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YouTube No Translation

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Re: YouTube No Translation

#91

Post by spaniard89277 »

unpaydijk wrote: post #66

One thing this kind of thing severely hurts is a lot of devices, services are affected by local laws, units, concepts, brands sometimes severely altering their function. - Searching for a guide on say a car infotainment system would be totally different here from someone explaining in the USA or germany. Now I see a ton of titles in my language, only to find out it's information is completely useless to me because a…

- Searching for a guide on say a car infotainment system would be totally different here from someone explaining in the USA or germany. Now I see a ton of titles in my language, only to find out it's information is completely useless to me because a menu, button or whatever doesen't even exist.

This is so annoying. I can't believe they couldn't understand this, and there are many multilingual people.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#92

Post by sweetjuly »

kaoD wrote: post #34
rickcarlino wrote: post #19

Unbelievable 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.

I don't even need a configurable toggle. I just need YouTube to understand I am native Spanish and English speaker and leave those untouched.

This is what baffles me the most. It's not just that they're foisting machine translation on people to boost some nonsense KPI, but that they're assuming that everyone speaks only one language. Tech is awfully hegemonic, sure, but it is unimaginable that only oblivious monolingual people worked on this feature. Did they just ignore internal complaints about this before they shipped it? How does a feature even get built like this?

Re: YouTube No Translation

#93

Post by 1oooqooq »

rickcarlino wrote: post #19

Unbelievable 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.

most open source clients allow you do pick the language and subtitle just fine. youtube backend is pretty decent, despite the frontend team being there just to add ads.

i recommend "PipePipe" on android.

if you are waiting for them to add that feature on the native player, remember google haven't added a single feature to gmail app besides reading email... you cannot even create a filter.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#94

Post by constantcrying »

YouTube apparently does not understand that bilingual people exist. I do not want translations between German and English, I understand both languages just fine.

I do not want to backwards translate some nonsense autogenerated YouTube translation to understand what some video title means. I do not ever want to watch an automatic dub where some AI voice replaces the actual language I understand.

Browsers got this right "never translate German" was enough to fix the auto translation feature. Somehow one of the most valuable companies in the world, managing one of the largest websites in the world can not implement something that basic.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#95

Post by AiAi »

It’s crazy that an extension is needed to fix this. When I first saw that “feature” I thought it was some bug and YouTube would fix soon, but they don’t seem to care about it.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#96

Post by climb_stealth »

I have not seen any auto-translations, even in for videos where others have complained about auto translations to the uploader.

Is this a US only feature? I hope I'm never going to see it because it sounds horrible.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#97

Post by rasz »

danielscrubs wrote: post #83
david-gpu wrote: post #82

Every time I find a video that was shot in my mother tongue auto-translated into English I want to bang my head against the wall. I've told Google in multiple ways that I'm multilingual and it just doesn't get it. It's worst on mobile, where you can't switch the audio channel to the original sound.

Spent a week in Africa, now YT swears that I know Arabic. I haven’t watched a single Arabic video. Any Googlers here that can explain how Google can be so bad at designing products?

>Spent a week in Africa, now YT swears that I know Arabic.

Logged into Twitch in Ukraine once, now Twitch fills my recommendation with _russian_ channels.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#98

Post by danielscrubs »

daniel_reetz wrote: post #87
danielscrubs wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spent a week in Africa, now YT swears that I know Arabic. I haven’t watched a single Arabic video. Any Googlers here that can explain how Google can be so bad at designing products?

Respectfully, at this point, do we need Googlers to explain? Structurally: launch-dependent levels/career advancement. Design wise: massive over reliance on A/B testing. Philosophically: a company hell bent on observing, categorizing, and exploiting us in extremis in exchange for only a tiny "relevant" slice of their potential deliverable. Because of their focus on "scale", they have never cared about any individual…

But in this hyperpersonalisation era, we somehow give them a free pass when their A/B testing should catch these exact things.

Taking a vacation abroad cant be a new concept for them.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#99

Post by realusername »

bombela wrote: post #69
culturestate wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Do you mean results in English, or results that are specifically US-centric?

Not op. But my experience is both. It's impossible to get Google to search for a specific region in a specific language. DuckDuckGo is far better on this. You can use add regions to search for, and quickly toggle them.

It's the same on Youtube, it's still impossible to search videos by language.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#100

Post by numpad0 »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #32
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…

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…

I think the idea is to eventually get machine translations just generally work, by start shooting in the general direction and pushing forward / throwing solutions at the wall and seeing which sticks. They must really not like how YouTube cross-language viewership currently work.
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