6 ms·

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

• 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.
    • makeitdouble 1y ago
      No. Accept language is set at the browser level, where you usually want a single default with granular per-site (or even per-content) control. There will be whole sites and apps that I want in a specific language that aren't my first preference. E.g. I might want my news and browser user interface in English but Google Maps in a local language, Netflix in the language of the content I watch the most etc. Reality is just too complex for a single ordered list IMHO, having the default set to whatever heuristics that best matches the site, and give a very easy, prominent and persistent way to change the language is I think the best approach.
      • avereveard 1y ago
        you still want a default for those website you haven't been yet. also you're conflating the user agent configuration with the trasmission protocol. the accept header easily accomodate your scenario with purely client side configuration, entirely transparent to the web site.
  • outadoc 1y ago
    Google has that preference as well, YouTube just doesn't care to honor it, which is somehow even more frustrating.
• pyuser583 1y ago
  There are some very complicated legal issues that come up with international video. Movie companies sometimes don’t want things distributed on certain areas - ever. Like when there are different productions of the same movie for different areas. The productions would compete against each other. It’s one of the reasons DVD has multiple incompatible regions. I don’t know if this is YouTube’s reasoning.
  • bcoates 1y ago
    If I remember right YouTube already provides the tools for that and you can just outright region lock an upload (possibly depending on having the right creator bits as a studio/large channel)
    • bl4ckneon 1y ago
      Yes, for CMS channels, which would be your movie studios, TV studios, etc. They have an option to block certain countries from watching it. If you are around in YouTube often enough you will find a video or two that will say something like "this video isn't available in your region/country"
  • numpad0 1y ago
    No, the complaint is opposite of that. They're seeking ways to escape their translation efforts because it's so bad. It has nothing to do with difficulties of offering translations. It's about declining complimentary ketchup squeeze on latte.
    • kikokikokiko 1y ago
      It's not even about it being a bad translation or not. If I am a native speaker, I WANT TO READ AND HEAR EVERYTHING IN THE ORIGINAL goddammit. Google juat became IBM in the 90s, it's depressing.
      • silon42 1y ago
        It's not just Youtube, if there wasn't a google.com/ncr, I'd have to seek alternatives a long time ago. And many other sites that confuse country with language (geizhals.eu, ... etc)
• phantomathkg 1y ago
  i18n and l10n are something that I have seen a company done right. It is easy developer to assume: If your IP is coming from country X, you must want the content to be served in language X. No, there are tourist from country Z, long term resident who prefer language A and people from country X want to learn language B. - If your browser Accept-Language say X,Y, then you must want all the content to be served in X. No, I want my search result to be predominantly in X, but when I search for things about Y, show me language Y, and when I search for this band from country Z, please show me in language X. As a hongkonger (zh_hk + en_gb), living in Singapore (zh_cn + en?), following JPOP. This is the daily fight I have with browser. I would rather all application, including web app just give me the option to choose and say, interface language, english, content language, follow origin.
  • creakingstairs 1y ago
    > As a hongkonger (zh_hk + en_gb), living in Singapore (zh_cn + en?), following JPOP. This is the daily fight I have with browser. Ah yes as a Korean living in Japan with locale set to English, this truly is a daily fight. > I would rather all application, including web app just give me the option to choose I've left websites for other competitors because they wouldn't have a button to change language.
  • rtpg 1y ago
    > i18n and l10n are something that I have seen a company done right. It is easy developer to assume: > If your IP is coming from country X, you must want the content to be served in language X. I would assume there are multilingual speakers in mostly every single team at YouTube. Or at the very least enough nerds who just like some random content from another country. People who would both want their UI to be in a language A but also to consume content from languages B, C... I do not understand how that assumption holds in any product decision except in one where the YT product teams are entirely and totally separated from the engineering teams.
  • littlecranky67 1y ago
    No need to do these assumptions, youtube accounts are google accounts and google already supports setting multiple languages that you speak/read.
• saretup 1y ago
  Doesn’t it just use the primary language you select in your account settings? Unless you’re talking about using it in incognito, in which case it does get annoying when it assumes a language based on region without asking.
  • RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u 1y ago
    My configured primary language is English, but I regularly watch contents in Chinese and Japanese, where I have sufficient mastery over to not need YouTube's subpar translation. YouTube's insistence in displaying video titles in English, starting a few months ago, and now also auto-dubbing in English, is incredibly annoying.
    • Jcampuzano2 1y ago
      Similar thing for me with Spanish and English. I consume both basically equally. I don't need audio or text translations for either, but Google insists on translating the english titles to Spanish completely ruining the entire meaning of what it is. Strangely I often get things in Portuguese for some reason even though I've never set a device to Portuguese, I just happen to have been to Brazil and Portugal. I wish I could just say please never translate either of these languages, and while some apps have this many are very hostile. I also have a weird setup where all my personal devices are in Spanish but my work devices and accounts are in English. It causes a strange mixup where I never really know what language I'm going to be served but its wrong more often than not.
  • isaacremuant 1y ago
    If you speak more than one language, which most non native language speakers do, you absolutely don't want your automatic translations. Hell, I don't want automatic translations even for languages I don't speak. If you want to allow me to have automatic subtitles go right ahead but forcing me to listen in one language is just absurd. It also destroys language learning opportunities. Google being anti user, probably so some director can boost AI numbers is pretty typical though.
  • dgellow 1y ago
• pyrale 1y ago
  The worst part about it is the half-translated effect on many sites. I'm fine in my native language and in english, but having a page written in both is a purge. Add to this the disappearance of a way to select language quiclky and the web is becoming shit these days wrt i18n.
• pickledoyster 1y ago
  > Or it's just as dumb as this was on some product managers "designed and implemented" line to get promoted? I'd suspect it's something banal, such as: $goal --> translate by default --> enough users click through by mistake (AB test shows user interest) --> more preroll ads shown to users (AB test shows business value) --> promotion Whether the $goal was {accessibility, show off translations, UX improvement} is quite irrelevant for a business that optimizes for revenue from ads.
• Sander_Marechal 1y ago
  I'm lucky enough that I mostly only consume English content on Youtube and not my native language, so I just set everything to English. But yeah, it's incredibly stupid.
  • Fuckconsume 1y ago
    [dead]
  • dgellow 1y ago
    I'm still getting titles auto-translated, and started to get videos auto-dubbed a few weeks ago.
    • ThatMedicIsASpy 1y ago
      It is a setting managed by the content creators. That is why it is very random
      • dgellow 1y ago
        Thanks, I wasn't aware that was the case
  • anty 1y ago
    I did this too, but then YouTube translated videos in my native language to English.
• ozim 1y ago
  I think statistics show that multilingual users are minority enough and most likely people who understand "help" or "guess" quit as soon when they see anything else so they don't consume the content. So YT doesn't care.
  • bryanrasmussen 1y ago
    >I think statistics show that multilingual users are minority enough I think that depends on the country. And maybe region of the country. At any rate I can turn off subtitles in my YouTube - can other people not do that?
    • ozim 1y ago
      They are doing automated voice over now and automated translation of video titles.
      • bryanrasmussen 1y ago
        huh I don't seem to get it. Do you have a link where I can see it in action? on edit: am in Denmark, I don't notice any automatic translation of the three languages I see most often - Danish, English, or Italian. on second edit: but maybe I am just not observing it in action when it happens or maybe I don't watch the kind of videos they do it to - anyway I'd like to see it.
        • joseda-hg 1y ago
          Not all creators enable it (Or take the time / know to disable it, as some report it enables automatically), but it's more common on say Mr Beast or Kurzgezagt, Larger channels that would keep an eye on click troughs As a point of anecdata, I go out of my way to avoid these, and report them any time I come across them, and now there's been a while I've not gotten them on content I want (But I do get them on some of the default feed YouTube places on home, even if I never interact with them)
        • joseda-hg 1y ago
• anal_reactor 1y ago
  Average user is not multilingual. Target group is average user. End of story.
  • Tor3 1y ago
    As others have commented already: Most people in Europe can speak at least two languages, and even the minority who can just speak one can typically understand several. Even my old parents, when they were alive, could understand at least three languages, and English wasn't one of them. Africa? Most people can handle several languages. South Africa, for example, has 11 official languages, people can often speak a bunch of them and understand several more. Asia? Varies, but multi-lingual is common in many regions, though not so much in Japan. It's not that you have to be able to speak multiple languages, understanding several is still common.
  • notpushkin 1y ago
    > Average user is not multilingual. [citation needed]
  • cubefox 1y ago
    I think it's more that the YouTube developers are US Americans who overwhelmingly speak only one language and naturally assume this is the case everywhere else.
    • stackbutterflow 1y ago
      This is a clear example where diversity of lived experiences make for a better product. I have no doubt that a young monolingual US developer can't imagine that many, if not most, people around the world are juggling between two or more languages multiple times a day. But it's obvious to anyone else.
    • Moomoomoo309 1y ago
      This feels off to me. There are so many Indians in silicon Valley, most of which speak at least one Indian language (even if not as well as English) in addition to English, some from India, some whose parents or grandparents are from India. They're both there in higher levels and lower levels - they're throughout the company, and none of them stepped in? I don't think this makes sense.
• wirrbel 1y ago
  Honestly, its infuriating. There are three languages that I speak and understand sufficiently well for consuming youtube videos. I don't ever want these to be translated. And then, the translation of video titles etc. is often surprisingly bad, because (I think) they don't consider the video context / content while translating, so it almost looks like a translation-by-dictionary-lookup translation. Most infuriating though is when you watch a video of a channel you watched for years and all of the sudden the audio is auto-translated into your primary language. So cringe.
• snailmailman 1y ago
  I’ve been learning a new language, and I’m constantly encountering language-learning videos that get translated entirely into my native language, effectively useless until I revert the audio track. Annoyingly, there’s not a native way to revert the translated description and title as far as I know. And this seems to be done without the knowledge of the creator! I watched a language-learning YouTube short today that was entirely not in English. But YouTube was automatically dubbing it into English. A commenter replied with “but why the bad ai voice?” And the creator replied “it’s not, that’s my voice”
  • dizhn 1y ago
    Revanced on android has an option to force native language. It does not fix the translated titles and descriptions as far as I can tell.
  • Tor3 1y ago
    I've seen a bunch of different shorts which have the same AI-generated horrible voice. I always assumed this was just the author preferring to script the audio and generate the voice. Can I assume this is actually big-G auto-dubbing the short? If so, then I'm guilty of (incorrectly) complaining to the author of several shorts.
    • DrillShopper 1y ago
      Those are likely uploads from Tiktok where that voice is everywhere.
    • ffsm8 1y ago
      Google is auto translating their videos unless the content creators explicitly opts out. The worst about this feature is that it depends on the language setting of the user, so the creator will likely never find out it's happening, because they're probably using YouTube in the language they're making the videos in. It's a toggle in their creator profile that I believe was auto enabled at some point. It's especially horrendous when the short has foreign language music. I was a following some Japanese cooking/baking channels some time ago, until this feature made them intolerable through the music translation. Anyway, you can easily see wherever YouTube ruined it via this feature: it gets a small "dub" badge next to the title - and you can manually switch the audio via the gear icon... Which isn't available for shorts, so you need to open these via the regular video URL... Which is way too much effort, obviously. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/15569972?sjid=16216375800445327550-EU https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/15569972?sjid=1621...
• oc1 1y ago
  I fear the future won't make us more educated but even dumber as the tech and ai tries to do all thinking for us, even thinking we don't want to learn languages as this is just one more "inefficiency" in humans to eradicate. And who is Ai trying to emulate? Right, people like these managers at Google resposnsible for such decisions (or like sama, not sure what's worse)
• weberer 1y ago
  Google as a whole is hostile to the user's browser's language settings. I have to append ?hl=en to every Google URL when connecting from an IP address that they determine is a non-English region.
  • unsupp0rted 1y ago
    While logged into Google with your own regional settings, try Google Flights in any country- the currency is always set to that country's currency. I have no idea what a flight costing 781,667 blergs is, Google. Is that a lot? If I knew what blergs are worth, I'd set my regional settings to blergs. So you set the currency to your own. Then navigate away, then come back. Now it's blergs again.
    • animuchan 1y ago
      Oh how I hate this UX antipattern. Even when you know the price of blerg, the cognitive overhead is real.
      • unsupp0rted 1y ago
        This flight is 781,667 blergs but this other one is only 722,458 blergs! Is that a huge cost savings? Better switch tabs and start calculating.
• animuchan 1y ago
  As a multilingual user: half the time YouTube "translation" is just gibberish, it's a total word soup. The closest thing is AliExpress listings, you know, the "Original 2025 Nintendo DS Inflatable Bedroom Wireless USB-C Potato Masher" stuff.
• jekwoooooe 1y ago
  Hostile to you, but 99.99% of the user base prefers it that way I’m sure.