YouTube No Translation
addons.mozilla.org
addons.mozilla.org
But, surely someone sane there has to realize there is a large number of users out there who speak more than one language, and don't need Google do "help" them or "guess" for what language they like more.
This extension can control subtitles so maybe there is hope that this or another extension will offer this kind of fine granularity
Sites that use ip of origin and just assume my language are such grating experiences.
Accept language is set at the browser level, where you usually want a single default with granular per-site (or even per-content) control.
There will be whole sites and apps that I want in a specific language that aren't my first preference. E.g. I might want my news and browser user interface in English but Google Maps in a local language, Netflix in the language of the content I watch the most etc.
Reality is just too complex for a single ordered list IMHO, having the default set to whatever heuristics that best matches the site, and give a very easy, prominent and persistent way to change the language is I think the best approach.
Movie companies sometimes don’t want things distributed on certain areas - ever. Like when there are different productions of the same movie for different areas.
The productions would compete against each other.
It’s one of the reasons DVD has multiple incompatible regions.
I don’t know if this is YouTube’s reasoning.
It has nothing to do with difficulties of offering translations. It's about declining complimentary ketchup squeeze on latte.
And many other sites that confuse country with language (geizhals.eu, ... etc)
If your IP is coming from country X, you must want the content to be served in language X.
No, there are tourist from country Z, long term resident who prefer language A and people from country X want to learn language B.
- If your browser Accept-Language say X,Y, then you must want all the content to be served in X.
No, I want my search result to be predominantly in X, but when I search for things about Y, show me language Y, and when I search for this band from country Z, please show me in language X.
As a hongkonger (zh_hk + en_gb), living in Singapore (zh_cn + en?), following JPOP. This is the daily fight I have with browser.
I would rather all application, including web app just give me the option to choose and say, interface language, english, content language, follow origin.
Ah yes as a Korean living in Japan with locale set to English, this truly is a daily fight.
> I would rather all application, including web app just give me the option to choose
I've left websites for other competitors because they wouldn't have a button to change language.
> If your IP is coming from country X, you must want the content to be served in language X.
I would assume there are multilingual speakers in mostly every single team at YouTube. Or at the very least enough nerds who just like some random content from another country.
People who would both want their UI to be in a language A but also to consume content from languages B, C...
I do not understand how that assumption holds in any product decision except in one where the YT product teams are entirely and totally separated from the engineering teams.
Accept-language doesn't do anything at all for google, either.
I see it as the other side of Hanlon's razor: we know there's competent people there, we should fully attribute this to malice.
But then Google serves up wikipedia articles auto-translated from English, often with made up (but plausible looking) domain terminology: "Russula cyanoxantha, ofte kjent som kullbrenneren eller spraglete russula" - No, that's not true, Google, Russula cyanoxantha may be known as the coal burner in English, but I have NEVER heard anyone call it kullbrenneren in Norwegian, and "spraglete russula" is also not something it's ever called.
And of course it weights its own AI translated garbage above the search results.
If you have 40 million country and you have 10 mil tourists over whole year given week you might 200k users that happen to be in that country.
Even if you have another 1mil expats living in that country. it still is 35mil of people vs 1mil of people for whom "your IP is from country X you get language X" is pretty good heuristic.
That said I am also pissed off by that approach but I do understand there is much more people who happen to use only that language in that country.
Optimizing for Expats or Tourists would be stupid as those are exceptions not the norm.
Of course, I'm multilingual even if I stay at home. Do we know how many people are multilingual? About half of Europeans speak more than one language. That's hundreds of millions of Youtube users. 22% of Americans for 76 million in the US. That's just numbers from Google's own Gemini (which is doing a bit of a half-assed job). Note that all EU countries except Ireland mandate second language teaching in schools (23 out of 27 mandate at least two foreign languages); you don't need to be an ex-pat, tourist, longterm resident or second generation immigrant to be multilingual.
Not taking input from multi-lingual users is not just bad practice from Google, it's actually impressive how they manage to ignore people they probably know and are working with.
Ireland does mandate second language teaching in schools, it's just not a foreign language, it's Irish (separate language, not a dialect of English). And it's taught atrociously badly. The vast majority of graduates, after about 13 years of mandatory Irish classes, cannot functionally speak it.
Of all the languages spoken in the UK and Ireland that argument attracts, I've never heard anyone claim that about Irish - an actual Gaelic language.
> The vast majority of graduates, after about 13 years of mandatory Irish classes, cannot functionally speak it.
They just need to get out their word book - that's right, their focal leabhair
♫ oh get out your focal leabhair, get out your focal leabhair
and we'll have you speaking Irish in a half-an-hour
Sea means yes and Níl means no
get out your focal leabhair and we'll all have a go ♫
Many people from other parts of the world don't know it exists, so when you say "Irish language", they just think you mean hiberno-english. I've never heard anyone claim it either, just assume, then get confused in conversation until I clarify.
I grew up in a country where we had mandatory lessons in a little-used local language imposed on us by politicians.
That I learned nothing isn’t the teachers’ fault - they were simply set an impossible task.
I don't know what their reasoning is. They can plainly see around them foreigners struggling to speak, but they somehow think that it won't happen to them?
Yes, but learned at school doesn't necessarily count for much. I grew up in the UK, secondary school was post-Maastricht so I was in the EU at the time; French was mandatory, but my grasp of the language is still so bad that when I tried to say "I don't speak French" in French in front of a French person, she couldn't tell if I was trying to say "I can" or "I can't".
I have pushed myself quite a bit in other languages since school, but I'm also a nerd who likes learning for its own sake. I suspect a lot of people are only just about barely able to function in tourist settings in the languages they learned at school.
That said, auto-translation of videos is kinda an existential threat to hosting a language course on YouTube.
Besides that they also get German, Dutch, Finnish or Indian stuff translated that they don't understand.
Can't win.
Make reasonable assumptions or provide good defaults. Make them overrideable. Make user settings stick.
I have the same problem, by the way — my phone is in English, which means I get to enjoy Apples hilarious English pronunciation of German street names while navigating.
So for me having no,en (in the future where this works I would dare to have no first):
app is in english, has auto translated norwegian: choose english
app is in norwegian, has auto translated english: choose norwegian
app is in norwegian and english equally: choose norwegian
app is in french, has english translation: choose englishIt's like modern apps have forgotten all lessons learned about internationalization.
Same in Windows. The "modern" system apps use just one setting (Windows language) for internationalization, ignoring the old date format and time format settings. So if I set my Windows language to English, I get AM/PM and dot as decimal separator in some parts of the UI and not in others.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/...
Google is notorious for ignoring browser language preferences not only in Youtube but also in its main product, and inferring from the (often faulty) geolocation.
Back in the 2000s, dutch wasn't very common but it usually was pretty good (my understanding is that one of the things that helped is that everyone followed the Microsoft style guide for dutch translations?)
Nowadays you get overly literal translations (meaning some form of MTL), translations that don't care for the length of the text (so it gets cut off with ... at the end for interface buttons) and so on and so forth. It all just reeks of automatic translation with little care put into the presentation. This is pretty much a universal experience across every single system I've ever used and why I usually just set all my devices to English. - It's simply not worth it to deal with the botched translations to try and figure out what was actually meant.
What I would like is a browser and os which allows you to set which languages (multiple) never need translating and the site sticking to that.
And for some reason, Apple/iOS doesn't allow you to set this for some system apps. For example, Music (Apple Music) app on iOS doesn't offer this option, which I desperately need because I don't want the music metadata I listened got translated.
Nowadays I think its more of a conscious decision many times. Like "We know someone could travel to france as a tourist, but its a small fraction of french IP addresses so screw these people". etc.
Is that really true though? I think it's a bit optimistic to say "first language". I know that many people do speak Irish, but the number of people who can speak Irish better than English is abysmal.
No Béarla[1] is one of the saddest documentaries I've ever seen. It follows a native speaker who tries to do mundane tasks in Ireland using only Irish, but can barely get anything done.
Scots is a bit different, because for many speakers it's just seen as an informal register of English. My grandparents, for example, were primarily Ulster Scots speakers - they could understand English but would have struggled to speak it naturally. My own internal monologue is peppered with plenty of Ulster Scots but fowk wid luck at me quare an funny if I were to use it much in my daily life in London!
And yes, it's not exactly common but there are still people who were taught Gaelic as their first language. Some of them I consider to be friends.
I think the UK is something like 9% English as a second language, and the USA is 22% ESL?
(Wnes i fy ngradd prifysgol yn Aberystwyth).
Oh, you're using Norwegian keyboard layout? Well surely you want Norwegian display text to go with that.
Oh, you're using US keyboard layout? Well surely you'll want US date and time formatting to go with that, along with the display text.
All the while ignoring the setting that's been there for ages and worked reasonably well.
Worse than that is, as you say, software that makes dumb assumptions about my language preferences. It gets especially interesting when graphic drivers translate strings like ambient occlusion, screen space reflections, temporal anti-aliasing, subsurface scattering. The result is incomprehensible gibberish - I mean levels far beyond the baseline gibberish danish already is :D
Win10 regional settings are so terrible, and it's pretty much impossible to set keyboard, date/number formatting and basically everything but display language to danish, while keeping the display language english (The King's English, thankyouverymuch). Thankfully Linux has the locale "en_DK.UTF-8" which instantly makes everything show like I want it.
One thing I've always found a bit peculiar between Norwegian and Danish computer words, is that in Danish they're often not translated but the English word is just used. My Danish family would say words like computer, download, password, cloud, software, while I would say datamaskin, nedlasting, passord, sky, programvare. And then they would mock our silly Norwegian words, heh.
A language is much more than a protocol for communication - it's culture. I'm not a purist (only a little), but I think this is a concerning development. I can only imagine how much worse it is in Copenhagen, because that's a very silly place.
Countless times I landed on websites I use relatively frequently in foreign countries to see them in a language I don't understand, having to rely on my browser's translation functionality to find the language switcher. My operating system + browser are set to English, yet I still get served the one in the language I don't understand.
The worst offenders in my opinion are the ones assuming language based on IP for multi-lingual countries like Switzerland. People living in the French or Italian parts almost always get served the German content. It's bad UX.
But even setting the client right is not really possible. I'm danish. I understand english and german. Norwegian and swedish are similar enough to danish that I can read it without too much trouble. Websites, if they're translated at all, usually offer their native language plus an english translation. So if I visit a website in any language I understand, I'd prefer the original. But for any other language I want the english version.
If I set my accept-language to "da,en", I get a lot of horrible machine translated danish on a lot of websites. If I set it to "en,da", all danish government websites are now english. I can't win.
I wish I could just say please never translate either of these languages, and while some apps have this many are very hostile.
I also have a weird setup where all my personal devices are in Spanish but my work devices and accounts are in English. It causes a strange mixup where I never really know what language I'm going to be served but its wrong more often than not.
It also destroys language learning opportunities.
Google being anti user, probably so some director can boost AI numbers is pretty typical though.
It really feels like the youtube team doesn't have any multilingual experience, which would be surprised if that's the case?
- French videos auto-dubbed with AI and with the titles auto-translated in English.
- English videos auto-dubbed with AI and with the titles auto-translated in French.
- French videos not dubbed, but with the titles auto-translated in English.
- English videos not dubbed, but with the titles auto-translated in French.
- French videos kept as is.
- English videos kept as is.
Also, Youtube keeps suggesting me French accents videos, even though I never watched a similar video (but watched videos on American accents and Spanish accents years ago)
I'd suspect it's something banal, such as: $goal --> translate by default --> enough users click through by mistake (AB test shows user interest) --> more preroll ads shown to users (AB test shows business value) --> promotion
Whether the $goal was {accessibility, show off translations, UX improvement} is quite irrelevant for a business that optimizes for revenue from ads.
But yeah, it's incredibly stupid.
I think that depends on the country. And maybe region of the country.
At any rate I can turn off subtitles in my YouTube - can other people not do that?
on edit: am in Denmark, I don't notice any automatic translation of the three languages I see most often - Danish, English, or Italian.
on second edit: but maybe I am just not observing it in action when it happens or maybe I don't watch the kind of videos they do it to - anyway I'd like to see it.
As a point of anecdata, I go out of my way to avoid these, and report them any time I come across them, and now there's been a while I've not gotten them on content I want (But I do get them on some of the default feed YouTube places on home, even if I never interact with them)
For the sake of completeness, this is what it looks like in the same account with 2 devices with different languages
This is a best case scenario, it's at least respecting device language* (Which isn't always the case, and the inconsistency adds insult to injury), note translation and dubbing isn't marked when clicking, and both languages are enabled on the account
PD: I take back my other comment, apparently I also get them on videos for my regular feed, apparently by now I just filter it out and ge t ocasionally angry when I realize
* But not really, United States Spanish isn't quite right, and it's jarring even when not comming from an AI Voice
I don't know your reality but literally anywhere in the 744 million users in Europe if you consider the technology literate average of internet users I guarantee that someone who is not even bilingual is precisely the exception.
I would hazard say the same is true in most of Asia and Africa perhaps less so in South America where Spanish/Portuguese are more monolithic.
A significant part of Africa, Benelux, The Nordics, a huge part of the indian subcontinent, most expats in any country, Canada...
Even if you live in a purely Monoglot country (And those are less common than people think), in absolute numbers it's a lot of people
[citation needed]
I don't have any numbers but it seems plausible that the average user doesn't make an informed decision about where they consume their videos or which search engine they use. They buy a smartphone to connect to their family and friends, to learn and to use essential services.
Unfortunately the smartphone is not designed to help users with this goal. It is a medium for tech companies to shove garbage down the throats on people who are just trying to live their lives, and to perform the largest mass surveillance campaign in the history of mankind. Communication and connectivity is the Trojan horse used to sell the malware that the smartphone is.
This feature is designed for users who "don't know any better".
It's not that you have to be able to speak multiple languages, understanding several is still common.
And then, the translation of video titles etc. is often surprisingly bad, because (I think) they don't consider the video context / content while translating, so it almost looks like a translation-by-dictionary-lookup translation.
Most infuriating though is when you watch a video of a channel you watched for years and all of the sudden the audio is auto-translated into your primary language. So cringe.
Annoyingly, there’s not a native way to revert the translated description and title as far as I know. And this seems to be done without the knowledge of the creator!
I watched a language-learning YouTube short today that was entirely not in English. But YouTube was automatically dubbing it into English. A commenter replied with “but why the bad ai voice?” And the creator replied “it’s not, that’s my voice”
It's a toggle in their creator profile that I believe was auto enabled at some point.
It's especially horrendous when the short has foreign language music. I was a following some Japanese cooking/baking channels some time ago, until this feature made them intolerable through the music translation.
Anyway, you can easily see wherever YouTube ruined it via this feature: it gets a small "dub" badge next to the title - and you can manually switch the audio via the gear icon... Which isn't available for shorts, so you need to open these via the regular video URL... Which is way too much effort, obviously.
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/15569972?sjid=1621...
I have no idea what a flight costing 781,667 blergs is, Google. Is that a lot?
If I knew what blergs are worth, I'd set my regional settings to blergs.
So you set the currency to your own. Then navigate away, then come back. Now it's blergs again.
It's OK if they want to offer it, but at least let me disable it for specific languages.
And for those languages which I don't understand, let me choose a default autodubbing language. Because I assume that auto-generated translations from French to English will be far better than those from French to German or Spanish.
Also, the voices they use sound like from a decade ago.
Reddit does something similar now. It auto translates posts and they show up in Google in my native tongue. Really annoying since when I search in that language I specifically don't want English sites.
Thanks to the geniuses at Reddit, I now frequently find posts on /r/de or similar German subreddits translated from my native language into one I'm worse at!
It took me some minutes to realize what was happening. At first I though it was some language specific sub before too many post had strange language.
Fake culture and putting things in the a strange cultural context and trying to hide it.
Does it actually say it is somewhere obvious? My girlfriend and I both looked something up and each got the same Reddit thread, but one in English and one in Chinese. She had no idea hers was translated.
But I also thought it was supposed to do the reverse if someone comments in the translated language, adding an original-language comment instead of a translated-language one.
The YouTube auto translation is not that. It's stilted and awkward, robotic voice with none of the context. It's not ready for release and it does a disservice to any creator that uses it because their vision is not going to be anywhere near correctly delivered.
At the very least make use of https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/...
... instead of relying on whatever stupid magic that places me in Germany when I live 5km from the border.
It can't be geoip because that IP is from a French ISP and has been in consistent use at this location for the past 5 years.
(but yeah even then it is horrible)
I live in a German speaking country, yet my native language is other and German is almost never preferred when I watch some content. All my UIs are in English.
Yet, I open a video by a Brit and he is autodubbed to German. There really isn't any similar UX decision by any other reputed company that would be comparably stupid as this. Google even has large presence in Switzerland, that makes it even more puzzling.
The thing with youtube translated titles is that half of them aren't even propper German and half of that half is utterly nonsensical, because some English ideom has been translated too literally.
It's a bit of an exaggeration, but it is as if a person is Lisbon would get their videos dubbed to Spanish.
What is more complicated is more the fact that we have 4 official languages :)
There's no formalized system for writing swiss german. (We even call swiss german "Mundart", literally translated "mouth type".) Only with sms and social media written swiss german has become a thing amongst younger people.
I don't think youtube not serving content badly translated to swiss german is a problem, quite frankly I'm happy swiss german is "ours".
I just wish google realized that "German (Switzerland)" means no need to auto-correct anything to 'ß'
Disclosure: I do consider standard German a semi-foreign language.
I'd rather hear them speak in English than having them butcher the melodies of my language.
The user's personal computer is a personal space. You'd think that when users go out of the way to explicitly configure language and country preferences, they would respect it. Instead, everything is overridden by geolocation.
These days if there is a longform video I wish to watch, I download it. Typically I find it through other means than "recommendations" or search. YT as a platform for discovering content is becoming increasingly irrelevant.
Several times per week, the video starts in English - and then after a few seconds switches to a horrible robotic French auto-dub.
Even if the dubbing became magically parfect - and no doubt AI will manage to do it (while still falling flat on its face as soon as someone is a little creative with langage or cracks a joke/wordplay), I still want to be, you know able to set a setting to enable or disable it. Crazy, right?
There are some cases where YouTube serves me Indonesian subtitles for some reason
Unfortunately here is. I remember around a decade ago I was buying Doctor Who DVDs on eBay. You would end up with ludicrous translations such as "Der Zeiteinmischer" for "The Time Meddler".
Here's an ebay thread with users expressing similar frustrations. https://community.ebay.com/t5/Buying/How-do-I-disable-Automa...
This is a Premium account too. If the apparently best and brightest software engineers in the world can’t be bothered to fix that then how can we expect anything more?
They’re so lucky to have enough of a monopoly left over to keep all the creators on their platform while they further encrapify it, otherwise it would have died already.
Let me introduce you to reddit.
It feels like they did not even test the feature before pushing it to production.
As someone who also lives in a country where I don’t speak the language (and certainly not well enough to understand tax law); having that content translated is potentially useful IFF it’s clearly labeled as such.
It's quite telling of how their developers "think" when they put the original language stream as the last one in the track list, instead of the sane first (zeroth?) position that it should occupy.
My browser states that I favour English, then French. My user profile on the website has "English" as language. Yet, when I get to the homepage, it tries to guess my language from my IP. NOOOO.
It could be system - but there is a surprising amount of people who set their OS to some language they are learning, or just English for convenience. And they do not want this to affect the web.
It could be the browser, but YouTube and most other services for that matter, are mostly used through apps.
It could be in the profile (but which one Google, YouTube, local app?)
This seemingly simple problem has an issue with discoverability.
Date formats, start of the week, 12/24h clock, auto translations, localised search results, language detection, it is all rubbish and clearly US-centric.
For all their (former) diversity dances, that company has very little to show for it.
However i haven't noticed this to be a problem with Google in general. All the Google products i've been using have been properly localised.
Inaccurate auto-captions for videos with hard coded captions probably isn't a big enough pain to warrant big investments?
Having said that I am against the automatic audio translation that some people are reporting. I have not experienced it myself but that seems poorly thought out. It should be easier for people to search through items in a foreign language but that content should be served in the content originally intended.
At least the audio translation I can turn off. I do not know how to get the actual title of a video or its description.
It's so frustrating that I've ended up just changing my UI language from English to another language so that at least those don't get butchered.
I don't really need magic, mainly want "if language not user's language" to turn into "if language not in user's language(s)"
Simple - at Google, feedback from internal users is ignored.
Haven't we learned in the last 15 years or so that options are bad for users? ;-)
Moreover, watching videos in a foreign language with subtitles in that same language used to be a popular tool for learning languages. Clearly, the proliferation of language skills is a serious danger to the market for AI generated instant translations and must be stopped at all costs.
Also, advertisers get that option, because they're the only users YT cares about.
(You don't want that distracting break in languages between revenue earning productions and embedding media fluff. I guess, in this context, the plug-in is as evil as ad-blockers are.)
In fact, there must be an incentive here for Google to auto-translate a video only when it can sell an ad in the translated language for more than one in the original.
I suppose we should be glad that they've not (yet!) gone that far, or it would become even more of an unpredictable mess from the end user's point of view.
(I can see a bright future where smart TVs come with mandatory, non-optional instant translation… and maybe, if we were allowed to dream, with realtime character replacement and background adaptation to fit the next ad context. It's the logical step forwards from colorized B/W… /s)
In general, some of the loudest voices in any given community are the ones who are dissatisfied with the thing in question. So, there are many people (or at least the two of us!) who are reasonably satisfied with this feature and find it helpful.
Two words: Preference and choice. You prefer it one way and are happy. Other prefer it another way.
The fact that they are unhappy is not that you can do what makes you happy. It is that the choice isn’t easily available to choose to do what makes them happy.
My main point was that I like the auto-translation because information retrieval was so much better. But the intent behind the video of the uploader has to be maintained and respected.
My response to having whole playlists effectively change language was the most reasonable one: start learning Japanese. Now I can at least read kana and get a solid chunk of titles, and I pick out phrases here and there in the lyrics now.
I can't imagine trying to search for something with a specific title and having the results screwed by bizarre machine translation.
I use English while using any YT client so I didn't notice it as much. So I changed the language on my browser to German, went to a couple of American channels and now I get some of the outrage on this thread. Weirdly, some videos get their titles translated and some don't. Not only the titles but also the descriptions get translated. Honestly, I'm surprised they aren't translating the comments at this point.
I still do understand and like the feature a lot. It's a good way to push the engagement rates I guess. A simple solution would be to show a dialog with languages where the users can pick what they speak, not touch videos in those languages and translate everything else.
It's honestly quite incredible.
Many former European colonies are mostly bilingual, e.g. Africa is highly multilingual out of necessity. Much of Europe itself is also mostly bilingual. If you want to communicate outside your own little region and your native language isn't a lingua franca, you need to be bilingual in this world.
The main holdouts when it comes to bilingualism are former imperial powers who managed to both kill domestic language diversity (e.g. France, UK, Russia) while also spreading their national language as a lingua Franca. Another group of holdouts are settler colonies such as the US, which didn't have a dominant native population after the arrival of Europeans.
But even if e.g. Russia itself isn't super bilingual, the rest of the former Soviet Union certainly is, since that is just the reality if you live in a small and/or formerly colonised country.
- educated people are expected to learn English in school and end up consuming English media anyway (where you'd expect >50% multilingual, but not everyone)
- country has many official languages (many people are multilingual, but not necessarily in English; e.g. India, Indonesia, possibly China)
- country has literacy problems (not so many left now, maybe in sub-Saharan Africa)
- proud monoglots of a language that isn't English: Japan, France (but even here a lot of people consume English media anyway)
Belgium has 3 languages but my guess would be that each region speaks English better. The French, pardon, Walloniers scarcely speak Dutch and while the Flemish area speaks better French it's usually not great (unsure whether most people would qualify as fluent). Afaik Flanders has mandatory French in school but Wallonia doesn't need to take Dutch, even though 60% of the population is Dutch-speaking. The German-speaking region is mostly forgotten about and they either integrate with the French-speaking part or work in Germany with Belgium as a cheap place to live
The Netherlands has Papiamento as the native language of most people in a part of the country. They're overseas but they vote for the same government and live by the same law. I literally didn't know this until a few years ago (I'm 30). I assume they don't want independence due to things like getting defence and other benefits from a much larger economy (and we're right to feel the need to pay such repairs) but man, this feels really 1800s slave trade levels of wrong. Not a soul speaks Papiamento in the european Netherlands, it's not even an option in school — let alone compulsory!
In Luxembourg it's hit or miss whether someone speaks the national language (Luxembourgish), French (an administrative language), or German (another administrative language). Many will speak at least two, but many also only one (French in particular)
Very eurocentric perhaps but that's my experience with countries that have more than one official language: nearly nobody bothers learning the other if there is no direct necessity
Even if it is, Google is itself is very international and multilingual, including the literal head of YouTube. They obviously know what the world looks like, and decided to do this anyway.
- uBlock Origin - ad block
- SponsorBlock - to skip in video ads (some other nice features like highlights too)
- YouTube Row Fixer - for the tiles to adjust to the window
- Return YouTube Dislike - self explanatory
- YouTube No Translation - thanks for the suggestion!
- Hiding Reels
- Setting a default playback speed
Enhancer for Youtube is also super useful: disable shorts entirely, autoplay next only on playlists, tweak number of videos per row, default playback speed, default theater mode, etc.
As another commenter said, Youtube is one of those sites that really requires multiple plugins to be useful :/
www.youtube.com##ytd-rich-item-renderer:style(--ytd-rich-grid-items-per-row: 6)"More $$$!!1"
But hey, another way to shoehorn AI into being "useful".
- need information about something in general -> search in English - need information about something specific for my home country (laws, local events, local shops, etc) -> search in my native language
now, I get weird auto translated content informing me about laws that are only applicable in the US and recommended products that are not even available in my home country.
The old Youtube was way nicer, it felt snappy, easy to interact with and didn't have all that bloat we have today. I also miss when the ads where a popup at the bottom of the video instead of having to watch double ad segment every 5 minute.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-anti-...
for example, "more plates more dates" has been translated to "Mehr Teller mehr Termine".
not allowing this feature to be disabled is such an user hostile decision.
Any have any idea how to fix this?
It's unfortunate that YouTube is only usable with these extensions, but here we are.
The problems reported by everyone in this thread sound to me like UI bugs of the player, official app or javascript in the browser, picking the wrong audio track automatically.
(a) uBlock - this one is debatable but deals with the worst distractions especially if you're trying to learn from a video your professor put up and you have an exam to prepare for, (b) unhook - hides most of the "recommendations" that attempt to keep you on the site because you're planning to do the copmprehension questions your professor gave you for after the video, (c) something to disable "autoplay next" for the same reason as above (a uBlock rule will do it), (d) no translation. Soon we'll probably need (e) something to block AI.
// Prevent translation on all levels
[element, attributedString, snippetAttributedString].forEach(el => {
if (el) {
el.setAttribute('translate', 'no');
following
el.style.setProperty('translate', 'no', 'important');
If you're using DeArrow, there is an option to disable those translations.
DeArrow is from the same team as SponsorBlock, it removes the clickbait thumbnails and titles with more descriptive ones. It makes the experience sooo much better. https://dearrow.ajay.app/
Even thought about making a spin off app with only the no-translate feature, that simply always uses the original title and audio. I guess revanced can do this too, but maybe there's enough people who don't use revanced, or don't know about this feature. Thoughts?
> Size: 123.22 kB
A not so small extension for getting rid of a problem seems so tiny. Feels a bit like overkill and I hoped there would be something I can forcibly set without any extension. Even with disabled cookies youtube uses local storage. Why not have there some variable for that purpose!?
And this feature is relatively new, I think they started rolling it out only a few months ago. I'm sure configuration options will pop up.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num... and assuming the videos in a language is ~proportional to L1+L2 speakers . That's a simplifying assumption, because I would guess English is more highly represented. Because people likely make more videos in English because there's a bigger audience for it. If only there was a way to allow more non-English speakers to be able to be understood/gain traction....
If I watch a foreign language movie I always prefer subtitles with original audio (and those are usually dubbed by human, professional dubbers, so much higher quality). Why would I treat YT any differently?
The main difference between youtube and foreign language films is most creators on youtube don't have a budget for professional dubbers, so you either only watch big creators who do have that budget, or you have to compromise.
This auto-dub-translation feature is also problematic in that viewers don't realise it's happening. I think that is unreasonably misleading. It could be great as an option, but it should really prompt you before switching it on.
That way people would not be forced to use it, and people would be aware of it.
But also I might just be lucky, I speak multiple languages and have traveled into various countries, and have never had youtube show me anything other than English wherever I go.
Edit: And although multilinguals are in the majority over monolinguals (I think, citation needed), I think being multilingual still makes you part of an even larger majority, which is humans who are unable to watch the majority of videos due to language.
I regularly consume content in two languages, my partner 3, and many of my friends are in the same boat. Please either allow me to just blacklist languages to not translate automatically or always keep content in the original language but allow changing after engaging with it. Its insane that this requires an extension for a company with as much resources as google.
The translations of video titles are absolutely atrocious and rarely mean anything near the intent of the original title.
So it tries to dub urdu videos (as 'hindi' videos) into english, or dub english into hindi, which is useless for me both ways.
Instead of dubbing, make better subs! YouTube subs fail to track when using the video speed feature, so if i am using any other speed playback than 1x, the subs don't load on time, and sometimes get skipped, fix that!
Thanks for sharing addon :)
In order to get a vaguely usable stock YouTube, you need to install at least UBlock, SponsorBlock, No Translation, and arguably DeArrow as well. And this only works for browsers, many people will cope with their mobile YouTube experience being hell on earth. Why do all this when you can get an alternative cross-platform client like GrayJay with all the same features (minus DeArrow for now), which works out of the box, has more privacy, and won't be completely useless the next time Google decides to shift things around a bit?
Same goes for Windows: you'll see people who go to great lengths to disable telemetry, remove Edge and sponsored content, often having to run random scripts from the internet with administrator privileges, just to have everything reset on the next Windows update. Remember how Windows users made fun of Linux users for having to open a command line for installing a browser (which isn't even true)?
I could go on: you can get Firefox and spend hours tweaking about:config to disable the anti-features, or you can get one of the dozen forks with the same patches pre-applied, yet some people will still defend the stock experience with their lives.
in "i am legend", the last man standing became the "unwanted alien" because everyone else had transformed into something else.
so the abnormal is the new normal. enshittification at its peak
UBlock: Solved by using YouTube Premium
SponsorBlock: Solved by not watching low-quality channels with sponsors. Also YouTube has started rolling out their own version of SponsorBlock to skip these segments.
No Translation: Yeah, this is a pain in stock YouTube
DeArrow: Why would I want clickbait thumbnails and titles fixed? Those are perfect indicators of a low quality video to not click.
> Same goes for Windows
Sure does. People who want a nice experience get a Mac, which is somewhat equivalent to paying for YouTube Premium.
> GrayJay
Can't install it on a Roku or on Apple TV. YouTube Premium is still the best option for TV watching.
The SponsorBlock and DeArrow argument only works some times: clickbait and sponsors can be an indicator of poor quality (see Linus Tech Tips), but they aren't always: even Tom Scott video thumbnails and titles used to get DeArrowed, and I bet no one here would argue that Tom Scott used to push low quality content.
YouTube offers the option to not pay, and instead have horrible interruptions with ads. Maybe in the future they will stop this nonsense and put everything behind a paywall, who knows?
But for normal people wanting to watch YouTube on their TV, there's really no option besides Premium. And it's really an incredible bargain compared to the value you get from it.
> clickbait and sponsors can be an indicator of poor quality (see Linus Tech Tips), but they aren't always
Agree. But I'd rather see a clickbait thumbnail from one of my subscribed channels than be fooled by a cleaned up thumbnail from a clickbait channel.
Thing is, I haven't lived in Italy for well over a decade. I don't consume much Italian content. I've tried my best to purge my Google account of any possible trace of Italian language settings, I've never saved an Italian address etc.
And yet Google must be convinced that, because I was in Italy over a dozen years ago when I made the account I must be Italian, and that cannot possibly change.
Edit: Sadly, no.
The worst thing about this for me is not the language issue but that the translations are AI generated shite. If it was a case of multilingual channels producing videos in multiple languages then it makes sense that a user with language set to German would receive the German version by default. But to give users an AI generated translation by default? That's horrible.
I get the impression someone in Google/YouTube has this grand vision of it being like a Babel Fish just seamlessly translating voices into your own language. The trouble is Babel Fish is science fiction. Douglas Adams described it as "feeding" the speech centres of your brain directly, not translating the audio into a shitty generated copy.
Google's stupidity knows no bounds.
----
Like, is nobody in Google multi-lingual? Who the fuck thought this -- not auto-translation, but forced auto-translation -- is a good idea? Surely for an organization that purportedly only hires the cream-of-the-crop, they'll have a larger fraction of employees that speak more than one language? Look, I'm resting-and-vesting like the rest of y'all, but if I were in the team that implemented this, I'd definitely speak up, and let them, up to my skip-level, know that this is terrible. The implication of either possibilities had occurred, yet the feature still shipped, is harrowing.
Even if the developers only speak one language, they must know at least three -- cream-of-the-crop, remember? -- programming languages, right? Imagine if, when you're first hired into Google, you declare your programming language of choice, say Go; then, henceforth whenever you check out the source code, irrespective of its original form, it gets auto-translated into Go, and you can't turn that off? Checking out Pixel first-stage bootloader code, almost certainly written in assembly -- nope! We know better: you're getting that in Go. Fuck, I shouldn't be giving them ideas!
Could they not imagine how horrible this would be, and by analogy when applied to human languages, be also just as horrid?
YouTube's often been cited as a great resource for learning new things. Well, now it's useless for, that's right, learning a second language! I wonder why this Spanish for beginners video's all in English? /s
Speaking about shit features, let's throw "Stable Volume" into the pile. At least this one remembers your preferences...most of the time. When I watch ASMR -- yes I'll admit in public I'm that guy -- videos, and am just about to fall asleep, I just love to be jolted awake by a loud robotic voice's rendition of tapping sounds. Maybe my grumpiness's due to my lack of sleep!
> Speaking about shit features, let's throw "Stable Volume" into the pile.
"Ambient Mode" too. It's a big waste of resources. It won't hurt your ears, but it eats up battery for no reason.
If I don't want the translated sound track there's a button right there in settings to change it. Why do I need this extension?
Also for the sound track sometimes there isn't even an option to disable it depending on what experiment or client you are using.
If you understand more than one language, you'll get half of the videos sloppily translated for no reason. There is no way to tell YouTube not to do this for specific languages.
It is beyond annoying.
A better solution would be a ‘blacklist’ of languages you understand—so YouTube only auto‑translates from languages you don’t speak, and always leaves familiar languages in their original form.
It‘s even the other way around!
A better solution would have been to just not ship this disaster of a "feature" in the first place.
I wouldn't want my browser to automatically translate every page I go to (without my consent!) either, and that would've been a much easier job!
Only that YouTube decides to use their Mickey Mouse sounding AI voice to deliver an English audio track. Not every time, but at least a third of the time. I have to hunt for the audio setting each time, because you cannot turn off AI voices permanently.
Tell me again how I‘m wrong.
Imagine how they spent big money developing a slogan for their brand or product and then AI comes around with a near literal translation that makes no sense whatsoever and that is what people hear.
That is the only positive side, otherwise it is what you wrote. A real pain.
A friend showed me that the latest game I had worked on was hilariously mistranslated. It's originally "Need For Speed: Payback" but got translated to "behöver du hastighet: återbetalning" which would be more like "do you need speed: reimbursement"
It was a video in French over accents, so the automatic English translation kind of made it useless. I'm French anyway, why translate it to English? I don't even live in an English-speaking country either (not that translating to Dutch would have been better).
>"Why would I want this?"
But showing me bad English translations of video titles from my native language without option to disable is stupid.
Defaulting to auto dubbed videos for a language I speak and having to hit that small button each time is annoying.
It's cool for some stuff, when I don't speak the language, and where the content is valuable, but it has to be an option.
(Also, I for one pay for YouTube premium)