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YouTube No Translation

469 points by doener 1y ago

cosmodev 1y ago
As someone whose native language isn't English but uses English across devices and daily life, this add-on is incredibly useful. I still prefer seeing video titles in my own language.
pentagrama 1y ago
Thanks for sharing this, this type of hostile behavior from YouTube is terrible, this should be opt in. I'm currently using YouTube Anti Translate [1], which is also open source [2]. Not sure if this one has some advantages, will check it out. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-anti-translate/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-anti-... [2] https://github.com/zpix1/yt-anti-translate https://github.com/zpix1/yt-anti-translate
autumnstwilight 1y ago
It's kinda wild how monolingual people can come into a thread of multilingual people pointing out specific problems that are happening due to forced autotranslation and be like, "well this hasn't happened to me personally so it's probably fine for normal people and not a real problem."
- cdrini 1y ago
  Hmm, who are you responding to? I don't see a single comment matching your description in this thread.
ryzvonusef 1y ago
as a pakistani natively bilingual in urdu and english, it's doubly annoying, because it doesn't have urdu, it has hindi. While the languages are very similar but still different enough to get annoying and confusing. So it tries to dub urdu videos (as 'hindi' videos) into english, or dub english into hindi, which is useless for me both ways. Instead of dubbing, make better subs! YouTube subs fail to track when using the video speed feature, so if i am using any other speed playback than 1x, the subs don't load on time, and sometimes get skipped, fix that!
jajuuka 1y ago
Personally I find the translation and dubbing of videos to be super helpful as someone who is only fluent in English. I found a few creators from around the world that I follow now because of this. But I can understand the frustration if someone knows more than one language. Been seeing more and more posts about this complaining about it. Hopefully Google adds this as an option on Youtube instead of requiring a third party add-on.
doener 1y ago
Via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44413749 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44413749
goku12 1y ago
Kudos to YouTube for making it to the list of a rare few websites that require browser extensions to deliver a half decent user experience. What's more? YouTube also leaves the competition in the dust in the sheer number of extensions required to achieve this. I hear that you extend this privilege uniformly to both unpaid guests and the subscribers of YouTube Premium alike. I'm sure that the lack of alternatives helped you a lot in achieving this coveted status.
- userbinator 1y ago
  I stopped using the site long ago because of what it's turned into, and only visit it for the occasional things I can't do with Invidious, yt-dlp, and a few shell scripts. It's quite telling of how their developers "think" when they put the original language stream as the last one in the track list, instead of the sane first (zeroth?) position that it should occupy.
ars 1y ago
Why would I want this? I watched a translated YouTube video and it was great. If I don't want the translated sound track there's a button right there in settings to change it. Why do I need this extension?
- charcircuit 1y ago
  For example if you listen to music in a different language you may be familiar with the foriegn name of a song, but not the translation of it. This makes things confusing. Also for the sound track sometimes there isn't even an option to disable it depending on what experiment or client you are using.
- sebtron 1y ago
  Automatically translated titles are often just wrong and misleading, and there is no way to turn this "feature" off. If you understand more than one language, you'll get half of the videos sloppily translated for no reason. There is no way to tell YouTube not to do this for specific languages. It is beyond annoying.
- vcvbcv 1y ago
  I guess this extension is really aimed at multilingual viewers who don’t want English (or any language they already know) automatically translated into their native tongue. A better solution would be a ‘blacklist’ of languages you understand—so YouTube only auto‑translates from languages you don’t speak, and always leaves familiar languages in their original form.
  - Tomte 1y ago
    > who don’t want English (or any language they already know) automatically translated into their native tongue. It‘s even the other way around!
  - Nullabillity 1y ago
    > A better solution would be a ‘blacklist’ of languages you understand—so YouTube only auto‑translates from languages you don’t speak, and always leaves familiar languages in their original form. A better solution would have been to just not ship this disaster of a "feature" in the first place. I wouldn't want my browser to automatically translate every page I go to (without my consent!) either, and that would've been a much easier job!
rdtsc 1y ago
It's surprising how hostile youtube is to multilingual users. Probably all in some attempt to show off their translation capability or to improve the experience for users who may want to access content in a language they don't speak? Or it's just as dumb as this was on some product managers "designed and implemented" line to get promoted? But, surely someone sane there has to realize there is a large number of users out there who speak more than one language, and don't need Google do "help" them or "guess" for what language they like more.
- hnthrowaway_423 1y ago
  Right ? I am suprised that Facebook is actually the one leading in this UX: they clearly separate UX language ( singular ) and Languages which you don't need translation ( plural ).
  - nextaccountic 1y ago
    I really, really want to have a way to tell Youtube that if I enable subtitles and the content is either English or Portuguese, then the subtitles should be shown in the original language (either subtitles created by the author or auto-generated subtitles - sometimes I can't do audio), but if it's another language, it should be shown in English (again, either subtitles authored by a person, or auto-generated ones) This extension can control subtitles so maybe there is hope that this or another extension will offer this kind of fine granularity
    - Kwpolska 1y ago
      This used to work some time ago. They just didn't automatically enable translation and picked the default language.
  - avereveard 1y ago
    Accept language header covers all that's needed. It's a ordered list of languages the user will understand in order of preference. You'd pick the first one as interface, don't translate anything that's in the list, and you can decide what to do with anything not in the list. Sites that use ip of origin and just assume my language are such grating experiences.
Jcampuzano2 1y ago
I feel like its profoundly American to assume everyone wants to see everything in one language. I regularly consume content in two languages, my partner 3, and many of my friends are in the same boat. Please either allow me to just blacklist languages to not translate automatically or always keep content in the original language but allow changing after engaging with it. Its insane that this requires an extension for a company with as much resources as google. The translations of video titles are absolutely atrocious and rarely mean anything near the intent of the original title.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
oc1 1y ago
So Google assumes that its user only speaks one language and needs translation for everything else. Is this the educational standard in America?
- kalleboo 1y ago
  What's crazy is the US actually does have a decent proportion of multilingual speakers thanks to its history of immigration (a quick search reveals 20% of American residents are bilingual). Even Google staff should be a pretty multicultural bunch of people as they recruit globally.
  - simongray 1y ago
    I mean... 20% is not really a lot. It's probably a lot closer to 100% in most countries of the world.
    - mslansn 1y ago
      Is it? That doesn’t sound right.
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      - matsemann 1y ago
        90 % of Norwegians speak English according to a quick search I just did. 89 % in Sweden.
        mslansn 1y ago
        That’s not “most countries”.
        Aachen 1y ago
        Contribute more data points of your own then, or even just one. Maybe eventually we'll get to know whether it's most or not rather than dismissing someone who's helping
oc1 1y ago
Reddit is the worst offender. I really wonder what goes through the mind of the management clerks at these companies.
- userbinator 1y ago
  I really wonder what goes through the mind of the management clerks at these companies. "More $$$!!1"
  - 0wis 1y ago
    Yeah, short term. Because power users that are used to switch between languages using internet slang do not like half baked polished translation in their IP-location language. So they leave. Remain mainly low quality users who couldn’t or didn’t wanted to switch between languages. A more powerful forever September again.
- felindev 1y ago
  While it is annoying, reddit at lest gives you option to see original text.
- petargyurov 1y ago
  When I first encountered this on Reddit I was really confused... They were (are?) translating even the text INSIDE an image. Can't believe how expensive that must've been across the entire frontpage. But hey, another way to shoehorn AI into being "useful".
- mailund 1y ago
  ah yes, and the auto translation on reddit broke a very useful trick I used all the time - need information about something in general -> search in English - need information about something specific for my home country (laws, local events, local shops, etc) -> search in my native language now, I get weird auto translated content informing me about laws that are only applicable in the US and recommended products that are not even available in my home country.
  - 1y ago
chartered_stack 1y ago
I actually appreciate the YouTube's auto-translate feature a lot because it allows me to search through videos in languages I don't know but still like to view videos and listen to videos in. For example, I listen to a lot of city pop and anime title songs on YouTube and a lot of them have titles in Japanese only. I absolutely would not find it as easy as I do to search through this content and listen to the music if the auto-translation feature did not exist. It just makes it easier for people who don't know the language to view videos in that language. Sure the translation quality might not be the best but it makes search a whole lot easier. This is why I find some of the comments on this thread surprising. Having said that I am against the automatic audio translation that some people are reporting. I have not experienced it myself but that seems poorly thought out. It should be easier for people to search through items in a foreign language but that content should be served in the content originally intended.
- rtpg 1y ago
  I do not understand how this got rolled out. Surely there are _loads_ of multilingual people working at YouTube. How is there not at least an option to flag multiple languages that you speak? At least the audio translation I can turn off. I do not know how to get the actual title of a video or its description. It's so frustrating that I've ended up just changing my UI language from English to another language so that at least those don't get butchered.
  - charcircuit 1y ago
    It got rolled out due to how MASSIVE the bounce rate is if the video is in a language users don't understand. I can easily see this on average providing a better experience and lead to less people bouncing. The false positives are not enough to counteract it.
    - rtpg 1y ago
      Just feels relatively easy to change the language preference to be a multiselect though.... like ignoring user backlash, I'd assume _internal users of YT_ would just get extremely annoyed. I don't really need magic, mainly want "if language not user's language" to turn into "if language not in user's language(s)"
Xunjin 1y ago
Thank you!
seydor 1y ago
i dont mind the others, but the automatic audio switch is very offensive to the creators
- Tepix 1y ago
  I think creators have the option to turn them off in the video settings. Unfortunately, many do not.
  - seydor 1y ago
    I want the option but i don't want it to be the default even after i repeatedly switch to the original audio
vhcr 1y ago
Google is the worst when it comes to i18n, I speak both Spanish and English, it translates reviews automatically to English, but at the same time will show me content in Spanish when I searched for something in English.
tilsammans 1y ago
I can recommend the DeArrow extension for this. It has an option to always show the untranslated title. Plus, it has the intended features such as thumbnail replacement and crowd-sourced titles. DeArrow works in Android Firefox. It's unfortunate that YouTube is only usable with these extensions, but here we are.
tobi_bsf 1y ago
It’s unbelievable how broken YouTube is when it comes to language. I’m German. I want to see German content in German, and obviously I want to see English content in English. How is this not possible—especially when it worked perfectly for years? Is there a Chrome Variant of this?
- RamRodification 1y ago
  If you use Chrome, you are at the whim of the same people who are messing up the platform in the first place anyway. You should probably see if you can transition to Firefox or some other non-Chromium browser.
  - pitkali 1y ago
    Google is not the only provider of Chrome extensions (yet?).
- doener 1y ago
  Yes: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/youtube-no-translation/lmkeolibdeeglfglnncmfleojmakecjb https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/youtube-no-translat...
  - sebstefan 1y ago
    Or better yet, switching to firefox
felindev 1y ago
This change has really been annoying me and as far as I tested, no extension worked. Quick look through network activity and it confirmed that it was done server side, no original titles were supplied anywhere. Only option was display language and titles were pre-translated to it. Just give me option to see original content, that is why I'm here
- RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u 1y ago
  I've just installed this extension, and confirmed that -- at least for now -- it works. The translated titles will be flashed first, then replaced by the original titles.
lajosbacs 1y ago
It is insane to me that you cannot turn it off in the setting even as a premium user. Or better yet, make this opt-in for everyone. I live in a German speaking country, yet my native language is other and German is almost never preferred when I watch some content. All my UIs are in English. Yet, I open a video by a Brit and he is autodubbed to German. There really isn't any similar UX decision by any other reputed company that would be comparably stupid as this. Google even has large presence in Switzerland, that makes it even more puzzling.
- atoav 1y ago
  German is my first language, but I prefer consuming English content in its original language. The thing with youtube translated titles is that half of them aren't even propper German and half of that half is utterly nonsensical, because some English ideom has been translated too literally.
  - kikokikokiko 1y ago
    It's the same in portuguese. The last few months, for every brazilian video I need to play a guessing game and decide, based on the ridiculously "translated" english title, if I really want to watch it. Since I use Firefox on Android to consume Youtube, I need to open the video and then switch to Desktop mode to be able to change the audio track to the original pt-BR. There's no such option on Youtube mobile. I have lost count how many videos I decided the hassle wasn't worth it. Great job YouTube team, you're screwing your metrics in order to provide a horrible feature multilingual users never asked for.
  - mnmalst 1y ago
    I prefer the same. It gets even better when youtube starts translating a video only available in your native language to English and you have no way to enable the native language audio.
- lajosbacs 1y ago
  Adding to my previous comment, in Switzerland, people speak very specific Swiss German, yet the videos are autodubbed to 'hoch' (standard) German. It's a bit of an exaggeration, but it is as if a person is Lisbon would get their videos dubbed to Spanish.
heisenbit 1y ago
I‘ve seen YT randomly deciding to translate videos shown in the the Telegram iOS client. No way around it other than view it on YT directly.
littlecranky67 1y ago
Youtube translations is such a dumb feature. I watch in german and english and have my language set to english. The english translations for german titles are most of the time garbage, because they translate names and fixed expressions we keep in english all to german. The result is just utter garbage - an complegtely unwanted. Especially since the underlying google account does support multiple languages, and I have set both languages that I speak there.
- easyThrowaway 1y ago
  This. I could excuse them (or reddit for the matter) if their translations were in any capacity decent or at least understandable. In reality most of the time they're plain italian or french word salads. Their automatic audio translations engine could be easily renamed "Mechanical Italian Brainrot Generator". It feels like they did not even test the feature before pushing it to production.
  - hn8726 1y ago
    Reddit's one is crazy, I didn't know it exists until I was researching some tax laws in my country. I saw a Reddit thread in my language and it took me a while to realize it's a US-centric subreddit just automatically translated. Translating content about US laws makes 0 sense!
    - klausa 1y ago
      I mean, there are people living in the US, who are subject to the taxation there that don’t speak English. As someone who also lives in a country where I don’t speak the language (and certainly not well enough to understand tax law); having that content translated is potentially useful IFF it’s clearly labeled as such.
renegat0x0 1y ago
Unfortunately the extensions are not available for android....
- littlecranky67 1y ago
  Extensions are in general not available for Android (or at least chrome for android)?
- timbit42 1y ago
  Does it work in Firefox for Android? Edit: Sadly, no.
Ezhik 1y ago
YouTube on my phone automatically replaces English audio with machine-generated Japanese audio. YouTube on my desktop computer automatically replaces Japanese audio with machine-generated English audio. It's honestly quite incredible.
trzeci 1y ago
Thanks for this! The automatic title translation are so low quality I'm surprised the same company created Google Translator. In a lion share cases they are plain wrong, in most they are awkward, in all - they are misleading that the content somehow promises native experience.
mdavid626 1y ago
Standard American thing - thinking everyone speaks only one language, and that language being the language of the country you live in.
- xxs 1y ago
  And the country is resolved by IP - which totally doesn't work with roaming - you also get the home country of your provider.
- ivanjermakov 1y ago
  Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14175238 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14175238
- bravesoul2 1y ago
  Isn't Spanish spoken alot in USA?
  - mdavid626 1y ago
    Yes, but most likely not among developers at Google.
  - AlchemistCamp 1y ago
    Yes. In America, there are over 60 million fluent Spanish speakers, which is more than the entire population of Spain. In many southern and southwestern parts of the country you can do just about anything you need to in Spanish and being bilingual is a big plus for any kind of public-facing work.
- edarchis 1y ago
  What drives me nuts with this is that they'll go for a weird guessing game instead of using the language settings that the browser is providing in every single request. My browser states that I favour English, then French. My user profile on the website has "English" as language. Yet, when I get to the homepage, it tries to guess my language from my IP. NOOOO.
Zufriedenheit 1y ago
Is there any way to achieve this on mobile iOS?
gethly 1y ago
I've been using "YouTube Anti Translate" for a year or two. I think the developer figured out all the bugs and quirks by now and it's pretty good.
- timbit42 1y ago
  This add-on seems to only fix video titles. The add-on this post refers to fixes audio translation.
kcaseg 1y ago
I wish there were a YouTube app with this + no reels, I have YouTube premium, I am already paying, stop forcing stuff on me.
- DecentShoes 1y ago
  Revanced lets you remove reels
dawnerd 1y ago
On the topic of multi-lingual - I frequently use airplay to cast to my apple tv from my laptop but a large number of videos now have alternative language tracks that apple decides to play and there's no way to change it. No language tracks show up. Worse is it changes language tracks after a few seconds. Any have any idea how to fix this?
darqis 1y ago
forced autotransation of anything is the worst. useless. whoever thought this was a good idea is just bored and seeking justification for their employment tbh
doener 1y ago
The same plugin for Chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/youtube-no-translation/lmkeolibdeeglfglnncmfleojmakecjb https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/youtube-no-translat...
Phui3ferubus 1y ago
Can I get the same for Google Play store? I will always take original version over shit-tier automatic translation.
oakstendheim 1y ago
This is such a Google thing. I'm browsing from a German IP address, have my language set to English only and my region set to the US. This is still not enough for Google, and Youtube by extension, to not show me German search results. It is honestly incredibly frustrating. Same goes for the trending page on YT. This appears to only be based on your IP address.
RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u 1y ago
I won't be contributing much to rational discussion, but this "feature" annoys me so much that I just have to rant for a bit. ---- Like, is nobody in Google multi-lingual? Who the fuck thought this -- not auto-translation, but forced auto-translation -- is a good idea? Surely for an organization that purportedly only hires the cream-of-the-crop, they'll have a larger fraction of employees that speak more than one language? Look, I'm resting-and-vesting like the rest of y'all, but if I were in the team that implemented this, I'd definitely speak up, and let them, up to my skip-level, know that this is terrible. The implication of either possibilities had occurred, yet the feature still shipped, is harrowing. Even if the developers only speak one language, they must know at least three -- cream-of-the-crop, remember? -- programming languages, right? Imagine if, when you're first hired into Google, you declare your programming language of choice, say Go; then, henceforth whenever you check out the source code, irrespective of its original form, it gets auto-translated into Go, and you can't turn that off? Checking out Pixel first-stage bootloader code, almost certainly written in assembly -- nope! We know better: you're getting that in Go. Fuck, I shouldn't be giving them ideas! Could they not imagine how horrible this would be, and by analogy when applied to human languages, be also just as horrid? YouTube's often been cited as a great resource for learning new things. Well, now it's useless for, that's right, learning a second language! I wonder why this Spanish for beginners video's all in English? /s Speaking about shit features, let's throw "Stable Volume" into the pile. At least this one remembers your preferences...most of the time. When I watch ASMR -- yes I'll admit in public I'm that guy -- videos, and am just about to fall asleep, I just love to be jolted awake by a loud robotic voice's rendition of tapping sounds. Maybe my grumpiness's due to my lack of sleep!
- gs17 1y ago
  I'm convinced the people who decide on features for YouTube don't use it. Auto-dubbing sounds like it could be great... until you click on a video with it applied. > Speaking about shit features, let's throw "Stable Volume" into the pile. "Ambient Mode" too. It's a big waste of resources. It won't hurt your ears, but it eats up battery for no reason.
red_admiral 1y ago
Nowadays to use youtube efficiently with ADHD, you practically need all of: (a) uBlock - this one is debatable but deals with the worst distractions especially if you're trying to learn from a video your professor put up and you have an exam to prepare for, (b) unhook - hides most of the "recommendations" that attempt to keep you on the site because you're planning to do the copmprehension questions your professor gave you for after the video, (c) something to disable "autoplay next" for the same reason as above (a uBlock rule will do it), (d) no translation. Soon we'll probably need (e) something to block AI.
- rauli_ 1y ago
  I would add sponsorblock to this list.
- thrdbndndn 1y ago
  Autoplay next can be simply turned off and I've had it off for years.
  - red_admiral 1y ago
    Probably region or other factors dependent?
godelski 1y ago
I really just wish YouTube would detect captions embedded in their videos and stop displaying the same text (often incorrectly) on top of it. You do all this machine learning, why not put it into production? It's easy to cache the results and you're already scrubbing audio data and automatically doing STT, so extend it to do video to text and compare. It's not like this is an unsolved problem, even if imperfect. The audio provides a strong feedback for OCR errors
- amelius 1y ago
  I think the engineers at Google know and want this, but Google has a monopoly here so without a strong financial reason nothing will happen.
- yunusabd 1y ago
  So you're saying that they should analyze both audio and video to increase the quality of the captions, if the video has hard-coded captions? I guess that's possible, just a question of effort vs. payoff. Inaccurate auto-captions for videos with hard coded captions probably isn't a big enough pain to warrant big investments?
- Leon_25 1y ago
  Agree. We build custom video analytics tools at Axon, and syncing OCR with audio-based STT isn’t rocket science anymore, especially with modern models. YouTube has all the ingredients, but seems slow to apply them at scale. Even basic alignment of audio captions with hardcoded subs would fix so much UX noise.
petargyurov 1y ago
If only I could add this to the YouTube app on my TV (as well as uBlock Origin)
yunusabd 1y ago
I'm working on an app that's based around youtube videos for language learning. I had to solve the same problem of youtube automatically changing the audio track to match the device locale. Even thought about making a spin off app with only the no-translate feature, that simply always uses the original title and audio. I guess revanced can do this too, but maybe there's enough people who don't use revanced, or don't know about this feature. Thoughts?
globular-toast 1y ago
Is this an example of developers assuming they know what users want without actually engaging with and asking said users? Or are the people reaching for plugins like this actually in a minority? The worst thing about this for me is not the language issue but that the translations are AI generated shite. If it was a case of multilingual channels producing videos in multiple languages then it makes sense that a user with language set to German would receive the German version by default. But to give users an AI generated translation by default? That's horrible. I get the impression someone in Google/YouTube has this grand vision of it being like a Babel Fish just seamlessly translating voices into your own language. The trouble is Babel Fish is science fiction. Douglas Adams described it as "feeding" the speech centres of your brain directly, not translating the audio into a shitty generated copy.
darkhorn 1y ago
Isnn't there any settings on Youtube to disable translation from Turkish into English? Why Youtube assumes that I am single lingual? It makes me crazy! I use Android and Youtube in English because it is thr original language. I watch sometimes Turksh videos from Turkish people but why the hell it translates into English?!
cdrini 1y ago
Oof a lot of hate for this feature. I agree more configuration would be nice, but at the same time, this is absolute science fiction come to life. Even for people who speak multiple languages: let's say you speak English, German, and French. That means you understand about 25%[1] of other people on the planet. That's 75% of videos which you would otherwise _never see or understand_. This feature is for people who _don't_ speak the most popular languages -- it lets _their_ videos get views when otherwise they would never be seen. And that's been my experience with the feature. I saw a recipe fully in Spanish because of the auto-dubbing. I actually want this enabled more globally, I want to see more fully non-English videos recommended to me from around the world. And this feature is relatively new, I think they started rolling it out only a few months ago. I'm sure configuration options will pop up. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num... and assuming the videos in a language is ~proportional to L1+L2 speakers . That's a simplifying assumption, because I would guess English is more highly represented. Because people likely make more videos in English because there's a bigger audience for it. If only there was a way to allow more non-English speakers to be able to be understood/gain traction....
- _Algernon_ 1y ago
  Of course I would understand the other 75%. Automatic subtitles have been a thing for ages and they have the benefit of not cutting out all personality and humor in the video. If I watch a foreign language movie I always prefer subtitles with original audio (and those are usually dubbed by human, professional dubbers, so much higher quality). Why would I treat YT any differently?
  - cdrini 1y ago
    +1 for subtitles. I do think that subtitles don't gain the same level of traction; and people complain about auto-translated subtitles as well (and auto-subtitles on their own!). I think auto-dubbing might be more successful at allowing folks from smaller languages/communities the opportunity to gain audiences outside of those smaller languages/communities. The main difference between youtube and foreign language films is most creators on youtube don't have a budget for professional dubbers, so you either only watch big creators who do have that budget, or you have to compromise.
cubefox 1y ago
Currently the extension doesn't work in Firefox for Android. I hope this feature is added in the future.
edarchis 1y ago
<edit> as pointed out by @addandsubtract, I misunderstood the extension, it's about audio translation, not just titles. Sorry about that. </edit> If you're using DeArrow, there is an option to disable those translations. DeArrow is from the same team as SponsorBlock, it removes the clickbait thumbnails and titles with more descriptive ones. It makes the experience sooo much better. https://dearrow.ajay.app/ https://dearrow.ajay.app/
- addandsubtract 1y ago
  No, DeArrow only disables the title translations. This post is about disabling the new AI audio translations that they're rolling out.
jacek 1y ago
It is incredible how many addons I need to make YouTube usable. Here's my list (all Firefox): - uBlock Origin - ad block - SponsorBlock - to skip in video ads (some other nice features like highlights too) - YouTube Row Fixer - for the tiles to adjust to the window - Return YouTube Dislike - self explanatory - YouTube No Translation - thanks for the suggestion!
- addandsubtract 1y ago
  Also DeArrow to replace clickbait titles and thumbnails with more relevant ones.
  - gfdujdufituj 1y ago
    I use BlockTube. If channels advertise that their content is trash via clickbait thumbnails and video titles, I can get rid of them once and for all.
- weberer 1y ago
  Also "Enhancer for Youtube" which allows - Hiding Reels - Setting a default playback speed
  - blendaddict 1y ago
    I can't watch without enhancer anymore. I always have my mousewheel on the speed control to regulate the pacing myself, because most people can't pace. Also, when I am looking for a specific second long clip in an hour long video, it is very helpful that I can set the speed to something like 8x.
- Xaphiosis 1y ago
  BlockTube is a must - can block specific channels from showing up, videos with "Journaling" and "changed my life", hide videos watched over 50%, etc. Enhancer for Youtube is also super useful: disable shorts entirely, autoplay next only on playlists, tweak number of videos per row, default playback speed, default theater mode, etc. As another commenter said, Youtube is one of those sites that really requires multiple plugins to be useful :/
danielspace23 1y ago
I honestly can't wrap my head around what some users do just to have the "stock" experience. In order to get a vaguely usable stock YouTube, you need to install at least UBlock, SponsorBlock, No Translation, and arguably DeArrow as well. And this only works for browsers, many people will cope with their mobile YouTube experience being hell on earth. Why do all this when you can get an alternative cross-platform client like GrayJay with all the same features (minus DeArrow for now), which works out of the box, has more privacy, and won't be completely useless the next time Google decides to shift things around a bit? Same goes for Windows: you'll see people who go to great lengths to disable telemetry, remove Edge and sponsored content, often having to run random scripts from the internet with administrator privileges, just to have everything reset on the next Windows update. Remember how Windows users made fun of Linux users for having to open a command line for installing a browser (which isn't even true)? I could go on: you can get Firefox and spend hours tweaking about:config to disable the anti-features, or you can get one of the dozen forks with the same patches pre-applied, yet some people will still defend the stock experience with their lives.
- 2Gkashmiri 1y ago
  this is funny. in "i am legend", the last man standing became the "unwanted alien" because everyone else had transformed into something else. so the abnormal is the new normal. enshittification at its peak
- carlosjobim 1y ago
  > In order to get a vaguely usable stock YouTube, you need to install at least UBlock, SponsorBlock, No Translation, and arguably DeArrow as well. UBlock: Solved by using YouTube Premium SponsorBlock: Solved by not watching low-quality channels with sponsors. Also YouTube has started rolling out their own version of SponsorBlock to skip these segments. No Translation: Yeah, this is a pain in stock YouTube DeArrow: Why would I want clickbait thumbnails and titles fixed? Those are perfect indicators of a low quality video to not click. > Same goes for Windows Sure does. People who want a nice experience get a Mac, which is somewhat equivalent to paying for YouTube Premium. > GrayJay Can't install it on a Roku or on Apple TV. YouTube Premium is still the best option for TV watching.
11mariom 1y ago
Few days ago I was surprised when video started in dubbed mode… I always watch everything in original audio, and turn subtitles when needed. At least for audio I found a setting, but titles… WHY?! Thanks for sharing addon :)
rjsw 1y ago
The interface to YouTube used by yt-dlp does still list the different audio tracks and labels the original one. The problems reported by everyone in this thread sound to me like UI bugs of the player, official app or javascript in the browser, picking the wrong audio track automatically.
martiuk 1y ago
The worst part of this so-called “feature” is when very diligent creators from non-English-speaking countries already present in English language. But YouTube just assumes it's in their native language, so you have this horrible AI voiceover by default instead of their voice or VO artist that they use.
qwertox 1y ago
Autodubbing is probably the worst feature Google has ever implemented. It's OK if they want to offer it, but at least let me disable it for specific languages. And for those languages which I don't understand, let me choose a default autodubbing language. Because I assume that auto-generated translations from French to English will be far better than those from French to German or Spanish. Also, the voices they use sound like from a decade ago.
- rightbyte 1y ago
  It is terrible and took me a while to realize what was happening. I though some videos were generated spam. Reddit does something similar now. It auto translates posts and they show up in Google in my native tongue. Really annoying since when I search in that language I specifically don't want English sites.
  - _bent 1y ago
    The Reddit translations are so insanely terrible. They are so much harder to read the the original English posts. It's like every word has been translated independently
    - hengheng 1y ago
      The problem isn't the the translation isn't done well enough, but rather its underhanded nature that tries to sell a translated website as a genuine discussion.
      - edwcross 1y ago
        Indeed. If I search Google for terms in my specific language other than English, I expect to find results that are relevant to my country. Auto-translated Reddit posts that "fake" being from that language are deeply annoying, because then I click them expecting to find some local references but in fact they are invariably talking about some US-specific market or situation that's useless to me.
  - 1y ago
marcocastignoli 1y ago
thanks
dizhn 1y ago
It's embarrassing that something like this is needed. For some reason Youtube has always been weird about languages. They have language and location information, yet they won't let you search by language, will return other languages when you search, won't search by location, won't default to another language in videos and now they are force translating video titles/descriptions and force dubbing videos. Nobody asked for any of this. They have been asked plenty of times to provide options related to languages yet they have not implemented any of it. Super super weird. When did we start to accept such bullshit even in paid products?
stefs 1y ago
the youtube translations aren't really good either. i'm constantly puzzled by videos with absolutely nonsensical titles until i remember that it's probably auto-translated and have to work out what the original meaning was. for example, "more plates more dates" has been translated to "Mehr Teller mehr Termine". not allowing this feature to be disabled is such an user hostile decision.
gfdujdufituj 1y ago
Not surprised it's unfathomable for Google drones that for 74 % of English speakers it's their second language. Google's stupidity knows no bounds.
dzogchen 1y ago
Oh my God this is auto translation business is so incredibly annoying. Especially for people that know multiple languages. But I imagine it is the worst for people who are trying to learn another language...
kachapopopow 1y ago
The fact that there's a massive delay for auto dubbing is crazy to me, it's not done in real-time, why have the delay?
- Narishma 1y ago
  What delay are you talking about?
  - kachapopopow 1y ago
    Autodubbing has a good 2-3 second delay before it starts the translated speech and it continues all the way throught the video.
vagrantJin 1y ago
Yeah, Yandex browser also has this and its annoying. Terrible actually even if their auto-dub is way better than youtube's.
fuomag9 1y ago
I really hate YouTube translations. I DO NOT want YouTube in Italian because I don’t care about Italian content or watching videos in Italian!
antirez 1y ago
As a person with a YouTube channel with most Italian content, and only coding content in English: as it is today, it is horrible. But if they fix it to the stop AI standards of voice translation, it will be a game changer. I'm referring to natural voice (matching the original one) lips sync, and there will no longer be language barriers on YouTube.
joelthelion 1y ago
Unfortunately not available for android where it would be very useful.
Alifatisk 1y ago
What is it with Youtube and adding things no one asked for? I especially dislike when they make it default, so I have to figure out how to disable new features. My browser language is EN, my preferred language in YT settings is EN, I live in a European country, yet, videos get translated into Arabic? What the hell Youtube. Why can't I just visit your platform, look up videos I am interested in and watch it. The old Youtube was way nicer, it felt snappy, easy to interact with and didn't have all that bloat we have today. I also miss when the ads where a popup at the bottom of the video instead of having to watch double ad segment every 5 minute.
2Gkashmiri 1y ago
i am so glad firefox addon is being discussed. looks to me normally browser extension posts are all chrome only for some reason and when i nag them about firefox version, they dont bother
polytely 1y ago
So embarrassing they thought this was a good idea, these are the people earning the big google salaries? What a clown show
kvemkon 1y ago
Due to this anti-feature I have many bookmarks with broken title and now looking for a way to automatically refresh them with the original one. > Size: 123.22 kB A not so small extension for getting rid of a problem seems so tiny. Feels a bit like overkill and I hoped there would be something I can forcibly set without any extension. Even with disabled cookies youtube uses local storage. Why not have there some variable for that purpose!?
Nitrolo 1y ago
For years YouTube would randomly change my language to Italian and auto translate all the titles, which was annoying but I can change the language back to English and it was fine. Thing is, I haven't lived in Italy for well over a decade. I don't consume much Italian content. I've tried my best to purge my Google account of any possible trace of Italian language settings, I've never saved an Italian address etc. And yet Google must be convinced that, because I was in Italy over a dozen years ago when I made the account I must be Italian, and that cannot possibly change.
donperignon 1y ago
Please this trend needs to stop, it’s so annoying. Subtitles are good enough and more respectful than this crappy uncontrolled auto transactions
madmulita 1y ago
Now we need one that detects and filters AI narrators.
anon025 1y ago
YouTube has become annoying with the AI thing. I live in the US but speak Spanish and consume almost 80% of content in Spanish and my OS and Keyboard are in Spanish, yet the thing is not able to respect the Accept-Language headers :(
rasz 1y ago
in sourcecode this snipped looked interesting https://github.com/YouG-o/YouTube_No_Translation/blob/91061a2a77ef72c76ce6288f0a6a7693c4a005bb/src/content/description/descriptionIndex.ts#L205-L213 https://github.com/YouG-o/YouTube_No_Translation/blob/91061a... // Prevent translation on all levels [element, attributedString, snippetAttributedString].forEach(el => { if (el) { el.setAttribute('translate', 'no'); sadly magic translate="no" attribute does nothing on its own :( Probably related to standard https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Global_attributes/translate https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/... so obviously Google doesnt honor it. following el.style.setProperty('translate', 'no', 'important'); is kinda funny too, CSS translate is about positioning not language :) and since 'no' is not a valid value this instruction is ignored anyways.

469 points by doener 1y ago

As someone whose native language isn't English but uses English across devices and daily life, this add-on is incredibly useful. I still prefer seeing video titles in my own language.

pentagrama 1y ago

Thanks for sharing this, this type of hostile behavior from YouTube is terrible, this should be opt in. I'm currently using YouTube Anti Translate [1], which is also open source [2]. Not sure if this one has some advantages, will check it out. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-anti-translate/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-anti-... [2] https://github.com/zpix1/yt-anti-translate https://github.com/zpix1/yt-anti-translate

autumnstwilight 1y ago

It's kinda wild how monolingual people can come into a thread of multilingual people pointing out specific problems that are happening due to forced autotranslation and be like, "well this hasn't happened to me personally so it's probably fine for normal people and not a real problem."

cdrini 1y ago
Hmm, who are you responding to? I don't see a single comment matching your description in this thread.

ryzvonusef 1y ago

as a pakistani natively bilingual in urdu and english, it's doubly annoying, because it doesn't have urdu, it has hindi. While the languages are very similar but still different enough to get annoying and confusing. So it tries to dub urdu videos (as 'hindi' videos) into english, or dub english into hindi, which is useless for me both ways. Instead of dubbing, make better subs! YouTube subs fail to track when using the video speed feature, so if i am using any other speed playback than 1x, the subs don't load on time, and sometimes get skipped, fix that!

jajuuka 1y ago

Personally I find the translation and dubbing of videos to be super helpful as someone who is only fluent in English. I found a few creators from around the world that I follow now because of this. But I can understand the frustration if someone knows more than one language. Been seeing more and more posts about this complaining about it. Hopefully Google adds this as an option on Youtube instead of requiring a third party add-on.

doener 1y ago

Via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44413749 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44413749

goku12 1y ago

Kudos to YouTube for making it to the list of a rare few websites that require browser extensions to deliver a half decent user experience. What's more? YouTube also leaves the competition in the dust in the sheer number of extensions required to achieve this. I hear that you extend this privilege uniformly to both unpaid guests and the subscribers of YouTube Premium alike. I'm sure that the lack of alternatives helped you a lot in achieving this coveted status.

userbinator 1y ago
I stopped using the site long ago because of what it's turned into, and only visit it for the occasional things I can't do with Invidious, yt-dlp, and a few shell scripts. It's quite telling of how their developers "think" when they put the original language stream as the last one in the track list, instead of the sane first (zeroth?) position that it should occupy.

ars 1y ago

Why would I want this? I watched a translated YouTube video and it was great. If I don't want the translated sound track there's a button right there in settings to change it. Why do I need this extension?

charcircuit 1y ago
For example if you listen to music in a different language you may be familiar with the foriegn name of a song, but not the translation of it. This makes things confusing. Also for the sound track sometimes there isn't even an option to disable it depending on what experiment or client you are using.
sebtron 1y ago
Automatically translated titles are often just wrong and misleading, and there is no way to turn this "feature" off. If you understand more than one language, you'll get half of the videos sloppily translated for no reason. There is no way to tell YouTube not to do this for specific languages. It is beyond annoying.
vcvbcv 1y ago
I guess this extension is really aimed at multilingual viewers who don’t want English (or any language they already know) automatically translated into their native tongue. A better solution would be a ‘blacklist’ of languages you understand—so YouTube only auto‑translates from languages you don’t speak, and always leaves familiar languages in their original form.
- Tomte 1y ago
  > who don’t want English (or any language they already know) automatically translated into their native tongue. It‘s even the other way around!
- Nullabillity 1y ago
  > A better solution would be a ‘blacklist’ of languages you understand—so YouTube only auto‑translates from languages you don’t speak, and always leaves familiar languages in their original form. A better solution would have been to just not ship this disaster of a "feature" in the first place. I wouldn't want my browser to automatically translate every page I go to (without my consent!) either, and that would've been a much easier job!

rdtsc 1y ago

It's surprising how hostile youtube is to multilingual users. Probably all in some attempt to show off their translation capability or to improve the experience for users who may want to access content in a language they don't speak? Or it's just as dumb as this was on some product managers "designed and implemented" line to get promoted? But, surely someone sane there has to realize there is a large number of users out there who speak more than one language, and don't need Google do "help" them or "guess" for what language they like more.

hnthrowaway_423 1y ago
Right ? I am suprised that Facebook is actually the one leading in this UX: they clearly separate UX language ( singular ) and Languages which you don't need translation ( plural ).
- nextaccountic 1y ago
  I really, really want to have a way to tell Youtube that if I enable subtitles and the content is either English or Portuguese, then the subtitles should be shown in the original language (either subtitles created by the author or auto-generated subtitles - sometimes I can't do audio), but if it's another language, it should be shown in English (again, either subtitles authored by a person, or auto-generated ones) This extension can control subtitles so maybe there is hope that this or another extension will offer this kind of fine granularity
  - Kwpolska 1y ago
    This used to work some time ago. They just didn't automatically enable translation and picked the default language.
- avereveard 1y ago
  Accept language header covers all that's needed. It's a ordered list of languages the user will understand in order of preference. You'd pick the first one as interface, don't translate anything that's in the list, and you can decide what to do with anything not in the list. Sites that use ip of origin and just assume my language are such grating experiences.

Jcampuzano2 1y ago

I feel like its profoundly American to assume everyone wants to see everything in one language. I regularly consume content in two languages, my partner 3, and many of my friends are in the same boat. Please either allow me to just blacklist languages to not translate automatically or always keep content in the original language but allow changing after engaging with it. Its insane that this requires an extension for a company with as much resources as google. The translations of video titles are absolutely atrocious and rarely mean anything near the intent of the original title.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

oc1 1y ago

So Google assumes that its user only speaks one language and needs translation for everything else. Is this the educational standard in America?

kalleboo 1y ago
What's crazy is the US actually does have a decent proportion of multilingual speakers thanks to its history of immigration (a quick search reveals 20% of American residents are bilingual). Even Google staff should be a pretty multicultural bunch of people as they recruit globally.
- simongray 1y ago
  I mean... 20% is not really a lot. It's probably a lot closer to 100% in most countries of the world.
  - mslansn 1y ago
    Is it? That doesn’t sound right.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - matsemann 1y ago
      90 % of Norwegians speak English according to a quick search I just did. 89 % in Sweden.
      - mslansn 1y ago
        That’s not “most countries”.
        Aachen 1y ago
        Contribute more data points of your own then, or even just one. Maybe eventually we'll get to know whether it's most or not rather than dismissing someone who's helping

oc1 1y ago

Reddit is the worst offender. I really wonder what goes through the mind of the management clerks at these companies.

userbinator 1y ago
I really wonder what goes through the mind of the management clerks at these companies. "More $$$!!1"
- 0wis 1y ago
  Yeah, short term. Because power users that are used to switch between languages using internet slang do not like half baked polished translation in their IP-location language. So they leave. Remain mainly low quality users who couldn’t or didn’t wanted to switch between languages. A more powerful forever September again.
felindev 1y ago
While it is annoying, reddit at lest gives you option to see original text.
petargyurov 1y ago
When I first encountered this on Reddit I was really confused... They were (are?) translating even the text INSIDE an image. Can't believe how expensive that must've been across the entire frontpage. But hey, another way to shoehorn AI into being "useful".
mailund 1y ago
ah yes, and the auto translation on reddit broke a very useful trick I used all the time - need information about something in general -> search in English - need information about something specific for my home country (laws, local events, local shops, etc) -> search in my native language now, I get weird auto translated content informing me about laws that are only applicable in the US and recommended products that are not even available in my home country.
- 1y ago

chartered_stack 1y ago

I actually appreciate the YouTube's auto-translate feature a lot because it allows me to search through videos in languages I don't know but still like to view videos and listen to videos in. For example, I listen to a lot of city pop and anime title songs on YouTube and a lot of them have titles in Japanese only. I absolutely would not find it as easy as I do to search through this content and listen to the music if the auto-translation feature did not exist. It just makes it easier for people who don't know the language to view videos in that language. Sure the translation quality might not be the best but it makes search a whole lot easier. This is why I find some of the comments on this thread surprising. Having said that I am against the automatic audio translation that some people are reporting. I have not experienced it myself but that seems poorly thought out. It should be easier for people to search through items in a foreign language but that content should be served in the content originally intended.

rtpg 1y ago
I do not understand how this got rolled out. Surely there are _loads_ of multilingual people working at YouTube. How is there not at least an option to flag multiple languages that you speak? At least the audio translation I can turn off. I do not know how to get the actual title of a video or its description. It's so frustrating that I've ended up just changing my UI language from English to another language so that at least those don't get butchered.
- charcircuit 1y ago
  It got rolled out due to how MASSIVE the bounce rate is if the video is in a language users don't understand. I can easily see this on average providing a better experience and lead to less people bouncing. The false positives are not enough to counteract it.
  - rtpg 1y ago
    Just feels relatively easy to change the language preference to be a multiselect though.... like ignoring user backlash, I'd assume _internal users of YT_ would just get extremely annoyed. I don't really need magic, mainly want "if language not user's language" to turn into "if language not in user's language(s)"

Xunjin 1y ago

Thank you!

seydor 1y ago

i dont mind the others, but the automatic audio switch is very offensive to the creators

Tepix 1y ago
I think creators have the option to turn them off in the video settings. Unfortunately, many do not.
- seydor 1y ago
  I want the option but i don't want it to be the default even after i repeatedly switch to the original audio

vhcr 1y ago

Google is the worst when it comes to i18n, I speak both Spanish and English, it translates reviews automatically to English, but at the same time will show me content in Spanish when I searched for something in English.

tilsammans 1y ago

I can recommend the DeArrow extension for this. It has an option to always show the untranslated title. Plus, it has the intended features such as thumbnail replacement and crowd-sourced titles. DeArrow works in Android Firefox. It's unfortunate that YouTube is only usable with these extensions, but here we are.

tobi_bsf 1y ago

It’s unbelievable how broken YouTube is when it comes to language. I’m German. I want to see German content in German, and obviously I want to see English content in English. How is this not possible—especially when it worked perfectly for years? Is there a Chrome Variant of this?

RamRodification 1y ago
If you use Chrome, you are at the whim of the same people who are messing up the platform in the first place anyway. You should probably see if you can transition to Firefox or some other non-Chromium browser.
- pitkali 1y ago
  Google is not the only provider of Chrome extensions (yet?).
doener 1y ago
Yes: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/youtube-no-translation/lmkeolibdeeglfglnncmfleojmakecjb https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/youtube-no-translat...
- sebstefan 1y ago
  Or better yet, switching to firefox

felindev 1y ago

This change has really been annoying me and as far as I tested, no extension worked. Quick look through network activity and it confirmed that it was done server side, no original titles were supplied anywhere. Only option was display language and titles were pre-translated to it. Just give me option to see original content, that is why I'm here

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u 1y ago
I've just installed this extension, and confirmed that -- at least for now -- it works. The translated titles will be flashed first, then replaced by the original titles.

lajosbacs 1y ago

It is insane to me that you cannot turn it off in the setting even as a premium user. Or better yet, make this opt-in for everyone. I live in a German speaking country, yet my native language is other and German is almost never preferred when I watch some content. All my UIs are in English. Yet, I open a video by a Brit and he is autodubbed to German. There really isn't any similar UX decision by any other reputed company that would be comparably stupid as this. Google even has large presence in Switzerland, that makes it even more puzzling.

atoav 1y ago
German is my first language, but I prefer consuming English content in its original language. The thing with youtube translated titles is that half of them aren't even propper German and half of that half is utterly nonsensical, because some English ideom has been translated too literally.
- kikokikokiko 1y ago
  It's the same in portuguese. The last few months, for every brazilian video I need to play a guessing game and decide, based on the ridiculously "translated" english title, if I really want to watch it. Since I use Firefox on Android to consume Youtube, I need to open the video and then switch to Desktop mode to be able to change the audio track to the original pt-BR. There's no such option on Youtube mobile. I have lost count how many videos I decided the hassle wasn't worth it. Great job YouTube team, you're screwing your metrics in order to provide a horrible feature multilingual users never asked for.
- mnmalst 1y ago
  I prefer the same. It gets even better when youtube starts translating a video only available in your native language to English and you have no way to enable the native language audio.
lajosbacs 1y ago
Adding to my previous comment, in Switzerland, people speak very specific Swiss German, yet the videos are autodubbed to 'hoch' (standard) German. It's a bit of an exaggeration, but it is as if a person is Lisbon would get their videos dubbed to Spanish.

heisenbit 1y ago

I‘ve seen YT randomly deciding to translate videos shown in the the Telegram iOS client. No way around it other than view it on YT directly.

littlecranky67 1y ago

Youtube translations is such a dumb feature. I watch in german and english and have my language set to english. The english translations for german titles are most of the time garbage, because they translate names and fixed expressions we keep in english all to german. The result is just utter garbage - an complegtely unwanted. Especially since the underlying google account does support multiple languages, and I have set both languages that I speak there.

easyThrowaway 1y ago
This. I could excuse them (or reddit for the matter) if their translations were in any capacity decent or at least understandable. In reality most of the time they're plain italian or french word salads. Their automatic audio translations engine could be easily renamed "Mechanical Italian Brainrot Generator". It feels like they did not even test the feature before pushing it to production.
- hn8726 1y ago
  Reddit's one is crazy, I didn't know it exists until I was researching some tax laws in my country. I saw a Reddit thread in my language and it took me a while to realize it's a US-centric subreddit just automatically translated. Translating content about US laws makes 0 sense!
  - klausa 1y ago
    I mean, there are people living in the US, who are subject to the taxation there that don’t speak English. As someone who also lives in a country where I don’t speak the language (and certainly not well enough to understand tax law); having that content translated is potentially useful IFF it’s clearly labeled as such.

renegat0x0 1y ago

Unfortunately the extensions are not available for android....

littlecranky67 1y ago
Extensions are in general not available for Android (or at least chrome for android)?
timbit42 1y ago
Does it work in Firefox for Android? Edit: Sadly, no.

Ezhik 1y ago

YouTube on my phone automatically replaces English audio with machine-generated Japanese audio. YouTube on my desktop computer automatically replaces Japanese audio with machine-generated English audio. It's honestly quite incredible.

trzeci 1y ago

Thanks for this! The automatic title translation are so low quality I'm surprised the same company created Google Translator. In a lion share cases they are plain wrong, in most they are awkward, in all - they are misleading that the content somehow promises native experience.

mdavid626 1y ago

Standard American thing - thinking everyone speaks only one language, and that language being the language of the country you live in.

xxs 1y ago
And the country is resolved by IP - which totally doesn't work with roaming - you also get the home country of your provider.
ivanjermakov 1y ago
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14175238 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14175238
bravesoul2 1y ago
Isn't Spanish spoken alot in USA?
- mdavid626 1y ago
  Yes, but most likely not among developers at Google.
- AlchemistCamp 1y ago
  Yes. In America, there are over 60 million fluent Spanish speakers, which is more than the entire population of Spain. In many southern and southwestern parts of the country you can do just about anything you need to in Spanish and being bilingual is a big plus for any kind of public-facing work.
edarchis 1y ago
What drives me nuts with this is that they'll go for a weird guessing game instead of using the language settings that the browser is providing in every single request. My browser states that I favour English, then French. My user profile on the website has "English" as language. Yet, when I get to the homepage, it tries to guess my language from my IP. NOOOO.

Zufriedenheit 1y ago

Is there any way to achieve this on mobile iOS?

gethly 1y ago

I've been using "YouTube Anti Translate" for a year or two. I think the developer figured out all the bugs and quirks by now and it's pretty good.

timbit42 1y ago
This add-on seems to only fix video titles. The add-on this post refers to fixes audio translation.

kcaseg 1y ago

I wish there were a YouTube app with this + no reels, I have YouTube premium, I am already paying, stop forcing stuff on me.

DecentShoes 1y ago
Revanced lets you remove reels

dawnerd 1y ago

On the topic of multi-lingual - I frequently use airplay to cast to my apple tv from my laptop but a large number of videos now have alternative language tracks that apple decides to play and there's no way to change it. No language tracks show up. Worse is it changes language tracks after a few seconds. Any have any idea how to fix this?

darqis 1y ago

forced autotransation of anything is the worst. useless. whoever thought this was a good idea is just bored and seeking justification for their employment tbh

doener 1y ago

The same plugin for Chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/youtube-no-translation/lmkeolibdeeglfglnncmfleojmakecjb https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/youtube-no-translat...

Phui3ferubus 1y ago

Can I get the same for Google Play store? I will always take original version over shit-tier automatic translation.

oakstendheim 1y ago

This is such a Google thing. I'm browsing from a German IP address, have my language set to English only and my region set to the US. This is still not enough for Google, and Youtube by extension, to not show me German search results. It is honestly incredibly frustrating. Same goes for the trending page on YT. This appears to only be based on your IP address.

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u 1y ago

I won't be contributing much to rational discussion, but this "feature" annoys me so much that I just have to rant for a bit. ---- Like, is nobody in Google multi-lingual? Who the fuck thought this -- not auto-translation, but forced auto-translation -- is a good idea? Surely for an organization that purportedly only hires the cream-of-the-crop, they'll have a larger fraction of employees that speak more than one language? Look, I'm resting-and-vesting like the rest of y'all, but if I were in the team that implemented this, I'd definitely speak up, and let them, up to my skip-level, know that this is terrible. The implication of either possibilities had occurred, yet the feature still shipped, is harrowing. Even if the developers only speak one language, they must know at least three -- cream-of-the-crop, remember? -- programming languages, right? Imagine if, when you're first hired into Google, you declare your programming language of choice, say Go; then, henceforth whenever you check out the source code, irrespective of its original form, it gets auto-translated into Go, and you can't turn that off? Checking out Pixel first-stage bootloader code, almost certainly written in assembly -- nope! We know better: you're getting that in Go. Fuck, I shouldn't be giving them ideas! Could they not imagine how horrible this would be, and by analogy when applied to human languages, be also just as horrid? YouTube's often been cited as a great resource for learning new things. Well, now it's useless for, that's right, learning a second language! I wonder why this Spanish for beginners video's all in English? /s Speaking about shit features, let's throw "Stable Volume" into the pile. At least this one remembers your preferences...most of the time. When I watch ASMR -- yes I'll admit in public I'm that guy -- videos, and am just about to fall asleep, I just love to be jolted awake by a loud robotic voice's rendition of tapping sounds. Maybe my grumpiness's due to my lack of sleep!

gs17 1y ago
I'm convinced the people who decide on features for YouTube don't use it. Auto-dubbing sounds like it could be great... until you click on a video with it applied. > Speaking about shit features, let's throw "Stable Volume" into the pile. "Ambient Mode" too. It's a big waste of resources. It won't hurt your ears, but it eats up battery for no reason.

red_admiral 1y ago

Nowadays to use youtube efficiently with ADHD, you practically need all of: (a) uBlock - this one is debatable but deals with the worst distractions especially if you're trying to learn from a video your professor put up and you have an exam to prepare for, (b) unhook - hides most of the "recommendations" that attempt to keep you on the site because you're planning to do the copmprehension questions your professor gave you for after the video, (c) something to disable "autoplay next" for the same reason as above (a uBlock rule will do it), (d) no translation. Soon we'll probably need (e) something to block AI.

rauli_ 1y ago
I would add sponsorblock to this list.
thrdbndndn 1y ago
Autoplay next can be simply turned off and I've had it off for years.
- red_admiral 1y ago
  Probably region or other factors dependent?

godelski 1y ago

I really just wish YouTube would detect captions embedded in their videos and stop displaying the same text (often incorrectly) on top of it. You do all this machine learning, why not put it into production? It's easy to cache the results and you're already scrubbing audio data and automatically doing STT, so extend it to do video to text and compare. It's not like this is an unsolved problem, even if imperfect. The audio provides a strong feedback for OCR errors

amelius 1y ago
I think the engineers at Google know and want this, but Google has a monopoly here so without a strong financial reason nothing will happen.
yunusabd 1y ago
So you're saying that they should analyze both audio and video to increase the quality of the captions, if the video has hard-coded captions? I guess that's possible, just a question of effort vs. payoff. Inaccurate auto-captions for videos with hard coded captions probably isn't a big enough pain to warrant big investments?
Leon_25 1y ago
Agree. We build custom video analytics tools at Axon, and syncing OCR with audio-based STT isn’t rocket science anymore, especially with modern models. YouTube has all the ingredients, but seems slow to apply them at scale. Even basic alignment of audio captions with hardcoded subs would fix so much UX noise.

petargyurov 1y ago

If only I could add this to the YouTube app on my TV (as well as uBlock Origin)

yunusabd 1y ago

I'm working on an app that's based around youtube videos for language learning. I had to solve the same problem of youtube automatically changing the audio track to match the device locale. Even thought about making a spin off app with only the no-translate feature, that simply always uses the original title and audio. I guess revanced can do this too, but maybe there's enough people who don't use revanced, or don't know about this feature. Thoughts?

globular-toast 1y ago

Is this an example of developers assuming they know what users want without actually engaging with and asking said users? Or are the people reaching for plugins like this actually in a minority? The worst thing about this for me is not the language issue but that the translations are AI generated shite. If it was a case of multilingual channels producing videos in multiple languages then it makes sense that a user with language set to German would receive the German version by default. But to give users an AI generated translation by default? That's horrible. I get the impression someone in Google/YouTube has this grand vision of it being like a Babel Fish just seamlessly translating voices into your own language. The trouble is Babel Fish is science fiction. Douglas Adams described it as "feeding" the speech centres of your brain directly, not translating the audio into a shitty generated copy.

darkhorn 1y ago

Isnn't there any settings on Youtube to disable translation from Turkish into English? Why Youtube assumes that I am single lingual? It makes me crazy! I use Android and Youtube in English because it is thr original language. I watch sometimes Turksh videos from Turkish people but why the hell it translates into English?!

cdrini 1y ago

Oof a lot of hate for this feature. I agree more configuration would be nice, but at the same time, this is absolute science fiction come to life. Even for people who speak multiple languages: let's say you speak English, German, and French. That means you understand about 25%[1] of other people on the planet. That's 75% of videos which you would otherwise _never see or understand_. This feature is for people who _don't_ speak the most popular languages -- it lets _their_ videos get views when otherwise they would never be seen. And that's been my experience with the feature. I saw a recipe fully in Spanish because of the auto-dubbing. I actually want this enabled more globally, I want to see more fully non-English videos recommended to me from around the world. And this feature is relatively new, I think they started rolling it out only a few months ago. I'm sure configuration options will pop up. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num... and assuming the videos in a language is ~proportional to L1+L2 speakers . That's a simplifying assumption, because I would guess English is more highly represented. Because people likely make more videos in English because there's a bigger audience for it. If only there was a way to allow more non-English speakers to be able to be understood/gain traction....

_Algernon_ 1y ago
Of course I would understand the other 75%. Automatic subtitles have been a thing for ages and they have the benefit of not cutting out all personality and humor in the video. If I watch a foreign language movie I always prefer subtitles with original audio (and those are usually dubbed by human, professional dubbers, so much higher quality). Why would I treat YT any differently?
- cdrini 1y ago
  +1 for subtitles. I do think that subtitles don't gain the same level of traction; and people complain about auto-translated subtitles as well (and auto-subtitles on their own!). I think auto-dubbing might be more successful at allowing folks from smaller languages/communities the opportunity to gain audiences outside of those smaller languages/communities. The main difference between youtube and foreign language films is most creators on youtube don't have a budget for professional dubbers, so you either only watch big creators who do have that budget, or you have to compromise.

cubefox 1y ago

Currently the extension doesn't work in Firefox for Android. I hope this feature is added in the future.

edarchis 1y ago

<edit> as pointed out by @addandsubtract, I misunderstood the extension, it's about audio translation, not just titles. Sorry about that. </edit> If you're using DeArrow, there is an option to disable those translations. DeArrow is from the same team as SponsorBlock, it removes the clickbait thumbnails and titles with more descriptive ones. It makes the experience sooo much better. https://dearrow.ajay.app/ https://dearrow.ajay.app/

addandsubtract 1y ago
No, DeArrow only disables the title translations. This post is about disabling the new AI audio translations that they're rolling out.

jacek 1y ago

It is incredible how many addons I need to make YouTube usable. Here's my list (all Firefox): - uBlock Origin - ad block - SponsorBlock - to skip in video ads (some other nice features like highlights too) - YouTube Row Fixer - for the tiles to adjust to the window - Return YouTube Dislike - self explanatory - YouTube No Translation - thanks for the suggestion!

addandsubtract 1y ago
Also DeArrow to replace clickbait titles and thumbnails with more relevant ones.
- gfdujdufituj 1y ago
  I use BlockTube. If channels advertise that their content is trash via clickbait thumbnails and video titles, I can get rid of them once and for all.
weberer 1y ago
Also "Enhancer for Youtube" which allows - Hiding Reels - Setting a default playback speed
- blendaddict 1y ago
  I can't watch without enhancer anymore. I always have my mousewheel on the speed control to regulate the pacing myself, because most people can't pace. Also, when I am looking for a specific second long clip in an hour long video, it is very helpful that I can set the speed to something like 8x.
Xaphiosis 1y ago
BlockTube is a must - can block specific channels from showing up, videos with "Journaling" and "changed my life", hide videos watched over 50%, etc. Enhancer for Youtube is also super useful: disable shorts entirely, autoplay next only on playlists, tweak number of videos per row, default playback speed, default theater mode, etc. As another commenter said, Youtube is one of those sites that really requires multiple plugins to be useful :/

danielspace23 1y ago

I honestly can't wrap my head around what some users do just to have the "stock" experience. In order to get a vaguely usable stock YouTube, you need to install at least UBlock, SponsorBlock, No Translation, and arguably DeArrow as well. And this only works for browsers, many people will cope with their mobile YouTube experience being hell on earth. Why do all this when you can get an alternative cross-platform client like GrayJay with all the same features (minus DeArrow for now), which works out of the box, has more privacy, and won't be completely useless the next time Google decides to shift things around a bit? Same goes for Windows: you'll see people who go to great lengths to disable telemetry, remove Edge and sponsored content, often having to run random scripts from the internet with administrator privileges, just to have everything reset on the next Windows update. Remember how Windows users made fun of Linux users for having to open a command line for installing a browser (which isn't even true)? I could go on: you can get Firefox and spend hours tweaking about:config to disable the anti-features, or you can get one of the dozen forks with the same patches pre-applied, yet some people will still defend the stock experience with their lives.

2Gkashmiri 1y ago
this is funny. in "i am legend", the last man standing became the "unwanted alien" because everyone else had transformed into something else. so the abnormal is the new normal. enshittification at its peak
carlosjobim 1y ago
> In order to get a vaguely usable stock YouTube, you need to install at least UBlock, SponsorBlock, No Translation, and arguably DeArrow as well. UBlock: Solved by using YouTube Premium SponsorBlock: Solved by not watching low-quality channels with sponsors. Also YouTube has started rolling out their own version of SponsorBlock to skip these segments. No Translation: Yeah, this is a pain in stock YouTube DeArrow: Why would I want clickbait thumbnails and titles fixed? Those are perfect indicators of a low quality video to not click. > Same goes for Windows Sure does. People who want a nice experience get a Mac, which is somewhat equivalent to paying for YouTube Premium. > GrayJay Can't install it on a Roku or on Apple TV. YouTube Premium is still the best option for TV watching.

11mariom 1y ago

Few days ago I was surprised when video started in dubbed mode… I always watch everything in original audio, and turn subtitles when needed. At least for audio I found a setting, but titles… WHY?! Thanks for sharing addon :)

rjsw 1y ago

The interface to YouTube used by yt-dlp does still list the different audio tracks and labels the original one. The problems reported by everyone in this thread sound to me like UI bugs of the player, official app or javascript in the browser, picking the wrong audio track automatically.

martiuk 1y ago

The worst part of this so-called “feature” is when very diligent creators from non-English-speaking countries already present in English language. But YouTube just assumes it's in their native language, so you have this horrible AI voiceover by default instead of their voice or VO artist that they use.

qwertox 1y ago

Autodubbing is probably the worst feature Google has ever implemented. It's OK if they want to offer it, but at least let me disable it for specific languages. And for those languages which I don't understand, let me choose a default autodubbing language. Because I assume that auto-generated translations from French to English will be far better than those from French to German or Spanish. Also, the voices they use sound like from a decade ago.

rightbyte 1y ago
It is terrible and took me a while to realize what was happening. I though some videos were generated spam. Reddit does something similar now. It auto translates posts and they show up in Google in my native tongue. Really annoying since when I search in that language I specifically don't want English sites.
- _bent 1y ago
  The Reddit translations are so insanely terrible. They are so much harder to read the the original English posts. It's like every word has been translated independently
  - hengheng 1y ago
    The problem isn't the the translation isn't done well enough, but rather its underhanded nature that tries to sell a translated website as a genuine discussion.
    - edwcross 1y ago
      Indeed. If I search Google for terms in my specific language other than English, I expect to find results that are relevant to my country. Auto-translated Reddit posts that "fake" being from that language are deeply annoying, because then I click them expecting to find some local references but in fact they are invariably talking about some US-specific market or situation that's useless to me.
- 1y ago

marcocastignoli 1y ago

thanks

dizhn 1y ago

It's embarrassing that something like this is needed. For some reason Youtube has always been weird about languages. They have language and location information, yet they won't let you search by language, will return other languages when you search, won't search by location, won't default to another language in videos and now they are force translating video titles/descriptions and force dubbing videos. Nobody asked for any of this. They have been asked plenty of times to provide options related to languages yet they have not implemented any of it. Super super weird. When did we start to accept such bullshit even in paid products?

stefs 1y ago

the youtube translations aren't really good either. i'm constantly puzzled by videos with absolutely nonsensical titles until i remember that it's probably auto-translated and have to work out what the original meaning was. for example, "more plates more dates" has been translated to "Mehr Teller mehr Termine". not allowing this feature to be disabled is such an user hostile decision.

gfdujdufituj 1y ago

Not surprised it's unfathomable for Google drones that for 74 % of English speakers it's their second language. Google's stupidity knows no bounds.

dzogchen 1y ago

Oh my God this is auto translation business is so incredibly annoying. Especially for people that know multiple languages. But I imagine it is the worst for people who are trying to learn another language...

kachapopopow 1y ago

The fact that there's a massive delay for auto dubbing is crazy to me, it's not done in real-time, why have the delay?

Narishma 1y ago
What delay are you talking about?
- kachapopopow 1y ago
  Autodubbing has a good 2-3 second delay before it starts the translated speech and it continues all the way throught the video.

vagrantJin 1y ago

Yeah, Yandex browser also has this and its annoying. Terrible actually even if their auto-dub is way better than youtube's.

fuomag9 1y ago

I really hate YouTube translations. I DO NOT want YouTube in Italian because I don’t care about Italian content or watching videos in Italian!

antirez 1y ago

As a person with a YouTube channel with most Italian content, and only coding content in English: as it is today, it is horrible. But if they fix it to the stop AI standards of voice translation, it will be a game changer. I'm referring to natural voice (matching the original one) lips sync, and there will no longer be language barriers on YouTube.

joelthelion 1y ago

Unfortunately not available for android where it would be very useful.

Alifatisk 1y ago

What is it with Youtube and adding things no one asked for? I especially dislike when they make it default, so I have to figure out how to disable new features. My browser language is EN, my preferred language in YT settings is EN, I live in a European country, yet, videos get translated into Arabic? What the hell Youtube. Why can't I just visit your platform, look up videos I am interested in and watch it. The old Youtube was way nicer, it felt snappy, easy to interact with and didn't have all that bloat we have today. I also miss when the ads where a popup at the bottom of the video instead of having to watch double ad segment every 5 minute.

2Gkashmiri 1y ago

i am so glad firefox addon is being discussed. looks to me normally browser extension posts are all chrome only for some reason and when i nag them about firefox version, they dont bother

polytely 1y ago

So embarrassing they thought this was a good idea, these are the people earning the big google salaries? What a clown show

kvemkon 1y ago

Due to this anti-feature I have many bookmarks with broken title and now looking for a way to automatically refresh them with the original one. > Size: 123.22 kB A not so small extension for getting rid of a problem seems so tiny. Feels a bit like overkill and I hoped there would be something I can forcibly set without any extension. Even with disabled cookies youtube uses local storage. Why not have there some variable for that purpose!?

Nitrolo 1y ago

For years YouTube would randomly change my language to Italian and auto translate all the titles, which was annoying but I can change the language back to English and it was fine. Thing is, I haven't lived in Italy for well over a decade. I don't consume much Italian content. I've tried my best to purge my Google account of any possible trace of Italian language settings, I've never saved an Italian address etc. And yet Google must be convinced that, because I was in Italy over a dozen years ago when I made the account I must be Italian, and that cannot possibly change.

donperignon 1y ago

Please this trend needs to stop, it’s so annoying. Subtitles are good enough and more respectful than this crappy uncontrolled auto transactions

madmulita 1y ago

Now we need one that detects and filters AI narrators.

anon025 1y ago

YouTube has become annoying with the AI thing. I live in the US but speak Spanish and consume almost 80% of content in Spanish and my OS and Keyboard are in Spanish, yet the thing is not able to respect the Accept-Language headers :(

rasz 1y ago

in sourcecode this snipped looked interesting https://github.com/YouG-o/YouTube_No_Translation/blob/91061a2a77ef72c76ce6288f0a6a7693c4a005bb/src/content/description/descriptionIndex.ts#L205-L213 https://github.com/YouG-o/YouTube_No_Translation/blob/91061a... // Prevent translation on all levels [element, attributedString, snippetAttributedString].forEach(el => { if (el) { el.setAttribute('translate', 'no'); sadly magic translate="no" attribute does nothing on its own :( Probably related to standard https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Global_attributes/translate https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/... so obviously Google doesnt honor it. following el.style.setProperty('translate', 'no', 'important'); is kinda funny too, CSS translate is about positioning not language :) and since 'no' is not a valid value this instruction is ignored anyways.