I also hate the youtube "feature" that translates the titles of videos to your setting's language. This is so annoying. I can understand English and don't need these automatic translations.
> I can understand English and don't need these automatic translations
I think it is far worse than that:
1. If I don't understand a language, probably that video is not for me. Most videos targeted for international audience are in English, or at least the author translated it by theirself.
2. Titles are small sentences, and they don't have enough context to be translated. Once I saw a video called something like "Vamos assistir uma conexão com o passado", which in Portuguese means "Let's watch a connection to the past". I needed to de-translate it in my brain to understand that the original title was "Let's play A Link to the Past"
3. Online resources are a great way to exercise a second language. So, please, don't underestimate my capabilities. At least let me try to read in the original language by myself, if I need the translation I how to use Google Translate or a dictionary.
I reckon that this feature makes the access to online content more democratic, it's ok. But at least let me disable that since it makes the experience worse
There's a video that Youtube keeps sending me with a translated title "O segredo das lavadouras" (what translates to "the secret of washing machines") that is about picking screw washers...
But the real problem is when it decides to translate the titles of some perfectly watchable videos in English into something that uses the Cyrillic alphabet, what has no relation to my accepted languages, and is only used half-way across the world from where I am.
My computer is set to English even though I'm German, and sometimes Youtube will treat me to this really uncanny machine voice with really weird phrases because it auto-translated some German video or advert.
Lidl is worth it, ja!
> Why is it so hard to just add something as a setting/feature and offer it to people without forcing it on the user?
Office politics. Google is famously "performance-driven", so the manager in charge of that feature needs usage metrics to be high for the sake of their own career.
That's a funny idea—if the KPI was boosting adoption of a feature and the PM just made that feature the default and suddenly adoption was through the roof.
Same here. My native tongue is German, I live in Switzerland, but my settings on all devices are English.
I do this on purpose, because I find everything is more searchable. I don't even know any German terms for most technical things I might search or look for. So even if the automatic translations were good, which they aren't, this would be a non-feature.
My browser already tells them what my preferred language is. Just use it.
Living in Zurich (German part of Switzerland for those who don't know), Windows 10 in English, the built-in Microsoft Store used to offer content in... French.
Now it's a mix of German and English, e.g. 1 heading is "Spiele-Bestseller", and the next is "Best selling apps". And prices displayed as "28,00 CHF" (correct would be to use the decimal point).
Not only the titles, but also the audio track. There's a few youtubers I regularly watch who are trying to branch out into some additional languages by providing fan-made translated audio tracks, and english is sometimes one of those. Every single time I watch one of those videos, I have to manually set the language back to the original because often the translations lose some of the word play or hidden meaning in the original language. Often it also means I need to rewind the video because it started playing before all the controls have loaded (because youtube hates FF with youtube-related extensions) and I could swap the language track back.
One of the sister replies linked to an extension to help with that, which I'm going to give a try, but it's annoying that there's not a simple toggle in the youtube settings to tell it to always use the original language. On the rare occasion that I want to use the translated audio track, I can do _that_ on my own; I speak enough languages that this is a very rare occasion with the type of content I watch.
This isn't even something I can understand as them being hostile to ad blocking or wanting to push ads. This is a 'convenience' feature that is just poorly implemented. But I'm sure there's some PM that got a pat on the back for it.
I'm sure YouTube's algorithm rewards people for using this feature and making their "content accessible", but if you serve me up an ugly machine translated Norwegian title rather than the English one I could read just fine, that's from my experience a signal that your YouTube channel is low quality algorithm-chasing garbage, so I click "never recommend this channel".
What a catastrophe. You punish the wrong person, and even worse, a channel owner will not even receive that signal! The vast majority of channel owners with English content is not aware what's going on. A friendly e-mail to the channel owner explaining the problem and asking to manually disable auto-translation is much more likely to achieve what you want.
If you want to get rid of auto-translation on a systematic level, provide feedback to the operators of Youtube through their official communication.
So what you're saying: Please complain through proper channels and hope they accept your input?
Or should he just keep using the signals he gets and immediately clean up his feed?
I actually see this as a feature. YouTube recommends a lot of garbage. I suggested that they improved my feed but they implemented this signal instead. I use the exactly this method to weed out a lot of content I do not care for.
You cannot tell the 500 pound gorilla anything. I prefer my videos without subtitles. I have that set as a preference. Yet when chromecasting it is common for the subtitles to spontaneously turn on. And has done so for a long time.
English is not my first language and my first language is not widely used. Hence I am not used to dubbed movies/programming and I am used to seeing subtitles.
If a native english speaker could understand the horror show that the machine generated subtitles are. If you are used to subtitles they are extremely hard to ignore. You will then read and get the understanding (often hilariously wrong) before the audio catches up and you might end up rather confused.
I can understand an American might have a hard time watching a subbed German movie. Thats natural because it is not common. But when you grew up with subtitles it is actually effortless. Except when they are poor. Then it becomes worse because of the cognitive load of 2 languages and the effort to figure out what is correct.
Dear english only speakers: Translation is hard. A poor translation is worse that no translation as it obfuscates the message. AI is not there yet at all. Maybe impressive but often not helpful or plain and simply distorts the real message.
What I wanted to transport is the following idea: attacking a channel owner (who is most likely innocent and did nothing wrong) with a metaphoric sledge-hammer when a more gentle and precise tool will do is not a great way to conduct oneself in society. vintermann and clan have a feed now without content that bothers them, but at the cost of lowering the channel owner's reputation in the eyes of the operators of Youtube, with the effect of slashing recommendations for the videos of the channel owner at large and his earnings. That's not nice, we should be considerate of the consequence of our actions. Does this make sense, do you understand this perspective?
This behaviour rankles me, I think is on the same level as the misuse of the feature "report this as spam (to some upstream entity/3rd party)" for e-mail messages that are not actually spam.
Attacking? By saying "don't recommend this", I'm just saying I want to give someone else the chance to be seen, rather than the ones who will make their stuff objectively worse in order to juice their stats for the algorithm.
I'm sure my "don't recommend this" clicks don't in any way make up for Google's promotion of channels that "make their content accessible", because it doesn't even stop them from recommending me more machine-translated videos.
They base the feed on user input. The feed is then (supposedly) adjusted to what I like.
What I call a signal you call an attack.
I signal that I do not like Minecraft videos. But I do not attack them.
Your anger is misdirected. You should be mad at YouTube because they do not seem to understand that there can be multiple signals at once.
The chances that I click on a Minecraft video is low. Autotranslated even lower.
So we differ strongly in opinion on how the platform should work. I read your "attack" argument as I should write to the Minecraft creators and tell them their content would be better if they played Minesweeper instead.
I do not punish anyone. I just pursue a clean and (for me) high quality feed.
If you are up in arms that I punish your channel that is another signal that I am probably not your target audience.
When dealing with audiences at scale you need to listen to these signals as handling personal opinions in mails from the discerning viewer is not feasible.
The vast majority of videos are not translated into borked machine-Norwegian, so if this isn't something you opt in to, it's something everyone opts out of (I doubt it).
> A friendly e-mail to the channel owner explaining the problem and asking to manually disable auto-translation is much more likely to achieve what you want.
No it isn't, because I see what kinds of channels do this, over and over again. They're very clearly publishers who don't care that they make something objectively worse as long as the algorithm rewards them for it.
> If you want to get rid of auto-translation on a systematic level, provide feedback to the operators of Youtube through their official communication.
Ha, as if they ever read that. Probably more Google employees will read this comment than will ever read any of my (many) "please stop translating things without asking, I know where to find machine translation if I need it, doing it without asking that means I have to translate back from broken Norwegian into English in order to understand what the hell you were trying to say" feedback reports.
The channel I'm interested in would be of great interest to English speakers. There are only a few people brave/stupid enough to travel to dangerous places (Ukraine near the front) to do a documentary. I cannot blame the author for turning on the translate, it likely overall expands his reach and is a good thing for those who are not interested in his native language. However I'm trying to learn his native language and getting dropped to English out of my control is not helpful to me.
Youtube really doesn't make it obvious that a title got auto-translated. I now realize that I've seen this happen before, with a video that had a different title on my TV than on my computer, but up until this very second I thought it was my TV's fault.
Even being aware of this - how do I know that it's an auto-translation, rather than someone making AI slop in my native language, without watching the video?
Now Reddit results are translated as well in Google, Kagi, so you think you have found a relevant response in your language, but it's just a machine translation from an English post.
Leads to foreign-language posts on English-speaking small subreddits as well. I see plenty of Portugese, Spanish, Italian and German in communities that barely have enough traffic to debate in a single language.
Thanks for the link, good to know. Gives me a fuzzy feeling to pay for a search engine whose devs you can actually interact with and are actually working on improving their product.
It's interesting that the quality is so low. You can do very good translations for many languages today even with fairly cheap LMs, but for some reason (cost?) automated translation online seems to be still mostly at Google Translate level.
It's even worse for videos with "official" dubs. I have been jump scared by German and French dubs on certain videos recently, I distinctly remember MrBeast, Mark Rober and Nick DiGiovanni. I have set my language to English and my Region to US (worldwide) I don't know what gave YT the idea to preselect these dubs for me, I have seldomly even watched a video that is not English.
Using Brave on iOS I haven't encountered it yet. Perhaps it strips some information? But with the official YT app I have, and it was both fascinating and annoying.
I don't even get the point of that. If I need a translation of the title, I won't be able to watch the video anyways. At least ot makes some sense with the horribly auto-translated videos now, but they had the title translation for a long time while the video was still the original language.
I get you and normally wouldn't either. I was a little impressed when I could switch to like 10 diff languages on the fly. As a foreign language learner seems like it could be pretty helpful.
It's probably most useful for utility or news content. Not 'high effort videos' about an interesting topic. I'm imagining you find a video in another language that fixes a problem you have and can switch to your language to watch.
I sometime watch videos in English with the automatic subtitles. Sometimes I can't understand a few words and the subtitles help me. Most of the time I watch them without subtitles, and rewind the video a few seconds to rewatch a short part with the subtitles enabled.
Worse is the auto-dubbing in some channels. Which cannot be disabled. That has resulted in me stopping to watch a channel completely due to the inability to select the original language (youtube mobile website).
What I don't get is how the feature works. I see it for veeery few videos and those are usually highly profitable clickbait and/or big budget productions, so my assumption has been this is actually something the uploader has to enable or even fill out. My language is very "small", so it makes sense that only the broadly-popuar and highly-profitable would be worth translating the titles for.
Unfortunately, all the translations are machine-translated garbage and there is no setting to turn this off as a viewer, so it's just incredibly annoying.
Gosh this annoys me so much. I am native Portuguese speaker but have all my settings in English. It always tries to auto-dub Portuguese content into English, how do I turn that off?
It is not just that these translations are not needed, they are often - in my case German - of a low quality, contain errors and lose information which the original language contained. And the roboter voices loses all the interesting modulations of the original voice. Even a Fireship video sounds terrible when translated.
So much this. I suspect the idea that a person speaks more than one language is absent in US silicon valley. Else I can't explain why youtube only lets you set one language. Heck, even google allows you to configure all spoken languages in your account, the very same google account you use for youtube. Yet youtube ignores it and has its own settings.
I think the issue is not speaking more than one language, but not preferring your native language over the original content's language. This is a very American-English-centric view of the world, where content is made for your language and your demographic. Consumption from outside the US is the exception.
In the rest of the world, and especially in Europe, this is the norm, not the exception. On one hand there is the prevalence of US English media (hello hollywood), US english literature (esp. in tech); and on the other hand cross-consumption between EU countries is much more common.
Oh, and the content ends up being in English too, because that's how to reach many people. We don't want those to be translated, because we don't want a double translation. This is something that the US / Silicon Valley mind cannot comprehend.
I think it's more a matter of "why would they have their system language set to X if they speak Y? If they want Y, they should just set their system language to Y!"
It's the idea that the user has a preference for something, and it applies always and everywhere, even when it's not applicable.
It should be absolutely clear, when i speak English and German, do not auto-translate any video title in those languages to the other. You wouldn't believe how bad the translations are, and how unwanted by me (the user). Worse when you speak a third or fourth language, and tend to watch videos. It gets messy.
It was more of an example in how they pick up on _some_ signal about a users language preference and then arrogantly assume they're correct in their decision, and that it's the user's fault if they assumed wrong.
This is actually something that foreigners working at Big Tech US companies should be able to understand very well, because English as a system language is often how software developers set things up for themselves regardless of their native language.
But they don't make those decisions. It's a UX thing, which means that in practice whoever is in charge of "driving up the numbers" is going to be making the decision; the engineers just get to cuss while implementing it.
While i appreciate the effort that Mark Rober puts in his Youtube videos making them multilanguage, i absolutely hate that native voice. It's one of the few Youtube shorts i have to play twice because of it.
Jesus H Christ, I once a month google to see if there's a proper way of stopping this (You can block this with TamperMonkey)
2 things that absolutely kill my experience,
1. Messing up with titles, specially if the contents of the video are still in a different language, Which Kurzgesagt will I get today? Only YouTube knows, this is annoying if I know the youtuber could use a different language in the title to make a joke
2. Messing up with the default audio tracks, I don't mind if the YouTuber has a dubbed track, that's awesome for getting more exposure, but I already know and expect a specific voice and it's extremely jarring
By the by, one quirk of poor language handling that I think it probably harming YouTube is advert language.
Every one of my subscriptions is an English language channel, and my language choice on all Google properties (where possible) including YouTube is English. It's not hard to judge that English is my favoured language.
And yet... every video advert I receive when travelling is served in the local country's language. It doesn't especially bother me, since I actively avoid listening to adverts (and indeed, now pay for Premium lite to avoid them almost altogether) but it's a weird not-so-edge case that I'd have thought a company as large as Google might have addressed already. They've absolutely got the tech to deliver adverts in any language. (And it could be powerful: imagine receiving adverts for local businesses in your native language while on holiday.)
Do you have en-US or en-GB as an alternate, lower-priority language?
If an English variant is in your Accept-Lang: headers, I'd hope YT wouldn't auto-translate English titles.
The other thing that Google might properly use is account-specific language settings. But if they're using GeoIP as has been suggested, I agree they're doing it wrong.
Hear! Hear! It enrages me. They also automatically turn the subtitles ON, making you constantly have to disable them. There is no way for multilingual users to add a list of the languages they understand, which is an insane limitation that's been driving me crazy for years at this point. Wtf are they even working on at youtube's HQ? Making video thumbnails larger still?
And most of the times, the translation misses a core part of the title, making it harder or even impossible to understand. A recent example is "I booted windows from Google Drive (part 2)", which got translated to "inicié ventanas de Google Drive", which misses the whole point. Luckily for me, the miniature said what the video was about, and I could understand and watch it.
About the translation, sure, "boot" ≈ "iniciar", "window" = "ventana", but for (microsoft) windows, and other names in foreign languages, the same name must be kept.
I mean, I can deal with the titles, but recently it has been auto selecting machine translated sound tracks, without any way to disable it. And they're bad, like maybe one level above 2010 phone TTS system
