Anybody knows the business reason for this feature to exist? most people here and in other places are incredibly frustrated with auto-translate and the inability to turn it off. I include myself in that bunch.
There are two potential reasons in my mind:
- Youtube folks A/B tested it and it got more engagement - n/ views, time viewed per video, etc. (but were they tracking the right metrics? ie did they capture user frustration)
- Some 'guru' at Youtube decided "it's good UX" and "it's what everybody wants". In such case, the damage the 'guru' is doing is unbelievable. Millions of people annoyed across the world... every single day.
Well, surely the idea is that anyone can watch any video in any language. Especially enabling the non-English-speaking world to consume the much larger corpus of English-speaking content.
The idea is great. They just botched it at the UI level.
In practice it means clicking a video you think is in your native language but it's actually in English with low quality auto-subs, but there's no reason Youtube couldn't improve the UX here, like indicate that it's been auto-translated or let you easily filter out content that's not in your language.
You gotta remember that "think of the average person, and then remember 50% are dumber than that".
By doing this, Youtube has probably 10x'd available content for "dumb" ppl to watch. Respectfully, my parents are in that cohort, and I suspect my father will happily watch AI translated and dubbed woodworking channels and not care at all. He "wins" here.
I have to acknowledge that there are probably more people like him then like me who want to have Japanese videos in Japanese in my US feed.
YT needs to make it configurable and I'm fine to turn it off, but the fact that I need an extension to do so is very much lame. As well as that I'm not sure uploaders are aware of their videos being displayed in this way.
Most Americans speak one language. Therefore American product designers think everyone speaks one language and only ever wants to hear everything in their one language...
I agree, it's annoying. I speak multiple languages and like to consume the original whenever possible.
Funny thing is that people are complaining with channel creators. Was in a discord where the moderators desperately asked people to explain it to them because people in English speaking countries most likely do not have this terrible experience and don't understand the rage.
I wouldn't mind and I would actually prefer if things were translated correctly, adapting to local slang, cultural references and the likes. As of now translations are weird if not outright cringey. This is a problem with LLMs in general (probably because they're trained mostly on English data), although to a lesser degree, but enough that I have to correct them daily.
Maybe youtube push audience to view auto translated/dubbed foreign language content from regions where they don't have to pay out to creators, or pay as much. TBH the more content I can view the better, just give me a toggle to set default language and a button to native video language.
- some non-guru added a potentiality useful feature, but since there is no strong engineering culture around UI quality (which also translates into inability to do proper A/B or any other testing you capture the dissatisfaction in relevant metrics), the pain persists
It's extremely sinister. The grand prize is feeding people AI-generated content, and completely removing the human factor. Many platforms started as social media, but converted into content delivery platforms. Which is cool, except content creators can be problematic. If you remove them out of equation, you basically get audience to watch whatever slop you want them to watch, with zero human interaction at all. Spotify is already taking serious steps by promoting AI-generated music. In this context, forcing AI-generated translations onto people is a step towards getting them used to listening AI-generated voice. And you can market this easily by saying "we just want people to have more cross-cultural communication, no evil here".
I don't want to completely disregard AI-generated content. Some of it can be actually good, and I use AI as a talking companion. But at the same time it's a technology that can easily be abused. And it will be abused. And we'll love it. Except those few nutjobs who resist, but nobody will care. Free speech doesn't matter when nobody's listening.
AFAIK it's up to the video owner to choose whether or not they enable these translations. When I found this out, I lost respect for so many creators, because they turned on this shitty feature.
I have been using an untranslate add-on like this one and have been absolutely loving it. Since YouTube has been AI translating video titles and dubbing contents it has been suggesting foreign videos in users' home feed.
The way these untranslate add-ons work (layman's explanation) is that they fetch the original title and audio and reinsert it, but the recommendation for the video stays in your feed. This has resulted in loads of super interesting foreign language content in my feed which is just awesome.
Cars are one of my YouTube interests and seeing loads of cool old car content from different parts of the world has been fascinating. Not only were different models popular in different places but the things people value in a car are also wildly different across the globe. And I get to listen to a cool foreign language while discovering this!
One downside is that to the YouTube algorithm, it probably seems like I absolutely LOVE this autodubbing feature, going crazy for all these translated videos. That could not be further from the truth: my youtube feed has become completely unusable without an untranslate add-on since this update.
Unbelievable that YouTube has not made this feature configurable. I am a language learner and use YouTube to find target language content. It’s very difficult now because you can no longer trust the title of the video to tell you what language it was intended for. Would have been very simple to add a settings toggle. This is one of the worst app inconveniences I’ve come across in recent years.
most open source clients allow you do pick the language and subtitle just fine. youtube backend is pretty decent, despite the frontend team being there just to add ads.
i recommend "PipePipe" on android.
if you are waiting for them to add that feature on the native player, remember google haven't added a single feature to gmail app besides reading email... you cannot even create a filter.
Google has always been a pain when it comes to internationalisation.
The number of hoops you have to jump through to get results from the actual Google page when you are outside of the US is mind boggling. I don’t even know if it’s still possible.
Every time I find a video that was shot in my mother tongue auto-translated into English I want to bang my head against the wall. I've told Google in multiple ways that I'm multilingual and it just doesn't get it. It's worst on mobile, where you can't switch the audio channel to the original sound.
After 25 you can’t really learn new languages without considerable investment and effort. Translating is the only option for the vast majority of people.
One thing this kind of thing severely hurts is a lot of devices, services are affected by local laws, units, concepts, brands sometimes severely altering their function.
- Searching for a guide on say a car infotainment system would be totally different here from someone explaining in the USA or germany. Now I see a ton of titles in my language, only to find out it's information is completely useless to me because a menu, button or whatever doesen't even exist.
- Recommendations on cooking advice become almost worthless since a grading system for flours is arcane, brands I've never heard of, compounded by some imperial units in the mix. A recipe turns into a research project
- when searching for non-native content I may avoid content in my language, since I know the subject is definitely not relevant anywhere near me, so perfectly valid content will be missed
Worse yet, sometimes physical products claiming to have localized manual will instead have used some very inferior version to google translate and give dangerous advice about safe handling of the device.
- Searching for a guide on say a car infotainment system would be totally different here from someone explaining in the USA or germany. Now I see a ton of titles in my language, only to find out it's information is completely useless to me because a menu, button or whatever doesen't even exist.
This is so annoying. I can't believe they couldn't understand this, and there are many multilingual people.
YouTube settings are notoriously volatile even on the same device and being logged in. Subtitles are enabled every other day all of a sudden without any need (even for my natural language content).
Since they rolled out the auto-trabslation thing the same happens, I have to switch to original English every few days.
I _love_ when youtube auto-translates english titles to my native language and then asks me if I want to translate the rare comments in my native language to english.
It seem they just don't contemplate people speaking two or more languages, *even though the setting in the google account is there*.
Great! Dutch living in Austria and YouTube is randomly dubbing videos from one language to another with no way of turning it off, which is my real WTF here.
How did they fail to make this an option in the first place?
To be very clear, I don’t even want to translate videos in languages that YouTube know I don’t understand. Much less in videos languages I do understand.
Also I don’t think it’s a good idea to use AI in any part of this chain unless there is user driven corrections. Seems like even big TikTok/Instagram accounts use some auto subtitling machinery and it’s invariably wrong. Why even bother? Or why not just manually subtitle if it’s a 10 second English video and the text is in English? Why use automation at all for that?
YouTube apparently does not understand that bilingual people exist. I do not want translations between German and English, I understand both languages just fine.
I do not want to backwards translate some nonsense autogenerated YouTube translation to understand what some video title means. I do not ever want to watch an automatic dub where some AI voice replaces the actual language I understand.
Browsers got this right "never translate German" was enough to fix the auto translation feature. Somehow one of the most valuable companies in the world, managing one of the largest websites in the world can not implement something that basic.
Everyone I've spoken to in my circle hates this feature.
We're all fairly intelligent people — if we needed audio dubbing, we'd turn it on ourselves.
But to have auto-dub enabled by default is, frankly, incredulous.
If someone from Google could explain the rationale behind forcing this on users, I’d genuinely love to understand it.
I ll give you an even better idea for a youtube extension, if nobody makes it, i ll most certainly do. I need to pin a particular comment on a set of videos matching a criteria and change this pinned comment across all these videos every now and then, like for example when i put a new video out, i would like to link to this from the pinned comment of relevant videos. this is such a hassle doing manually in current times. i am amazed nobody has come up with a pinned comment manager for youtube yet
The fact that this needs to exist is a testament to how bad some things in YouTube are. They were able to make me quit being a paying customer with shitty things like that.
This really needs to be configurable on a per-account basis. I'm using YouTube mostly on mobile devices and TVs, without the possibility to use addons.
The required settings are quite simple (a lot of social media platforms have them): Setting a list of languages that should never be translated, and setting a preferred language the other ones should be translated to.
I guess the silicon valley people who develop YouTube can't grasp the concept that there are people out there who speak multiple languages.
It’s crazy that an extension is needed to fix this. When I first saw that “feature” I thought it was some bug and YouTube would fix soon, but they don’t seem to care about it.
Surprisingly, it isn't. You can change the language in your google account and it will take that into account for what to translate and into what language, but you can't turn it off completely.
I don't know who thought this was a good user experience, because it's one of the most frustrating features I've ever had to deal with. I'm german, but almost all of the things I watch are in english. So usually I will just ignore recommendations with german titles. Except I can't do that anymore, because there's no guarantee that youtube didn't randomly decide to translate the title of an english video into german. And recently, they've added auto-translated audio, which is even worse, because now I'm opening an english video and a terrible robotic german voice is talking to me and I manually need to switch to the original source.
It's also not consistent behavior. It's not like all videos on the front page are looking like they're in german. It's just some of them and afaik there's no way to tell.
And you genuinely can't turn it off completely. Incredibly frustrating and I'm just puzzled by the thought-process that lead to this decision. This would be a pretty cool feature if it was consistently applied and freely configurable.
I am Russian but am also fluent in English so I watch videos in both these languages. This automatic translation doesn't happen that often with my usage of YouTube, but when it does, it frustrates the crap out of me. So yes, I did look for a setting to turn it off, but didn't find any.
Relatedly, Google and Microsoft insist on showing machine-translated developer docs by default. A translate button is fine, but doing it by default?! I struggle to understand who thought that this could possibly ever be a good idea.
You'd guess so but no. If you're bilingual you have to choose one language, and videos in the other will get this ridiculously bad literal auto-translation treatment. Pure insanity, and something that makes me mad daily.
Apparently not, or the setting is not easily accessible, and it baffles me it's the case and someone at YouTube probably is proud of it on top of getting their promotion for such a terrible feature.
As a polish YouTube user who wants to watch content in both languages, it's an infuriating no. YouTube started translating titles recently for me, and the translations are pure nonsense. I'm not exaggerating, it's dumb word for word translation with no context. I have to reverse engineer titles now. Even more recently they turned audio translation on too with the most ear piercing voice possible, but that can be turned off. Title translation can't be turned off.
zorrolovsky|7 months ago
There are two potential reasons in my mind: - Youtube folks A/B tested it and it got more engagement - n/ views, time viewed per video, etc. (but were they tracking the right metrics? ie did they capture user frustration) - Some 'guru' at Youtube decided "it's good UX" and "it's what everybody wants". In such case, the damage the 'guru' is doing is unbelievable. Millions of people annoyed across the world... every single day.
hombre_fatal|7 months ago
The idea is great. They just botched it at the UI level.
In practice it means clicking a video you think is in your native language but it's actually in English with low quality auto-subs, but there's no reason Youtube couldn't improve the UX here, like indicate that it's been auto-translated or let you easily filter out content that's not in your language.
lbotos|7 months ago
By doing this, Youtube has probably 10x'd available content for "dumb" ppl to watch. Respectfully, my parents are in that cohort, and I suspect my father will happily watch AI translated and dubbed woodworking channels and not care at all. He "wins" here.
I have to acknowledge that there are probably more people like him then like me who want to have Japanese videos in Japanese in my US feed.
YT needs to make it configurable and I'm fine to turn it off, but the fact that I need an extension to do so is very much lame. As well as that I'm not sure uploaders are aware of their videos being displayed in this way.
dismalaf|7 months ago
I agree, it's annoying. I speak multiple languages and like to consume the original whenever possible.
Macha|7 months ago
riedel|7 months ago
beached_whale|7 months ago
maksimur|7 months ago
maxglute|7 months ago
eviks|7 months ago
anal_reactor|7 months ago
I don't want to completely disregard AI-generated content. Some of it can be actually good, and I use AI as a talking companion. But at the same time it's a technology that can easily be abused. And it will be abused. And we'll love it. Except those few nutjobs who resist, but nobody will care. Free speech doesn't matter when nobody's listening.
7bit|7 months ago
miggol|7 months ago
The way these untranslate add-ons work (layman's explanation) is that they fetch the original title and audio and reinsert it, but the recommendation for the video stays in your feed. This has resulted in loads of super interesting foreign language content in my feed which is just awesome.
Cars are one of my YouTube interests and seeing loads of cool old car content from different parts of the world has been fascinating. Not only were different models popular in different places but the things people value in a car are also wildly different across the globe. And I get to listen to a cool foreign language while discovering this!
One downside is that to the YouTube algorithm, it probably seems like I absolutely LOVE this autodubbing feature, going crazy for all these translated videos. That could not be further from the truth: my youtube feed has become completely unusable without an untranslate add-on since this update.
rickcarlino|7 months ago
kaoD|7 months ago
1oooqooq|7 months ago
i recommend "PipePipe" on android.
if you are waiting for them to add that feature on the native player, remember google haven't added a single feature to gmail app besides reading email... you cannot even create a filter.
RandomThoughts3|7 months ago
The number of hoops you have to jump through to get results from the actual Google page when you are outside of the US is mind boggling. I don’t even know if it’s still possible.
david-gpu|7 months ago
danielscrubs|7 months ago
I haven’t watched a single Arabic video.
Any Googlers here that can explain how Google can be so bad at designing products?
TrackerFF|7 months ago
1. Sites/apps that automatically change language based on your location, and force that auto-translation onto you.
2. Reddit that translates reddit posts to your location based language. Those will quickly populate your search feed for almost any search you do.
OhHiMarkos|7 months ago
bilekas|7 months ago
What a great way to stop people ever needing to learn another language. God forbid people use their brains for anything that 30 second shorts.
dcow|7 months ago
unpaydijk|7 months ago
- Searching for a guide on say a car infotainment system would be totally different here from someone explaining in the USA or germany. Now I see a ton of titles in my language, only to find out it's information is completely useless to me because a menu, button or whatever doesen't even exist.
- Recommendations on cooking advice become almost worthless since a grading system for flours is arcane, brands I've never heard of, compounded by some imperial units in the mix. A recipe turns into a research project
- when searching for non-native content I may avoid content in my language, since I know the subject is definitely not relevant anywhere near me, so perfectly valid content will be missed
Worse yet, sometimes physical products claiming to have localized manual will instead have used some very inferior version to google translate and give dangerous advice about safe handling of the device.
spaniard89277|7 months ago
This is so annoying. I can't believe they couldn't understand this, and there are many multilingual people.
waschl|7 months ago
julius|7 months ago
SkiFire13|7 months ago
I _love_ when youtube auto-translates english titles to my native language and then asks me if I want to translate the rare comments in my native language to english.
It seem they just don't contemplate people speaking two or more languages, *even though the setting in the google account is there*.
sjmulder|7 months ago
polytely|7 months ago
alkonaut|7 months ago
To be very clear, I don’t even want to translate videos in languages that YouTube know I don’t understand. Much less in videos languages I do understand.
Also I don’t think it’s a good idea to use AI in any part of this chain unless there is user driven corrections. Seems like even big TikTok/Instagram accounts use some auto subtitling machinery and it’s invariably wrong. Why even bother? Or why not just manually subtitle if it’s a 10 second English video and the text is in English? Why use automation at all for that?
constantcrying|7 months ago
I do not want to backwards translate some nonsense autogenerated YouTube translation to understand what some video title means. I do not ever want to watch an automatic dub where some AI voice replaces the actual language I understand.
Browsers got this right "never translate German" was enough to fix the auto translation feature. Somehow one of the most valuable companies in the world, managing one of the largest websites in the world can not implement something that basic.
RaSoJo|7 months ago
If someone from Google could explain the rationale behind forcing this on users, I’d genuinely love to understand it.
vivzkestrel|7 months ago
atum47|7 months ago
Garlef|7 months ago
ryanchoi|7 months ago
andix|7 months ago
The required settings are quite simple (a lot of social media platforms have them): Setting a list of languages that should never be translated, and setting a preferred language the other ones should be translated to.
I guess the silicon valley people who develop YouTube can't grasp the concept that there are people out there who speak multiple languages.
climb_stealth|7 months ago
Is this a US only feature? I hope I'm never going to see it because it sounds horrible.
AiAi|7 months ago
silon42|7 months ago
Translated subtitles are useful though, even if often very bad.
xorcist|7 months ago
CivBase|7 months ago
Version467|7 months ago
I don't know who thought this was a good user experience, because it's one of the most frustrating features I've ever had to deal with. I'm german, but almost all of the things I watch are in english. So usually I will just ignore recommendations with german titles. Except I can't do that anymore, because there's no guarantee that youtube didn't randomly decide to translate the title of an english video into german. And recently, they've added auto-translated audio, which is even worse, because now I'm opening an english video and a terrible robotic german voice is talking to me and I manually need to switch to the original source.
It's also not consistent behavior. It's not like all videos on the front page are looking like they're in german. It's just some of them and afaik there's no way to tell.
And you genuinely can't turn it off completely. Incredibly frustrating and I'm just puzzled by the thought-process that lead to this decision. This would be a pretty cool feature if it was consistently applied and freely configurable.
grishka|7 months ago
Relatedly, Google and Microsoft insist on showing machine-translated developer docs by default. A translate button is fine, but doing it by default?! I struggle to understand who thought that this could possibly ever be a good idea.
thrance|7 months ago
Zealotux|7 months ago
torlok|7 months ago
69tg69|7 months ago
forinti|7 months ago
YouTube seems to randomly translate the titles and it's irritating.