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I also hate the youtube "feature" that translates the titles of videos to your setting's language. This is so annoying. I can understand English and don't need

by tapia 1y ago

I also hate the youtube "feature" that translates the titles of videos to your setting's language. This is so annoying. I can understand English and don't need these automatic translations.

Freak_NL 1y ago
And you can't turn it off. I really hate this non-feature.
- apples_oranges 1y ago
  Using Brave on iOS I haven't encountered it yet. Perhaps it strips some information? But with the official YT app I have, and it was both fascinating and annoying.
- cypressious 1y ago
  Agreed. I use https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/youtube-anti-translate https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/youtube-anti-tra... to work around it.
avhception 1y ago
My computer is set to English even though I'm German, and sometimes Youtube will treat me to this really uncanny machine voice with really weird phrases because it auto-translated some German video or advert. Lidl is worth it, ja!
- FinnLobsien 1y ago
  I absolutely hate this. I have the exact same thing. Even if the technology was good, I speak both languages and want to see the original. Why is it so hard to just add something as a setting/feature and offer it to people without forcing it on the user?
  - avhception 1y ago
    I wonder if Lidl or the other advertisers know and approve of this.
    - FinnLobsien 1y ago
      I mean it's probably somewhere, deep in the ToS but pretty sure if you showed that machine voice to the advertisers they wouldn't approve.
  - preisschild 1y ago
    This would also be good for movies :D I can speak german, I don't need forced subtitles for the nazis
    - jiehong 1y ago
      Sometimes we do, when actors actually don’t speak German very well (or Russian or Chinese or French)
  - bunderbunder 1y ago
    > Why is it so hard to just add something as a setting/feature and offer it to people without forcing it on the user? Office politics. Google is famously "performance-driven", so the manager in charge of that feature needs usage metrics to be high for the sake of their own career. (Speculating, of course.)
    - FinnLobsien 1y ago
      That's a funny idea—if the KPI was boosting adoption of a feature and the PM just made that feature the default and suddenly adoption was through the roof. The sad part is we can't rule that out.
- qiine 1y ago
  its especially funny with asmr video, not gonna lie the first time I was beyond confused
- numpad0 1y ago
  idoundernotstandwhothisfeatureisdivisiblebytwoinproductionandi just dislike video and move on. I'm guessing Google wants uploader penalized, and I do feel sorry but it's not my problem.
- pjmlp 1y ago
  I thought I was the only one getting such a messy ads. At least I know I didn't mess anything on my WebOS TV.
- dgb23 1y ago
  Same here. My native tongue is German, I live in Switzerland, but my settings on all devices are English. I do this on purpose, because I find everything is more searchable. I don't even know any German terms for most technical things I might search or look for. So even if the automatic translations were good, which they aren't, this would be a non-feature. My browser already tells them what my preferred language is. Just use it.
  - netsharc 1y ago
    Living in Zurich (German part of Switzerland for those who don't know), Windows 10 in English, the built-in Microsoft Store used to offer content in... French. Now it's a mix of German and English, e.g. 1 heading is "Spiele-Bestseller", and the next is "Best selling apps". And prices displayed as "28,00 CHF" (correct would be to use the decimal point). Like Van Halen's brown M&Ms, it just shows how sloppily this thing is programmed: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/brown-out/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/brown-out/
littlecranky67 1y ago
So much this. I suspect the idea that a person speaks more than one language is absent in US silicon valley. Else I can't explain why youtube only lets you set one language. Heck, even google allows you to configure all spoken languages in your account, the very same google account you use for youtube. Yet youtube ignores it and has its own settings.
- fifnir 1y ago
  > I suspect the idea that a person speaks more than one language is absent in US silicon valley. Exactly, it's like they've never left their own state levels of ignorance
- troupo 1y ago
  > I suspect the idea that a person speaks more than one language is absent in US silicon valley. Which has been baffling to me considering how many foreigners work at these companies.
  - genocidicbunny 1y ago
    I think it's more a matter of "why would they have their system language set to X if they speak Y? If they want Y, they should just set their system language to Y!" It's the idea that the user has a preference for something, and it applies always and everywhere, even when it's not applicable.
    - littlecranky67 1y ago
      It should be absolutely clear, when i speak English and German, do not auto-translate any video title in those languages to the other. You wouldn't believe how bad the translations are, and how unwanted by me (the user). Worse when you speak a third or fourth language, and tend to watch videos. It gets messy.
      - genocidicbunny 1y ago
        Yeah I know, I watch videos in six different languages and the automatic translation are pretty universally bad.
sebtron 1y ago
There are a few browser extensions to fix this, I use this one: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-no-translation https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-no-tr...
- Aldipower 1y ago
  Thanks! This is great. Although embarrassing for YouTube.
- nilslindemann 1y ago
  I can also recommend FreeTube
sph 1y ago
Now Reddit results are translated as well in Google, Kagi, so you think you have found a relevant response in your language, but it's just a machine translation from an English post.
- fifnir 1y ago
  I've been noticing the same, this completely breaks searching for reddit results for me
  - nilslindemann 1y ago
    Try "Reddit Untranslate" addon.
    - reddalo 1y ago
      I'm a bit fed up with having to use a million plugins to make the web usable.
- qiine 1y ago
  duckduckgo seems to do it as well
  - whstl 1y ago
    Yep, this is coming from Reddit itself. It's using different URLs, and they seem to be making an effort to SEO-rank those translations.
    - int_19h 1y ago
      It's interesting that the quality is so low. You can do very good translations for many languages today even with fairly cheap LMs, but for some reason (cost?) automated translation online seems to be still mostly at Google Translate level.
      - 1y ago
Unai 1y ago
Can't recommend "DeArrow" browser extension enough. YouTube is a miserable experience without it (and its sister extension SponsorBlock).
thrance 1y ago
Hear! Hear! It enrages me. They also automatically turn the subtitles ON, making you constantly have to disable them. There is no way for multilingual users to add a list of the languages they understand, which is an insane limitation that's been driving me crazy for years at this point. Wtf are they even working on at youtube's HQ? Making video thumbnails larger still?
echoangle 1y ago
I don't even get the point of that. If I need a translation of the title, I won't be able to watch the video anyways. At least ot makes some sense with the horribly auto-translated videos now, but they had the title translation for a long time while the video was still the original language.
- immibis 1y ago
  There's been automatic subtitle translation for a long time.
  - echoangle 1y ago
    Good point, I didn’t even think about that because I would never watch a video in a foreign language with auto-translated subtitles.
    - anton-c 1y ago
      I get you and normally wouldn't either. I was a little impressed when I could switch to like 10 diff languages on the fly. As a foreign language learner seems like it could be pretty helpful. It's probably most useful for utility or news content. Not 'high effort videos' about an interesting topic. I'm imagining you find a video in another language that fixes a problem you have and can switch to your language to watch.
    - gus_massa 1y ago
      I sometime watch videos in English with the automatic subtitles. Sometimes I can't understand a few words and the subtitles help me. Most of the time I watch them without subtitles, and rewind the video a few seconds to rewatch a short part with the subtitles enabled.
genocidicbunny 1y ago
Not only the titles, but also the audio track. There's a few youtubers I regularly watch who are trying to branch out into some additional languages by providing fan-made translated audio tracks, and english is sometimes one of those. Every single time I watch one of those videos, I have to manually set the language back to the original because often the translations lose some of the word play or hidden meaning in the original language. Often it also means I need to rewind the video because it started playing before all the controls have loaded (because youtube hates FF with youtube-related extensions) and I could swap the language track back. One of the sister replies linked to an extension to help with that, which I'm going to give a try, but it's annoying that there's not a simple toggle in the youtube settings to tell it to always use the original language. On the rare occasion that I want to use the translated audio track, I can do _that_ on my own; I speak enough languages that this is a very rare occasion with the type of content I watch. This isn't even something I can understand as them being hostile to ad blocking or wanting to push ads. This is a 'convenience' feature that is just poorly implemented. But I'm sure there's some PM that got a pat on the back for it.
nilslindemann 1y ago
It is not just that these translations are not needed, they are often - in my case German - of a low quality, contain errors and lose information which the original language contained. And the roboter voices loses all the interesting modulations of the original voice. Even a Fireship video sounds terrible when translated.
vintermann 1y ago
I'm sure YouTube's algorithm rewards people for using this feature and making their "content accessible", but if you serve me up an ugly machine translated Norwegian title rather than the English one I could read just fine, that's from my experience a signal that your YouTube channel is low quality algorithm-chasing garbage, so I click "never recommend this channel".
- gus_massa 1y ago
  I guess it's the default option. I've seen a few good channels that have that "feature" enabled. I hate it too.
- bmn__ 1y ago
  What a catastrophe. You punish the wrong person, and even worse, a channel owner will not even receive that signal! The vast majority of channel owners with English content is not aware what's going on. A friendly e-mail to the channel owner explaining the problem and asking to manually disable auto-translation is much more likely to achieve what you want. If you want to get rid of auto-translation on a systematic level, provide feedback to the operators of Youtube through their official communication.
  - SpicyLemonZest 1y ago
    Youtube really doesn't make it obvious that a title got auto-translated. I now realize that I've seen this happen before, with a video that had a different title on my TV than on my computer, but up until this very second I thought it was my TV's fault. Even being aware of this - how do I know that it's an auto-translation, rather than someone making AI slop in my native language, without watching the video?
    - Narishma 1y ago
      One way to tell is when the video has text in the thumbnail. If it's in a different language than the title it has likely been auto translated.
  - deleted 1y ago
b3lvedere 1y ago
While i appreciate the effort that Mark Rober puts in his Youtube videos making them multilanguage, i absolutely hate that native voice. It's one of the few Youtube shorts i have to play twice because of it.
world2vec 1y ago
Gosh this annoys me so much. I am native Portuguese speaker but have all my settings in English. It always tries to auto-dub Portuguese content into English, how do I turn that off?
franga2000 1y ago
What I don't get is how the feature works. I see it for veeery few videos and those are usually highly profitable clickbait and/or big budget productions, so my assumption has been this is actually something the uploader has to enable or even fill out. My language is very "small", so it makes sense that only the broadly-popuar and highly-profitable would be worth translating the titles for. Unfortunately, all the translations are machine-translated garbage and there is no setting to turn this off as a viewer, so it's just incredibly annoying.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
captainpiggies 1y ago
It's even worse for videos with "official" dubs. I have been jump scared by German and French dubs on certain videos recently, I distinctly remember MrBeast, Mark Rober and Nick DiGiovanni. I have set my language to English and my Region to US (worldwide) I don't know what gave YT the idea to preselect these dubs for me, I have seldomly even watched a video that is not English.
- whstl 1y ago
  Yep. Youtube is the worst: - If I select German subtitles for a German video, it will auto-translate all English subtitles to German in the future. - If I select subtitles for an English video, same. - If the video has an Arabic, Hindi, French human-made subtitle to help that audience, it shows it to me instead of the automatic captions Horrible.
joseda-hg 1y ago
Jesus H Christ, I once a month google to see if there's a proper way of stopping this (You can block this with TamperMonkey) 2 things that absolutely kill my experience, 1. Messing up with titles, specially if the contents of the video are still in a different language, Which Kurzgesagt will I get today? Only YouTube knows, this is annoying if I know the youtuber could use a different language in the title to make a joke 2. Messing up with the default audio tracks, I don't mind if the YouTuber has a dubbed track, that's awesome for getting more exposure, but I already know and expect a specific voice and it's extremely jarring I know what Mark Rober sound like, leave it be
lucasoshiro 1y ago
> I can understand English and don't need these automatic translations I think it is far worse than that: 1. If I don't understand a language, probably that video is not for me. Most videos targeted for international audience are in English, or at least the author translated it by theirself. 2. Titles are small sentences, and they don't have enough context to be translated. Once I saw a video called something like "Vamos assistir uma conexão com o passado", which in Portuguese means "Let's watch a connection to the past". I needed to de-translate it in my brain to understand that the original title was "Let's play A Link to the Past" 3. Online resources are a great way to exercise a second language. So, please, don't underestimate my capabilities. At least let me try to read in the original language by myself, if I need the translation I how to use Google Translate or a dictionary. I reckon that this feature makes the access to online content more democratic, it's ok. But at least let me disable that since it makes the experience worse
- marcosdumay 1y ago
  There's a video that Youtube keeps sending me with a translated title "O segredo das lavadouras" (what translates to "the secret of washing machines") that is about picking screw washers... But the real problem is when it decides to translate the titles of some perfectly watchable videos in English into something that uses the Cyrillic alphabet, what has no relation to my accepted languages, and is only used half-way across the world from where I am.
tirant 1y ago
Worse is the auto-dubbing in some channels. Which cannot be disabled. That has resulted in me stopping to watch a channel completely due to the inability to select the original language (youtube mobile website).
mft_ 1y ago
By the by, one quirk of poor language handling that I think it probably harming YouTube is advert language. Every one of my subscriptions is an English language channel, and my language choice on all Google properties (where possible) including YouTube is English. It's not hard to judge that English is my favoured language. And yet... every video advert I receive when travelling is served in the local country's language. It doesn't especially bother me, since I actively avoid listening to adverts (and indeed, now pay for Premium lite to avoid them almost altogether) but it's a weird not-so-edge case that I'd have thought a company as large as Google might have addressed already. They've absolutely got the tech to deliver adverts in any language. (And it could be powerful: imagine receiving adverts for local businesses in your native language while on holiday.)
preisschild 1y ago
Even reddit does that now and for some reason shows the translated version by default when I search a post through google. Very annoying, because instead of just seeing the english post, which I'm easily able to understand, I see half-broken german...
harshreality 1y ago
Do you have en-US or en-GB as an alternate, lower-priority language? If an English variant is in your Accept-Lang: headers, I'd hope YT wouldn't auto-translate English titles. The other thing that Google might properly use is account-specific language settings. But if they're using GeoIP as has been suggested, I agree they're doing it wrong.
- lxgr 1y ago
  > If an English variant is in your Accept-Lang: headers, I'd hope YT wouldn't auto-translate English titles. Your hope is unfortunately entirely misplaced. Google is one of the worst offenders for assuming language and region from users' IP.
cenamus 1y ago
I mean, I can deal with the titles, but recently it has been auto selecting machine translated sound tracks, without any way to disable it. And they're bad, like maybe one level above 2010 phone TTS system
Jotalea 1y ago
And most of the times, the translation misses a core part of the title, making it harder or even impossible to understand. A recent example is "I booted windows from Google Drive (part 2)", which got translated to "inicié ventanas de Google Drive", which misses the whole point. Luckily for me, the miniature said what the video was about, and I could understand and watch it. About the translation, sure, "boot" ≈ "iniciar", "window" = "ventana", but for (microsoft) windows, and other names in foreign languages, the same name must be kept.

by tapia 1y ago

I also hate the youtube "feature" that translates the titles of videos to your setting's language. This is so annoying. I can understand English and don't need these automatic translations.

Freak_NL 1y ago

And you can't turn it off. I really hate this non-feature.

apples_oranges 1y ago
Using Brave on iOS I haven't encountered it yet. Perhaps it strips some information? But with the official YT app I have, and it was both fascinating and annoying.
cypressious 1y ago
Agreed. I use https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/youtube-anti-translate https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/youtube-anti-tra... to work around it.

avhception 1y ago

My computer is set to English even though I'm German, and sometimes Youtube will treat me to this really uncanny machine voice with really weird phrases because it auto-translated some German video or advert. Lidl is worth it, ja!

FinnLobsien 1y ago
I absolutely hate this. I have the exact same thing. Even if the technology was good, I speak both languages and want to see the original. Why is it so hard to just add something as a setting/feature and offer it to people without forcing it on the user?
- avhception 1y ago
  I wonder if Lidl or the other advertisers know and approve of this.
  - FinnLobsien 1y ago
    I mean it's probably somewhere, deep in the ToS but pretty sure if you showed that machine voice to the advertisers they wouldn't approve.
- preisschild 1y ago
  This would also be good for movies :D I can speak german, I don't need forced subtitles for the nazis
  - jiehong 1y ago
    Sometimes we do, when actors actually don’t speak German very well (or Russian or Chinese or French)
- bunderbunder 1y ago
  > Why is it so hard to just add something as a setting/feature and offer it to people without forcing it on the user? Office politics. Google is famously "performance-driven", so the manager in charge of that feature needs usage metrics to be high for the sake of their own career. (Speculating, of course.)
  - FinnLobsien 1y ago
    That's a funny idea—if the KPI was boosting adoption of a feature and the PM just made that feature the default and suddenly adoption was through the roof. The sad part is we can't rule that out.
qiine 1y ago
its especially funny with asmr video, not gonna lie the first time I was beyond confused
numpad0 1y ago
idoundernotstandwhothisfeatureisdivisiblebytwoinproductionandi just dislike video and move on. I'm guessing Google wants uploader penalized, and I do feel sorry but it's not my problem.
pjmlp 1y ago
I thought I was the only one getting such a messy ads. At least I know I didn't mess anything on my WebOS TV.
dgb23 1y ago
Same here. My native tongue is German, I live in Switzerland, but my settings on all devices are English. I do this on purpose, because I find everything is more searchable. I don't even know any German terms for most technical things I might search or look for. So even if the automatic translations were good, which they aren't, this would be a non-feature. My browser already tells them what my preferred language is. Just use it.
- netsharc 1y ago
  Living in Zurich (German part of Switzerland for those who don't know), Windows 10 in English, the built-in Microsoft Store used to offer content in... French. Now it's a mix of German and English, e.g. 1 heading is "Spiele-Bestseller", and the next is "Best selling apps". And prices displayed as "28,00 CHF" (correct would be to use the decimal point). Like Van Halen's brown M&Ms, it just shows how sloppily this thing is programmed: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/brown-out/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/brown-out/

littlecranky67 1y ago

So much this. I suspect the idea that a person speaks more than one language is absent in US silicon valley. Else I can't explain why youtube only lets you set one language. Heck, even google allows you to configure all spoken languages in your account, the very same google account you use for youtube. Yet youtube ignores it and has its own settings.

fifnir 1y ago
> I suspect the idea that a person speaks more than one language is absent in US silicon valley. Exactly, it's like they've never left their own state levels of ignorance
troupo 1y ago
> I suspect the idea that a person speaks more than one language is absent in US silicon valley. Which has been baffling to me considering how many foreigners work at these companies.
- genocidicbunny 1y ago
  I think it's more a matter of "why would they have their system language set to X if they speak Y? If they want Y, they should just set their system language to Y!" It's the idea that the user has a preference for something, and it applies always and everywhere, even when it's not applicable.
  - littlecranky67 1y ago
    It should be absolutely clear, when i speak English and German, do not auto-translate any video title in those languages to the other. You wouldn't believe how bad the translations are, and how unwanted by me (the user). Worse when you speak a third or fourth language, and tend to watch videos. It gets messy.
    - genocidicbunny 1y ago
      Yeah I know, I watch videos in six different languages and the automatic translation are pretty universally bad.

sebtron 1y ago

There are a few browser extensions to fix this, I use this one: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-no-translation https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-no-tr...

Aldipower 1y ago
Thanks! This is great. Although embarrassing for YouTube.
nilslindemann 1y ago
I can also recommend FreeTube

sph 1y ago

Now Reddit results are translated as well in Google, Kagi, so you think you have found a relevant response in your language, but it's just a machine translation from an English post.

fifnir 1y ago
I've been noticing the same, this completely breaks searching for reddit results for me
- nilslindemann 1y ago
  Try "Reddit Untranslate" addon.
  - reddalo 1y ago
    I'm a bit fed up with having to use a million plugins to make the web usable.
qiine 1y ago
duckduckgo seems to do it as well
- whstl 1y ago
  Yep, this is coming from Reddit itself. It's using different URLs, and they seem to be making an effort to SEO-rank those translations.
  - int_19h 1y ago
    It's interesting that the quality is so low. You can do very good translations for many languages today even with fairly cheap LMs, but for some reason (cost?) automated translation online seems to be still mostly at Google Translate level.
    - 1y ago

Unai 1y ago

Can't recommend "DeArrow" browser extension enough. YouTube is a miserable experience without it (and its sister extension SponsorBlock).

thrance 1y ago

Hear! Hear! It enrages me. They also automatically turn the subtitles ON, making you constantly have to disable them. There is no way for multilingual users to add a list of the languages they understand, which is an insane limitation that's been driving me crazy for years at this point. Wtf are they even working on at youtube's HQ? Making video thumbnails larger still?

echoangle 1y ago

I don't even get the point of that. If I need a translation of the title, I won't be able to watch the video anyways. At least ot makes some sense with the horribly auto-translated videos now, but they had the title translation for a long time while the video was still the original language.

immibis 1y ago
There's been automatic subtitle translation for a long time.
- echoangle 1y ago
  Good point, I didn’t even think about that because I would never watch a video in a foreign language with auto-translated subtitles.
  - anton-c 1y ago
    I get you and normally wouldn't either. I was a little impressed when I could switch to like 10 diff languages on the fly. As a foreign language learner seems like it could be pretty helpful. It's probably most useful for utility or news content. Not 'high effort videos' about an interesting topic. I'm imagining you find a video in another language that fixes a problem you have and can switch to your language to watch.
  - gus_massa 1y ago
    I sometime watch videos in English with the automatic subtitles. Sometimes I can't understand a few words and the subtitles help me. Most of the time I watch them without subtitles, and rewind the video a few seconds to rewatch a short part with the subtitles enabled.

genocidicbunny 1y ago

Not only the titles, but also the audio track. There's a few youtubers I regularly watch who are trying to branch out into some additional languages by providing fan-made translated audio tracks, and english is sometimes one of those. Every single time I watch one of those videos, I have to manually set the language back to the original because often the translations lose some of the word play or hidden meaning in the original language. Often it also means I need to rewind the video because it started playing before all the controls have loaded (because youtube hates FF with youtube-related extensions) and I could swap the language track back. One of the sister replies linked to an extension to help with that, which I'm going to give a try, but it's annoying that there's not a simple toggle in the youtube settings to tell it to always use the original language. On the rare occasion that I want to use the translated audio track, I can do _that_ on my own; I speak enough languages that this is a very rare occasion with the type of content I watch. This isn't even something I can understand as them being hostile to ad blocking or wanting to push ads. This is a 'convenience' feature that is just poorly implemented. But I'm sure there's some PM that got a pat on the back for it.

nilslindemann 1y ago

It is not just that these translations are not needed, they are often - in my case German - of a low quality, contain errors and lose information which the original language contained. And the roboter voices loses all the interesting modulations of the original voice. Even a Fireship video sounds terrible when translated.

vintermann 1y ago

I'm sure YouTube's algorithm rewards people for using this feature and making their "content accessible", but if you serve me up an ugly machine translated Norwegian title rather than the English one I could read just fine, that's from my experience a signal that your YouTube channel is low quality algorithm-chasing garbage, so I click "never recommend this channel".

gus_massa 1y ago
I guess it's the default option. I've seen a few good channels that have that "feature" enabled. I hate it too.
bmn__ 1y ago
What a catastrophe. You punish the wrong person, and even worse, a channel owner will not even receive that signal! The vast majority of channel owners with English content is not aware what's going on. A friendly e-mail to the channel owner explaining the problem and asking to manually disable auto-translation is much more likely to achieve what you want. If you want to get rid of auto-translation on a systematic level, provide feedback to the operators of Youtube through their official communication.
- SpicyLemonZest 1y ago
  Youtube really doesn't make it obvious that a title got auto-translated. I now realize that I've seen this happen before, with a video that had a different title on my TV than on my computer, but up until this very second I thought it was my TV's fault. Even being aware of this - how do I know that it's an auto-translation, rather than someone making AI slop in my native language, without watching the video?
  - Narishma 1y ago
    One way to tell is when the video has text in the thumbnail. If it's in a different language than the title it has likely been auto translated.
- deleted 1y ago

b3lvedere 1y ago

While i appreciate the effort that Mark Rober puts in his Youtube videos making them multilanguage, i absolutely hate that native voice. It's one of the few Youtube shorts i have to play twice because of it.

world2vec 1y ago

Gosh this annoys me so much. I am native Portuguese speaker but have all my settings in English. It always tries to auto-dub Portuguese content into English, how do I turn that off?

franga2000 1y ago

What I don't get is how the feature works. I see it for veeery few videos and those are usually highly profitable clickbait and/or big budget productions, so my assumption has been this is actually something the uploader has to enable or even fill out. My language is very "small", so it makes sense that only the broadly-popuar and highly-profitable would be worth translating the titles for. Unfortunately, all the translations are machine-translated garbage and there is no setting to turn this off as a viewer, so it's just incredibly annoying.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

captainpiggies 1y ago

It's even worse for videos with "official" dubs. I have been jump scared by German and French dubs on certain videos recently, I distinctly remember MrBeast, Mark Rober and Nick DiGiovanni. I have set my language to English and my Region to US (worldwide) I don't know what gave YT the idea to preselect these dubs for me, I have seldomly even watched a video that is not English.

whstl 1y ago
Yep. Youtube is the worst: - If I select German subtitles for a German video, it will auto-translate all English subtitles to German in the future. - If I select subtitles for an English video, same. - If the video has an Arabic, Hindi, French human-made subtitle to help that audience, it shows it to me instead of the automatic captions Horrible.

joseda-hg 1y ago

Jesus H Christ, I once a month google to see if there's a proper way of stopping this (You can block this with TamperMonkey) 2 things that absolutely kill my experience, 1. Messing up with titles, specially if the contents of the video are still in a different language, Which Kurzgesagt will I get today? Only YouTube knows, this is annoying if I know the youtuber could use a different language in the title to make a joke 2. Messing up with the default audio tracks, I don't mind if the YouTuber has a dubbed track, that's awesome for getting more exposure, but I already know and expect a specific voice and it's extremely jarring I know what Mark Rober sound like, leave it be

lucasoshiro 1y ago

> I can understand English and don't need these automatic translations I think it is far worse than that: 1. If I don't understand a language, probably that video is not for me. Most videos targeted for international audience are in English, or at least the author translated it by theirself. 2. Titles are small sentences, and they don't have enough context to be translated. Once I saw a video called something like "Vamos assistir uma conexão com o passado", which in Portuguese means "Let's watch a connection to the past". I needed to de-translate it in my brain to understand that the original title was "Let's play A Link to the Past" 3. Online resources are a great way to exercise a second language. So, please, don't underestimate my capabilities. At least let me try to read in the original language by myself, if I need the translation I how to use Google Translate or a dictionary. I reckon that this feature makes the access to online content more democratic, it's ok. But at least let me disable that since it makes the experience worse

marcosdumay 1y ago
There's a video that Youtube keeps sending me with a translated title "O segredo das lavadouras" (what translates to "the secret of washing machines") that is about picking screw washers... But the real problem is when it decides to translate the titles of some perfectly watchable videos in English into something that uses the Cyrillic alphabet, what has no relation to my accepted languages, and is only used half-way across the world from where I am.

tirant 1y ago

Worse is the auto-dubbing in some channels. Which cannot be disabled. That has resulted in me stopping to watch a channel completely due to the inability to select the original language (youtube mobile website).

mft_ 1y ago

By the by, one quirk of poor language handling that I think it probably harming YouTube is advert language. Every one of my subscriptions is an English language channel, and my language choice on all Google properties (where possible) including YouTube is English. It's not hard to judge that English is my favoured language. And yet... every video advert I receive when travelling is served in the local country's language. It doesn't especially bother me, since I actively avoid listening to adverts (and indeed, now pay for Premium lite to avoid them almost altogether) but it's a weird not-so-edge case that I'd have thought a company as large as Google might have addressed already. They've absolutely got the tech to deliver adverts in any language. (And it could be powerful: imagine receiving adverts for local businesses in your native language while on holiday.)

preisschild 1y ago

Even reddit does that now and for some reason shows the translated version by default when I search a post through google. Very annoying, because instead of just seeing the english post, which I'm easily able to understand, I see half-broken german...

harshreality 1y ago

Do you have en-US or en-GB as an alternate, lower-priority language? If an English variant is in your Accept-Lang: headers, I'd hope YT wouldn't auto-translate English titles. The other thing that Google might properly use is account-specific language settings. But if they're using GeoIP as has been suggested, I agree they're doing it wrong.

lxgr 1y ago
> If an English variant is in your Accept-Lang: headers, I'd hope YT wouldn't auto-translate English titles. Your hope is unfortunately entirely misplaced. Google is one of the worst offenders for assuming language and region from users' IP.

cenamus 1y ago

I mean, I can deal with the titles, but recently it has been auto selecting machine translated sound tracks, without any way to disable it. And they're bad, like maybe one level above 2010 phone TTS system

Jotalea 1y ago

And most of the times, the translation misses a core part of the title, making it harder or even impossible to understand. A recent example is "I booted windows from Google Drive (part 2)", which got translated to "inicié ventanas de Google Drive", which misses the whole point. Luckily for me, the miniature said what the video was about, and I could understand and watch it. About the translation, sure, "boot" ≈ "iniciar", "window" = "ventana", but for (microsoft) windows, and other names in foreign languages, the same name must be kept.