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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

> For some respondents, this prompted their browser to believe our survey was written in a language other than English (even though, again, it was in English) and ask if they wanted the page to be translated to English – or, we think, automatically try to translate the page to English.

I goddamn hate this "feature" so much. Especially since it sometimes resets and then I have to find out where the fuck Google moved the disable button to again.

No Google, I speak fluent German and English and can reasonably read Croatian - if I wanted a translation I would explicitly ask for it myself thanks.

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You're going to love YouTube automatically translating video titles to your geo-ip language...

For the next project-manager-promotion-worthy feature, they also do auto-dubbing of the speech now!

They now sometimes dub the audio track. The result is about as horrible as one would imagine. Whoever decided to turn this on by default clearly didn't give a damn.

> You're going to love YouTube automatically translating video titles to your geo-ip language...

This is the worst feature of YouTube for me. Any idea how I can turn this off and show the original language title?

It's not automatic, channels opt into it. It's in fact a great way to identify spammy channels, because

1. They know YouTube's algorithm rewards them for it

2. They know it makes their stuff objectively worse

and the only channels who know that and still opt into it, are channels which have no shame and are pure view-bait trash.

So when I see a bork-Norwegian video title like "Du gjetter aldri hva som skjedde neste!" I hit "never recommend this channel".

#1 is the crux. People have come to expect high quality videos that require teams of sometimes dozens of people, and creators are held hostage by YouTube's algorithm that keeps on changing and is an effective black box.

The best part is YouTube has a bug that would sometimes force a dubbed language; as in, a video originally with an English audio track would get stuck between French and Italian even when you try to manually change the language back to English.

I have a standard message for people who use machine translation on their "content":

"I know that machine translation exists. I know where to find it, should I need it. When you push it without asking, half the time I have to translate back from machine-junk to your language, in order to figure out what the hell you were trying to say. You make more work for me, not less. MACHINE TRANSLATION SHOULD ALWAYS BE OPT-IN."

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