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Comment by rdtsc | Hacker News Reader

It's surprising how hostile youtube is to multilingual users. Probably all in some attempt to show off their translation capability or to improve the experience for users who may want to access content in a language they don't speak? Or it's just as dumb as this was on some product managers "designed and implemented" line to get promoted?

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.

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I’ve been learning a new language, and I’m constantly encountering language-learning videos that get translated entirely into my native language, effectively useless until I revert the audio track.

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”

Revanced on android has an option to force native language. It does not fix the translated titles and descriptions as far as I can tell.

I've seen a bunch of different shorts which have the same AI-generated horrible voice. I always assumed this was just the author preferring to script the audio and generate the voice. Can I assume this is actually big-G auto-dubbing the short? If so, then I'm guilty of (incorrectly) complaining to the author of several shorts.

Those are likely uploads from Tiktok where that voice is everywhere.

Google is auto translating their videos unless the content creators explicitly opts out. The worst about this feature is that it depends on the language setting of the user, so the creator will likely never find out it's happening, because they're probably using YouTube in the language they're making the videos in.

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...

i18n and l10n are something that I have seen a company done right. It is easy developer to assume:

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.

> As a hongkonger (zh_hk + en_gb), living in Singapore (zh_cn + en?), following JPOP. This is the daily fight I have with browser.

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.

> i18n and l10n are something that I have seen a company done right. It is easy developer to assume:

> 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.

No need to do these assumptions, youtube accounts are google accounts and google already supports setting multiple languages that you speak/read.

It doesn't work, you can set all the languages you speak on your Google account settings, and Youtube will still change every video title and audio track to either your default language on settings, or your system language. At this point I don't even know what stupid decision between the two above the Youtube backend is choosing.

Yes, this. Google still doesn't get even the Accept-Language header right, which is shocking, because they're Google.

that doesn't mean a single thing - google would auto-default to IP country resolution every step. It's funny in an awful way to have a road trip in Europe - every day it's a different language. While I speak 3 languages that's far from sufficient, morealso google translations leave a lot to be desired outside English (as everything is designed in US,incl. date formats [mm/dd], units - inches and miles, etc.)

Accept-language doesn't do anything at all for google, either.

Would be great if they actually use it in their products instead of showing me some insane mixup of stuff I don't want :)

It's gotten to the point where searching Google for word definitions is actively hampering me by defaulting to showing the definition in my "regional language" (which isn't correct in the first place since it's spoken by a majority in my country but not in the region where I live) as well as English when I only want the English meaning. Stuff like this has had me switch to DDG where even if the results are strictly worse, at least it's not going out of its way to annoy me

The very fact that Google allows multiple language setting yet still fearlessly screw you at every turn is the biggest sign IMHO that they just hate multi-linguals.

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.

I have all of my language settings configured to en_US. I've explicitly configured YouTube's country setting as well. I still get autotranslated titles for the local language in the search results. There are so many irrelevant results that YT search has become unusable. I'm increasingly noticing similar behavior in Google search, especially around news and current events.

But sometimes you actually have to search for something in your native language. Plants and mushrooms for instance: I know them by their Norwegian names, I wouldn't often not know how to search for them in English.

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.

Another specialty seems to be a half page of "related" questions. I'm not a stickler for grammar, but I frequently find questions here with a syntax suitable for a cartoon caveman.

I think you overestimate amount of multilingual users and tourists.

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.

I'm a tourist 4 weeks per year. Excluding any business travel. That's 7.6% of the time. Now, I travel internationally more than most, but it's not out of the ordinary and it's 100x your estimate.

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.

> all EU countries except Ireland mandate second language teaching in schools

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.

> separate language, not a dialect of English

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 ♫

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYNZbmrMg7M

> I've never heard anyone claim that about Irish - an actual Gaelic language.

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.

> And it's taught atrociously badly. The vast majority of graduates, after about 13 years of mandatory Irish classes, cannot functionally speak it.

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.

Monolinguals consistently underestimate how hard it is to reach proficiency in another language. The exception to this being being raised in a multilingual home.

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?

> 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.

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.

Huh, basically every European aged <~40 is going to know their native language + English at the very least.

Knowing English is not equal to enjoying content in English.

Besides that they also get German, Dutch, Finnish or Indian stuff translated that they don't understand.

I also have this problem with apps in my native language. I have my phone set to en,no because I prefer the English version over some bad auto-translated crap where some apps try to translate stuff. But then when I download a Norwegian app, then it prefers to use some badly maintained English translation instead, but here I would of course prefer the native version.

Can't win.

And it would be _so, so, easy_.

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.

Yeah, I think apps just should have a sorted list (/tiers) of languages they support, and pick whatever first has a match in the user preferences. If the app supports two languages equally well, then choose the one first in the user's preference list.

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 english

People figured this out when they specified HTTP 1.1 in 1997. A prioritized list of the languages the user knows. They even allow a q-factor weighing so the user can specify a factor of how comfortable they are with a language. All modern browsers already support this, but 99% of websites fail to use it properly including Google.

It'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/...

Indeed.

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.

Same here with Dutch: you could pretty much watch i18n degrade real time by observing the quality of the dutch translations for all major sites and tech products over the years.

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.

I've had the unfortunate mishap of having the perfectly fine English translation of a German site switch to auto translate Dutch crap due to one part using the language preference and the other the IP source, bit weird since as far as I know they usually only offer English. And I can perfectly fine read German so I usually immediately switch to that since some info is not available in English especially with the different Bundesambt websites.

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.

On iOS, this is something you can can control on a per-app basis from the (system) Settings.app.

Android has it too.

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.

Really useful for Google maps. I generally prefer English but I want Japanese for google so I get local people's opinion over tourists who think every ramen is the best ramen they've ever tasted. I'm surprised it's not an option actually. Language aside, tourism and actually living somewhere are totally separate and reviews should reflect that.

Interesting use case! Why won't you just use Tabelog instead?

I don't feel like tabelog is that popular recently. But I could be wrong.

Still miles ahead of Google Maps Review (in Japan) at least.

I live in Japan and am not yet fluent enough, so need to use a VPN to get the Google Search English results, otherwise it's totally unusable. Heck even for programming I pull my hair since I get the translated docs when searching. Just give me the (original) English ones please. I did search in English have Google set to English, but still get the Japanese ones even for those that have English resources.

Hm.. I don't seem to have that particular problem. I use VPN sometimes, but for other reasons, so I don't normally do my searches there. With the native IP I get both English and Japanese results, depending on what it finds, but for multi-language sites in Japan I actually get English sometimes. If I only want results from Japan I prefix my Google search with site:.jp, or whatever for other places. I never get auto-translated documents. I get what I would expect, actually. With a bias from the country (in this case Japan) I am in, but that's about it.

Google Search seem to be... becoming hyper-localized in the last 5-10 years. They seem to simply refuse to give back a lot of pages, by 15-ish-mile IP locality. It's sort of super alarming.

I used to think this way, i.e. assuming a misunderstanding on the product development side.

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.

I recall my British colleague’s disbelief when I told her there are many people in the US whose first language is not English…

Similarly, plenty of folk born in the UK whose first language isn't English. I have many friends who grew up speaking Scots, and a few whose first language is Gaelic.

> whose first language is Gaelic

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.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyll-bBZzyk

Likely not for Gaelic, even in the Gaeltacht. I have a couple of friends who deliberately speak Gaelic to their kids, but neither of them would consider it their first language. The kids themselves are properly bilingual, but tend to default to English when visitors are present.

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!

Sorry, I should have been more specific: Scots Gaelic.

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.

We've got lists of falsehoods programmers believe about all kinds of things, we could probably do the same for all groups, including falsehoods the British believe about the USA, or about languages.

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).

Windows took a nosedive with recent Windows releases, due to the "apps".

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.

Danskjævel here, and I feel your pain. MS Windows has always had a pretty terrible danish translation. Partly because a lot of tech language translates poorly to danish, and partly because MS are lazy and incompetent. Back in Windows 2000 days, I found instances where "Windows" the product name was translated to "vinduer", the danish word for an actual window. I actually found a ~25 year old screenshot I took --> https://0x0.st/80r5.png

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.

Hah, that "skjermbilde" is hilarious!

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.

Yea, german is the same way, they translate a lot of tech words as well. Danish is taking on english loan words at an alarming rate. Many products have english labels on them, even though they're manufactured for the danish (or scandinavian) market. Seing a store having "udsalg" is getting rarer, now it's a "sale". Many younger people use english words in regular conversation, and I hate how it affects me, and I start doing it as well. I try very hard not to. Last place I worked had english as the official corporate language, and all meetings were in english. Even if I'm very proficient in english, my brain works in danish and it takes much less effort for me to converse in danish, and switching between languages all day makes the mental load worse.

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.

It baffles me that a ton of sites that have been translated into multiple languages still set the language based on IP rather than trying to determine it based on the client settings or defaulting to a set language with an easy way to switch it.

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.

>client settings

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.

How very strange. I don't get any kind of translations of native sites (government or otherwise).

I get this a lot in restaurant menus nowadays. My phone is set to English because I am more familiar with techy terms in English than my native language with its weird translations. I go to a restaurant, open the QR menu and tell them what I want. But they don't understand what I want because the menu is set to English because of my phone settings. A lot of places have English names in their regular menu (because cool) so I am not talking about speaking English to a nonspeaker. Like sometimes a wrap is called a wrap and sometimes it's called whatever the native thing is. That kind of thing.

Google as a whole is hostile to the user's browser's language settings. I have to append ?hl=en to every Google URL when connecting from an IP address that they determine is a non-English region.

While logged into Google with your own regional settings, try Google Flights in any country- the currency is always set to that country's currency.

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.

Oh how I hate this UX antipattern. Even when you know the price of blerg, the cognitive overhead is real.

This flight is 781,667 blergs but this other one is only 722,458 blergs! Is that a huge cost savings? Better switch tabs and start calculating.

> Or it's just as dumb as this was on some product managers "designed and implemented" line to get promoted?

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.

Right ? I am suprised that Facebook is actually the one leading in this UX: they clearly separate UX language ( singular ) and Languages which you don't need translation ( plural ).

I really, really want to have a way to tell Youtube that if I enable subtitles and the content is either English or Portuguese, then the subtitles should be shown in the original language (either subtitles created by the author or auto-generated subtitles - sometimes I can't do audio), but if it's another language, it should be shown in English (again, either subtitles authored by a person, or auto-generated ones)

This extension can control subtitles so maybe there is hope that this or another extension will offer this kind of fine granularity

This used to work some time ago. They just didn't automatically enable translation and picked the default language.

Accept language header covers all that's needed. It's a ordered list of languages the user will understand in order of preference. You'd pick the first one as interface, don't translate anything that's in the list, and you can decide what to do with anything not in the list.

Sites that use ip of origin and just assume my language are such grating experiences.

No.

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.

you still want a default for those website you haven't been yet. also you're conflating the user agent configuration with the trasmission protocol. the accept header easily accomodate your scenario with purely client side configuration, entirely transparent to the web site.

Google has that preference as well, YouTube just doesn't care to honor it, which is somehow even more frustrating.

I'm lucky enough that I mostly only consume English content on Youtube and not my native language, so I just set everything to English.

But yeah, it's incredibly stupid.

I'm still getting titles auto-translated, and started to get videos auto-dubbed a few weeks ago.

It is a setting managed by the content creators. That is why it is very random

Thanks, I wasn't aware that was the case

I did this too, but then YouTube translated videos in my native language to English.

I fear the future won't make us more educated but even dumber as the tech and ai tries to do all thinking for us, even thinking we don't want to learn languages as this is just one more "inefficiency" in humans to eradicate. And who is Ai trying to emulate? Right, people like these managers at Google resposnsible for such decisions (or like sama, not sure what's worse)

The worst part about it is the half-translated effect on many sites. I'm fine in my native language and in english, but having a page written in both is a purge. Add to this the disappearance of a way to select language quiclky and the web is becoming shit these days wrt i18n.

I think statistics show that multilingual users are minority enough and most likely people who understand "help" or "guess" quit as soon when they see anything else so they don't consume the content. So YT doesn't care.

>I think statistics show that multilingual users are minority enough

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?

They are doing automated voice over now and automated translation of video titles.

huh I don't seem to get it. Do you have a link where I can see it in action?

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.

Not all creators enable it (Or take the time / know to disable it, as some report it enables automatically), but it's more common on say Mr Beast or Kurzgezagt, Larger channels that would keep an eye on click troughs

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)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVh4xvG1ltY

https://imgur.com/a/HbBWcX8

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

Doesn’t it just use the primary language you select in your account settings? Unless you’re talking about using it in incognito, in which case it does get annoying when it assumes a language based on region without asking.

My configured primary language is English, but I regularly watch contents in Chinese and Japanese, where I have sufficient mastery over to not need YouTube's subpar translation. YouTube's insistence in displaying video titles in English, starting a few months ago, and now also auto-dubbing in English, is incredibly annoying.

Similar thing for me with Spanish and English. I consume both basically equally. I don't need audio or text translations for either, but Google insists on translating the english titles to Spanish completely ruining the entire meaning of what it is. Strangely I often get things in Portuguese for some reason even though I've never set a device to Portuguese, I just happen to have been to Brazil and Portugal.

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.

If you speak more than one language, which most non native language speakers do, you absolutely don't want your automatic translations. Hell, I don't want automatic translations even for languages I don't speak. If you want to allow me to have automatic subtitles go right ahead but forcing me to listen in one language is just absurd.

It also destroys language learning opportunities.

Google being anti user, probably so some director can boost AI numbers is pretty typical though.

No it doesn't. It's mostly based on your location in my experience. Also, there is a clear distinction between the language you want for content and the language you use for the youtube UI. They shouldn't be conflated.

It really feels like the youtube team doesn't have any multilingual experience, which would be surprised if that's the case?

Even if they had no experience, surely something like this would come out in user testing?

With the amount of dumb UI decisions these past few years, I don't think they do much, if any, user testing.

I mean I'd suggest that if maligning them, but it can't actually be true? Like a chef that never tastes the food??

If only it was that easy. I'm French living in France. My account settings are in English, my browsers and apps (phone, TV) are in English but my Youtube region is France. So Youtube serves me:

- 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)

Honestly, its infuriating. There are three languages that I speak and understand sufficiently well for consuming youtube videos. I don't ever want these to be translated.

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.

As a multilingual user: half the time YouTube "translation" is just gibberish, it's a total word soup. The closest thing is AliExpress listings, you know, the "Original 2025 Nintendo DS Inflatable Bedroom Wireless USB-C Potato Masher" stuff.

Hostile to you, but 99.99% of the user base prefers it that way I’m sure.

Average user is not multilingual. Target group is average user. End of story.

I think it's more that the YouTube developers are US Americans who overwhelmingly speak only one language and naturally assume this is the case everywhere else.

This is a clear example where diversity of lived experiences make for a better product. I have no doubt that a young monolingual US developer can't imagine that many, if not most, people around the world are juggling between two or more languages multiple times a day. But it's obvious to anyone else.

This feels off to me. There are so many Indians in silicon Valley, most of which speak at least one Indian language (even if not as well as English) in addition to English, some from India, some whose parents or grandparents are from India. They're both there in higher levels and lower levels - they're throughout the company, and none of them stepped in? I don't think this makes sense.

> Average user is not multilingual

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.

I don't think you understand the proficiency needed to comfortably consume content in another language. Save for a few hotspots (Benelux, Nordics) most people say "yes, I speak a second language" because when they focus hard, they can say "me wants toilet" and that's enough for their use case (holiday abroad once a year). My mother is a teacher of English but when I brought a friend who only spoke English, I had to translate the conversation between them. This is the reality of bilingualism in small towns.

Maybe in those countries. In any case, it's considerably easier to read and listen than write and speak.

Most ESL people (And by definition most english speakers) are at least bilingual

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

Most sources I can find claim that around 60% of the world's population is multilingual. I suspect that the number of internet users that are multilingual is probably pretty close to that.

> Average user is not multilingual.

[citation needed]

I don't agree with the average user not being bilingual, but I do see your point about who the target audience is here.

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".

As others have commented already: Most people in Europe can speak at least two languages, and even the minority who can just speak one can typically understand several. Even my old parents, when they were alive, could understand at least three languages, and English wasn't one of them. Africa? Most people can handle several languages. South Africa, for example, has 11 official languages, people can often speak a bunch of them and understand several more. Asia? Varies, but multi-lingual is common in many regions, though not so much in Japan.

It's not that you have to be able to speak multiple languages, understanding several is still common.

There are some very complicated legal issues that come up with international video.

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.

If I remember right YouTube already provides the tools for that and you can just outright region lock an upload (possibly depending on having the right creator bits as a studio/large channel)

Yes, for CMS channels, which would be your movie studios, TV studios, etc. They have an option to block certain countries from watching it. If you are around in YouTube often enough you will find a video or two that will say something like "this video isn't available in your region/country"

No, the complaint is opposite of that. They're seeking ways to escape their translation efforts because it's so bad.

It has nothing to do with difficulties of offering translations. It's about declining complimentary ketchup squeeze on latte.

It's not even about it being a bad translation or not. If I am a native speaker, I WANT TO READ AND HEAR EVERYTHING IN THE ORIGINAL goddammit. Google juat became IBM in the 90s, it's depressing.

It's not just Youtube, if there wasn't a google.com/ncr, I'd have to seek alternatives a long time ago.

And many other sites that confuse country with language (geizhals.eu, ... etc)

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