Comment by cdrini | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cdrini | Hacker News Reader

Oof a lot of hate for this feature. I agree more configuration would be nice, but at the same time, this is absolute science fiction come to life. Even for people who speak multiple languages: let's say you speak English, German, and French. That means you understand about 25%[1] of other people on the planet. That's 75% of videos which you would otherwise _never see or understand_. This feature is for people who _don't_ speak the most popular languages -- it lets _their_ videos get views when otherwise they would never be seen. And that's been my experience with the feature. I saw a recipe fully in Spanish because of the auto-dubbing. I actually want this enabled more globally, I want to see more fully non-English videos recommended to me from around the world.

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....

Of course I would understand the other 75%. Automatic subtitles have been a thing for ages and they have the benefit of not cutting out all personality and humor in the video.

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?

+1 for subtitles. I do think that subtitles don't gain the same level of traction; and people complain about auto-translated subtitles as well (and auto-subtitles on their own!). I think auto-dubbing might be more successful at allowing folks from smaller languages/communities the opportunity to gain audiences outside of those smaller languages/communities.

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.

+1 even if you don't understand the language, it's nice to hear the real voice.

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.

While I agree that good automatic translations are great, the fact that the current unconfigurable mess that doesn't even respect the user's settings (neither the settings of their Google Account nor the settings of their browser), makes it a grating experience to multilinguals, who are believed to be the majority in the world.

+1! That's a reasonable take. The takes on here saying Google is a shill for introducing this feature, that no one wants it, that it's useless, are the takes that I found frustrating in this comment thread.

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.

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