[Version467]

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.

[silvestrov]

> thought-process that lead to this decision

highly likely to be monolingual people as they cannot understand you would like movies to be in any other language than your mother tongue.

[SkiFire13]

Moreover I could still prefer movies in my native language *but properly dubbed by some voice actors*, not by some random AI that's going to mess up all the context.

[troupo]

> highly likely to be monolingual people

Which is insane to me. Silicon Valley is filled to the brim with multi-lingual people. And yet so many decisions that are coming out have no understanding of languages

[rtsil]

I'm in France, but my Google, browsers and devices languages are English. So Youtube randomly auto-dubs (and auto-translates the title of) some French videos into English, and some English videos into French. But they're never the same videos depending on the devices or the browsers. However, the automatic subtitles during the preview remain in the original langage.

[vladvasiliu]

I'm in the same boat (living in France, browser and google account configured to use English) and I've never noticed this.

Now I'm not a hardcore Youtube user, but whenever I browse it, French-titled videos are in French, and the same for English.

I'm mostly using Firefox on Linux, and occasionally Edge on Windows.

[lloeki]

I'm in France, my devices are set to en-GB, I've watched only English videos (plus the odd French one) yet youtube decides to auto translate audio in German and lately in Spanish.

Go figure.

[WHA8m]

I'd love to have a robotic german voice. All I get is the clickbait MrBeast TikTok voice. I get a real reaction when I hear it. I try so hard to avoid the current social media content. It's unbearable. The shock is even greater when I do stumble across it.

Youtube is really the only website that is straight up unusable for me without a set of Addons (uBlock, sponsorBlock, Unhook).

[troupo]

> I don't know who thought this was a good user experience

Which youtube decision of recent years ever thought about user experience?

It's all "company bets" and "promotion tracks".

When it was a fight against TikTok you got Shorts that you can't get rid of.

Now you probably have to "show commitment to our AI offerings" or something. So you get autotranslated videos by a team which will get 500k bonuses and will move on in a month

[chii]

> I don't know who thought this was a good user experience

the product manager(s) and the team who needed to show impact in their performance reviews.

[MrGilbert]

To add to that, the german translation most of the time is absolutely horrible and more clickbait then the original wording.

[HPsquared]

It should really be an option in the advanced search, or be able to say something like lang:de

[lloeki]

> 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

Sp you clicked when you wouldn't have, somewhere an engagement graph went a notch up, and someone will get a pat on the back.