YouTube No Translation

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.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#5

Post by Version467 » Sat, Jul 19, 2025, 11:18 AM UTC

CivBase wrote: post #2

I 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 ignore recommendations with german titles. 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. And recently, they've added auto-translated audio, which is even worse, because now I'm opening an english video and a terrible robotic german voice is talking to me and I manually need to switch to the original source.

It's also not consistent behavior. It's not like all videos on the front page are looking like they're in german. It's just some of them and afaik there's no way to tell.

And you genuinely can't turn it off completely. Incredibly frustrating and I'm just puzzled by the thought-process that lead to this decision. This would be a pretty cool feature if it was consistently applied and freely configurable.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#6

Post by sigio » Sat, Jul 19, 2025, 11:19 AM UTC

Zealotux wrote: post #4

CivBase wrote: post #2

I didn't know video translations were a thing. Is this not configurable?

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)

Re: YouTube No Translation

#7

Post by MrGilbert » Sat, Jul 19, 2025, 11:24 AM UTC

Version467 wrote: post #5

CivBase wrote: post #2

I 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…

To add to that, the german translation most of the time is absolutely horrible and more clickbait then the original wording.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#8

Post by HPsquared » Sat, Jul 19, 2025, 11:26 AM UTC

Version467 wrote: post #5

CivBase wrote: post #2

I 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…

It should really be an option in the advanced search, or be able to say something like lang:de

Re: YouTube No Translation

#9

Post by thrance » Sat, Jul 19, 2025, 11:27 AM UTC

CivBase wrote: post #2

I didn't know video translations were a thing. Is this not configurable?

You'd guess so but no. If you're bilingual you have to choose one language, and videos in the other will get this ridiculously bad literal auto-translation treatment. Pure insanity, and something that makes me mad daily.

Re: YouTube No Translation

#10

Post by WHA8m » Sat, Jul 19, 2025, 11:28 AM UTC

Version467 wrote: post #5

CivBase wrote: post #2

I 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…

I'd love to have a robotic german voice. All I get is the clickbait MrBeast TikTok voice. I get a real reaction when I hear it. I try so hard to avoid the current social media content. It's unbearable. The shock is even greater when I do stumble across it.

Youtube is really the only website that is straight up unusable for me without a set of Addons (uBlock, sponsorBlock, Unhook).