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

71–80 of 106 posts

Re: YouTube No Translation

#71

Post by vouaobrasil »

lbotos wrote: post #33
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…

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…

I've disabled dubbing on my channel completely. I think the world was a better place when people made an effort to learn languages, and making material in any language available in any other removes some of the magic from the world.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#72

Post by maksimur »

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…

I wouldn't mind and I would actually prefer if things were translated correctly, adapting to local slang, cultural references and the likes. As of now translations are weird if not outright cringey. This is a problem with LLMs in general (probably because they're trained mostly on English data), although to a lesser degree, but enough that I have to correct them daily.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#73

Post by vladvasiliu »

estebank wrote: post #67
vladvasiliu wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do note that when rolling out features like these, they geoblock them, even on a per run basis, so it might be happening a lot throughout the world but it just hasn't reached your country. For an example, mobile YouTube in the US lets me minimize the video and multitask while still seeing a picture-in-picture window and the audio, while as soon as one lands on France that feature gets immediately disabled.

I've heard about different features in different regions, but GP is also in France.

I am also not connected to my account when I browse in Edge (it's my work PC, it also uses a separate IP), so I don't think it's related to the feature being rolled out on a per-account basis.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#74

Post by [deleted] »

ntstr wrote: post #30
WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

Re: YouTube No Translation

#76

Post by Macha »

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…

The execs want everyone focused on AI and building features related to AI. This is AI. So it is built.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#77

Post by redwall_hp »

b3orn wrote: post #50
ahmedfromtunis wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's dumb about watching dubbed woodworking videos? And what part of watching japanese videos in japanese makes superior? You know what's dumb, though: failing to acknowledge that the world is diverse and people have diverse needs that we can't even start to imagine. I'm happy for your dad that AI has opened for him the gates to even more content to watch from around the world about his hobby.

> And what part of watching japanese videos in japanese makes superior? Bilingual people exist and the AI translation YouTube currently uses sounds very unnatural and destroys everything that isn't voice.

Multilingual people not only exist, but they're the majority in the world, with some estimates reaching over 60% of the global population (others are low 50s).

Even the US, which is a pretentious bubble, has a great many multilingual people. English is by far the most common, but many people speak it as a second language or not at all.

Another issue is not all people, whether they are proficient in one language or more, speak the dominant language of the country they reside in. Which language does some geofence decide Indians speak? Do Eastern Canadians speak English or French? (Officially both, and bilingual signage is a legal requirement.)

Maybe I'm travelling in Japan and I only know very basic Japanese, but the geo-targeting decides everything should be in Japanese. Or maybe someone is immigrating to the US and doesn't speak English (which is not a legal requirement in any way). We have many non-English speakers who live in the US.

Honestly, if it gets to the point that it's providing pressure against the use of a language where it's commonly spoken, it could arguably be considered ethnic cleansing adjacent...

Re: YouTube No Translation

#78

Post by maxglute »

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…

Maybe youtube push audience to view auto translated/dubbed foreign language content from regions where they don't have to pay out to creators, or pay as much. TBH the more content I can view the better, just give me a toggle to set default language and a button to native video language.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#79

Post by beached_whale »

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…

I want more of it. Just make it clear it is auto translated. It opens up a lot of views outside the english sphere

Re: YouTube No Translation

#80

Post by OhHiMarkos »

TrackerFF wrote: post #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.

Yep, reddit also does this. Since I am not native English speaker and I am expat in a European country, this is super frustrating.
Post reply on HN