[0] https://www.gwern.net/docs/culture/2018-micola.pdf

Re: YouTube No Translation

#53
I ll give you an even better idea for a youtube extension, if nobody makes it, i ll most certainly do. I need to pin a particular comment on a set of videos matching a criteria and change this pinned comment across all these videos every now and then, like for example when i put a new video out, i would like to link to this from the pinned comment of relevant videos. this is such a hassle doing manually in current times. i am amazed nobody has come up with a pinned comment manager for youtube yet

Re: YouTube No Translation

#54

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…

Most Americans speak one language. Therefore American product designers think everyone speaks one language and only ever wants to hear everything in their one language...

I agree, it's annoying. I speak multiple languages and like to consume the original whenever possible.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#55
post #6
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently not, or the setting is not easily accessible, and it baffles me it's the case and someone at YouTube probably is proud of it on top of getting their promotion for such a terrible feature.

On desktop you can at least change it at runtime (like auto-dubbing), but on mobile they have made this completely impossible. I keep running into (originally) german video's that have been auto-translated to english for me, which I really dislike, since I can perfectly understand german. There's no way to disable this and just get subs only (which can be toggled on/off)

I have never experienced this, but then again I'm on web. Haven't faffed with the YT mobile app since I put GrapheneOS on my phone 3 years ago.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#56
The fact that this needs to exist is a testament to how bad some things in YouTube are. They were able to make me quit being a paying customer with shitty things like that.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#58

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…

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.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#59
How did they fail to make this an option in the first place?

To be very clear, I don’t even want to translate videos in languages that YouTube know I don’t understand. Much less in videos languages I do understand.

Also I don’t think it’s a good idea to use AI in any part of this chain unless there is user driven corrections. Seems like even big TikTok/Instagram accounts use some auto subtitling machinery and it’s invariably wrong. Why even bother? Or why not just manually subtitle if it’s a 10 second English video and the text is in English? Why use automation at all for that?

Re: YouTube No Translation

#60
post #33

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…

You gotta remember that "think of the average person, and then remember 50% are dumber than that". By doing this, Youtube has probably 10x'd available content for "dumb" ppl to watch. Respectfully, my parents are in that cohort, and I suspect my father will happily watch AI translated and dubbed woodworking channels and not care at all. He "wins" here. I have to acknowledge that there are probably more people like hi…

> By doing this, Youtube has probably 10x'd available content for "dumb" ppl to watch.

But is that content really watchable for them?

Post reply on HN