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Comment by awiesenhofer | Hacker News Reader

I noticed this too the other way round: as a german native speaker i notice more and more videos in youtubes recommendations that are just popular english videos with german titles. i somehow always assumed these are automatic translations from youtube itself.

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Yes, these are automatically translated by YT. I'm seeing a lot of video titles that have suddenly been translated to Dutch when I log in. I find this very annoying and have been looking how to turn it off, but couldn't find it.

In my observation not all videos have translated titles, I'd say about 20~30%. So my theory is that it is either some A/B test from YT, or that the channel owner can opt in/out of the automatic translations.

The only way I've managed to turn it off is by changing the language of youtube to be English (I've had it in my native language before).

I'm French but have everything in English (system, browser & YouTube). I've seen a lot of French YouTube videos with their title auto-translated in English a couple of weeks after their diffusion.

(Bad for two reasons: (1) badly translated titles, sometimes hilariously so, and (2) the algorithm recommends me videos I have already watched. I guess (2) is because I don't usually watch the last 20 seconds, the static "my last video was", whatever it's called, so YouTube must think I haven't watched the video. Most times, the red gauge below the video thumbnail shows half-full even though I've watched the video minus these 20 seconds. There's still room for improvements...)

They are not automatically translated. The owner of the video has chosen to translate the title in several languages. For example this channel uses this feature [1]. The English titles are almost always "Sharpest * kitchen knife in the world". The original Japanese titles are more creative, usually something like "I tried to <do something>" and rarely mention knives at all.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCg3qsVzHeUt5_cPpcRtoaJQ/vid...

The English titles really aren't all that great, but those videos themselves are really cool.

My kids got deep into the weird kids bit of YouTube where Filipinos or Vietnamese kids are acting out skits in English, but the titles are in German or Turkish or Urdu.

I'd always figured it was an attempt at Youtube SEO - matching keywords in different languages with the same content.

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