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.
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”
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.
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.
> 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.
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 ).
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My friend thought a video was ai generated because it was translated to 17 languages. But the voices were natural, fit the pace of the video, and had emotion and impulse. They had been paid for.
The YouTube auto translation is not that. It's stilted and awkward, robotic voice with none of the context. It's not ready for release and it does a disservice to any creator that uses it because their vision is not going to be anywhere near correctly delivered.
The bare minimal would be to implement the Accept-Languages http header correctly, not just a randomly picked subset in it. They cannot seem to even bother to do that.
Google has had ample time to figure out I speak more languages than Swedish. Auto-translated subtitles. Translated video titles. Reddit posts. I hate it. I hate hate hate it.
I'd say that dubbing in general is the worst ever. Where I'm from (Belgium/Dutch) nothing is ever dubbed, we just read the subtitles, much better like that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, I know Sundar is Indian.
This doesn't stop Google from being one of the worst major tech companies I use at internationalisation and localisation.
Date formats, start of the week, 12/24h clock, auto translations, localised search results, language detection, it is all rubbish and clearly US-centric.
For all their (former) diversity dances, that company has very little to show for it.
Except both the head of YouTube and literally the CEO of Google are of Indian decent, have lived in India, and as such are almost certainly multilingual. Plus the fact that Google attracts developers from all of the world probably means very many developers at both Google and YouTube are multilingual. They obviously know how the world looks like, and still decided to do this.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
Even if it is, Google is itself is very international and multilingual, including the literal head of YouTube. They obviously know what the world looks like, and decided to do this anyway.
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.
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?
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
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.
[+] [-] rdtsc|9 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] snailmailman|9 months ago|reply
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”
[+] [-] phantomathkg|9 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] weberer|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] pickledoyster|9 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hnthrowaway_423|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Sander_Marechal|9 months ago|reply
But yeah, it's incredibly stupid.
[+] [-] oc1|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] pyrale|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ozim|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] saretup|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] wirrbel|9 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] animuchan|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] jekwoooooe|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] anal_reactor|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] pyuser583|9 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] qwertox|9 months ago|reply
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|9 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] xdfgh1112|9 months ago|reply
The YouTube auto translation is not that. It's stilted and awkward, robotic voice with none of the context. It's not ready for release and it does a disservice to any creator that uses it because their vision is not going to be anywhere near correctly delivered.
[+] [-] Seb-C|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] lloeki|9 months ago|reply
At the very least make use of https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/...
... instead of relying on whatever stupid magic that places me in Germany when I live 5km from the border.
It can't be geoip because that IP is from a French ISP and has been in consistent use at this location for the past 5 years.
(but yeah even then it is horrible)
[+] [-] bjoli|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] DaanDL|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] lajosbacs|9 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] littlecranky67|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] easyThrowaway|9 months ago|reply
It feels like they did not even test the feature before pushing it to production.
[+] [-] goku12|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] mdavid626|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] edarchis|9 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] gherkinnn|9 months ago|reply
Date formats, start of the week, 12/24h clock, auto translations, localised search results, language detection, it is all rubbish and clearly US-centric.
For all their (former) diversity dances, that company has very little to show for it.
[+] [-] dagw|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] xxs|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ivanjermakov|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] tobi_bsf|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] godelski|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] chartered_stack|9 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Ezhik|9 months ago|reply
It's honestly quite incredible.
[+] [-] oc1|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] kalleboo|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] dagw|9 months ago|reply
Even if it is, Google is itself is very international and multilingual, including the literal head of YouTube. They obviously know what the world looks like, and decided to do this anyway.
[+] [-] jacek|9 months ago|reply
- 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!
[+] [-] oakstendheim|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] oc1|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] kcaseg|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] dizhn|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] doener|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] felindev|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] gethly|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Alifatisk|9 months ago|reply
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.