Oh god. Yeah. You know how YouTube sometimes asks you questions instead of an ad? I once got a super shitty romanized one in my language. The romanization was

Oh god. Yeah. You know how YouTube sometimes asks you questions instead of an ad? I once got a super shitty romanized one in my language. The romanization was atrocious. It might have been the "official" way to romanize things, but nobody in India uses that, so it's not useful like that. It was a shitty machine romanization of a shitty machine translation. It took me a minute to even understand wtf was going on. To me, it was gibberish and it wanted an action from me, so I was stuck staring at it. I realized it was some Indic language, but I wasn't even sure which for a while, that's how bad it was. It took me like five minutes to decipher it. It contained crap like "vhid'io" (video) and "sa'ina apa" (sign up), which are English words transliterated into Marathi and then back, for some stupid reason. Whoever made that had no idea whatsoever what they were doing. Romanizations are not preferred in India. People may use them whilst chatting but that's just because learning a new keyboard is hard. These romanizations are significantly different and more readable. All speakers of the language who can read romanizations can read the script, so the script is very much preferred. This was in Mumbai, where plenty of folks do not even speak that language. While Google may have guessed my language from the fact that it knows everything, I've noticed YouTube showing Marathi ads on anyone's computer in Mumbai, so it probably was a geolocation based decision.