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Comment by lajosbacs | Hacker News Reader

It is insane to me that you cannot turn it off in the setting even as a premium user. Or better yet, make this opt-in for everyone.

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.

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I find it puzzling that they haven't any respect for user agency in relation to cultural and language preferences. Yet, in other areas we have been browbeaten with performative endorsement of other identity politics trends.

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.

Adding to my previous comment, in Switzerland, people speak very specific Swiss German, yet the videos are autodubbed to 'hoch' (standard) German.

It's a bit of an exaggeration, but it is as if a person is Lisbon would get their videos dubbed to Spanish.

I wouldn't fault youtube on that specific point. Swiss german isn't really recognized as a distinct language, and it is pretty fragmented by regions/cantons.

What is more complicated is more the fact that we have 4 official languages :)

Their failure to differentiate Swiss German isn't the problem as of itself. Rather, it is a clear example of why they should stop being opinionated about the language that their users want.

But every speaker of swiss german is expected to also speak and write standard german. "swiss standard german over swiss german dialect" is enforced in school, sometimes even during breaks.

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'

I know, but on the other hand you have many Swiss who, when spoken to in perfect Hochdeutsch, prefer to reply in English. No way you're gonna win over these people with autotranslate to what they consider a 'foreign' language.

Switching to a even more foreign language is a bit weird - in my experience the concern about English is much greater than about German. I'd expect people would just only speak swiss German (deciding between talking swiss German or standard German with a standard German speaker is a bit of a difficult question as well). Can I ask about your background? Switching to English is usually a tourist/clearly not german-speaking thing.

Disclosure: I do consider standard German a semi-foreign language.

As an Austrian, I consider the way Germans (with the exception of Bavarians) speak our language highly grating and painful to listen to.

I'd rather hear them speak in English than having them butcher the melodies of my language.

German is my first language, but I prefer consuming English content in its original language.

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 the same in portuguese. The last few months, for every brazilian video I need to play a guessing game and decide, based on the ridiculously "translated" english title, if I really want to watch it. Since I use Firefox on Android to consume Youtube, I need to open the video and then switch to Desktop mode to be able to change the audio track to the original pt-BR. There's no such option on Youtube mobile. I have lost count how many videos I decided the hassle wasn't worth it. Great job YouTube team, you're screwing your metrics in order to provide a horrible feature multilingual users never asked for.

I prefer the same. It gets even better when youtube starts translating a video only available in your native language to English and you have no way to enable the native language audio.

I had the opposite experience. I usually watch US/english content on Youtube, and only follow one or two german channels. Anyway, a new german video came out, but instead of their regular german content, it was in english. I thought it was a bit at first or a special video they tried to do for the english market. It wasn't until I logged in through another account that I noticed that Youtube had auto-translated the video to english - without any prior notice. Such an annoying and distracting thing to do unannounced.

Want to hear something worse?

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?

Yes! It is inconsistent, you think that finally reason prevailed and they nuked the 'feature', but then it appears randomly again.

Their language detection is really bad. I have everything set in French, I am in France, I go to watch a video by a French guy but YouTube decides to serve me the English audio track, like hello YouTube? Happens to me more frequently when I watch on TV.

There are some cases where YouTube serves me Indonesian subtitles for some reason

Remember this is YouTube that (in the web browser) refuses to make a proper setting for turning off the annoying video previews, instead having a locally-stored setting that keeps reverting to off for me (it’s either because I am logged in across devices and some off them move between three or four networks daily, or my browser security settings, or that I have a few Google accounts, or some combination of those). I end up having to re-set this stupid thing at least every week on one of my devices (sometimes on two or three).

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.

> There really isn't any similar UX decision by any other reputed company

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...

> There really isn't any similar UX decision by any other reputed company that would be comparably stupid as this.

Let me introduce you to reddit.

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