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Comment by CivBase | Hacker News Reader

I didn't know video translations were a thing. Is this not configurable?

Surprisingly, it isn't. You can change the language in your google account and it will take that into account for what to translate and into what language, but you can't turn it off completely.

I don't know who thought this was a good user experience, because it's one of the most frustrating features I've ever had to deal with. I'm german, but almost all of the things I watch are in english. So usually I will just ignore recommendations with german titles. Except I can't do that anymore, because there's no guarantee that youtube didn't randomly decide to translate the title of an english video into german. And recently, they've added auto-translated audio, which is even worse, because now I'm opening an english video and a terrible robotic german voice is talking to me and I manually need to switch to the original source.

It's also not consistent behavior. It's not like all videos on the front page are looking like they're in german. It's just some of them and afaik there's no way to tell.

And you genuinely can't turn it off completely. Incredibly frustrating and I'm just puzzled by the thought-process that lead to this decision. This would be a pretty cool feature if it was consistently applied and freely configurable.

To add to that, the german translation most of the time is absolutely horrible and more clickbait then the original wording.

It should really be an option in the advanced search, or be able to say something like lang:de

I'd love to have a robotic german voice. All I get is the clickbait MrBeast TikTok voice. I get a real reaction when I hear it. I try so hard to avoid the current social media content. It's unbearable. The shock is even greater when I do stumble across it.

Youtube is really the only website that is straight up unusable for me without a set of Addons (uBlock, sponsorBlock, Unhook).

> I don't know who thought this was a good user experience

the product manager(s) and the team who needed to show impact in their performance reviews.

I'm in France, but my Google, browsers and devices languages are English. So Youtube randomly auto-dubs (and auto-translates the title of) some French videos into English, and some English videos into French. But they're never the same videos depending on the devices or the browsers. However, the automatic subtitles during the preview remain in the original langage.

I'm in the same boat (living in France, browser and google account configured to use English) and I've never noticed this.

Now I'm not a hardcore Youtube user, but whenever I browse it, French-titled videos are in French, and the same for English.

I'm mostly using Firefox on Linux, and occasionally Edge on Windows.

Do note that when rolling out features like these, they geoblock them, even on a per run basis, so it might be happening a lot throughout the world but it just hasn't reached your country. For an example, mobile YouTube in the US lets me minimize the video and multitask while still seeing a picture-in-picture window and the audio, while as soon as one lands on France that feature gets immediately disabled.

I've heard about different features in different regions, but GP is also in France.

I am also not connected to my account when I browse in Edge (it's my work PC, it also uses a separate IP), so I don't think it's related to the feature being rolled out on a per-account basis.

I'm in France, my devices are set to en-GB, I've watched only English videos (plus the odd French one) yet youtube decides to auto translate audio in German and lately in Spanish.

Go figure.

> thought-process that lead to this decision

highly likely to be monolingual people as they cannot understand you would like movies to be in any other language than your mother tongue.

> highly likely to be monolingual people

Which is insane to me. Silicon Valley is filled to the brim with multi-lingual people. And yet so many decisions that are coming out have no understanding of languages

I wouldn't be surprised at all if they one day decided that to have an experience of having no user content automatically translated, you have to pay for the privilege. Call it a multilinguality tax.

Even for the monolingual Google employees it's not uncommon for them to travel to other locales, even as part of their job, so they would be on the receiving end of this "experience" too. We've had 2 decades of experience with this being an issue. One would think that they'd incorporate this "edge case" into their design process matrix by now.

Moreover I could still prefer movies in my native language *but properly dubbed by some voice actors*, not by some random AI that's going to mess up all the context.

> I don't know who thought this was a good user experience

Which youtube decision of recent years ever thought about user experience?

It's all "company bets" and "promotion tracks".

When it was a fight against TikTok you got Shorts that you can't get rid of.

Now you probably have to "show commitment to our AI offerings" or something. So you get autotranslated videos by a team which will get 500k bonuses and will move on in a month

> Except I can't do that anymore, because there's no guarantee that youtube didn't randomly decide to translate the title of an english video into german

Sp you clicked when you wouldn't have, somewhere an engagement graph went a notch up, and someone will get a pat on the back.

I am Russian but am also fluent in English so I watch videos in both these languages. This automatic translation doesn't happen that often with my usage of YouTube, but when it does, it frustrates the crap out of me. So yes, I did look for a setting to turn it off, but didn't find any.

Relatedly, Google and Microsoft insist on showing machine-translated developer docs by default. A translate button is fine, but doing it by default?! I struggle to understand who thought that this could possibly ever be a good idea.

You'd guess so but no. If you're bilingual you have to choose one language, and videos in the other will get this ridiculously bad literal auto-translation treatment. Pure insanity, and something that makes me mad daily.

Apparently not, or the setting is not easily accessible, and it baffles me it's the case and someone at YouTube probably is proud of it on top of getting their promotion for such a terrible feature.

On desktop you can at least change it at runtime (like auto-dubbing), but on mobile they have made this completely impossible. I keep running into (originally) german video's that have been auto-translated to english for me, which I really dislike, since I can perfectly understand german. There's no way to disable this and just get subs only (which can be toggled on/off)

I thought that yt-dlp uses the mobile interface, it shows the different language options and identifies the original one, the official mobile player must be making the choice of which one to use.

I have never experienced this, but then again I'm on web. Haven't faffed with the YT mobile app since I put GrapheneOS on my phone 3 years ago.

As a polish YouTube user who wants to watch content in both languages, it's an infuriating no. YouTube started translating titles recently for me, and the translations are pure nonsense. I'm not exaggerating, it's dumb word for word translation with no context. I have to reverse engineer titles now. Even more recently they turned audio translation on too with the most ear piercing voice possible, but that can be turned off. Title translation can't be turned off.

Yup. I look up videos with Polish titles precisely because I want local content made in Poland telling about things specific to Poland, not some other stuff which turns out to be in English made for other locales.

But I guess they see my frustration as "engagement".

> because I want local content made in Poland telling about things specific to Poland,

I used to use site:reddit.com as my go to must-use keyword whenever I wanted to look for something on Google, but since they introduced automated translation in my language (French) it has become a nightmare because I would find irrelevant content written for other places even when I type my search in French. You see, they had the great idea to not only automatically translate entire subreddits and comments but also have the translated forms be indexed by Google!

So now you would try to look for comments on, for example, great retail shops for niche products and click links that talk about shopping in the USA or Canada. Hateful.

I can't really describe how much I hate this without going into the most vulgar of expletives.

site:reddit.com was the last bastion of finding things quickly on google without stumbling upon ton of markov chain / copy paste crap content. Now it's being ruined by this translation nonsense + LLM bots.

Both duckduckgo and brave search have reddit index. Not as much complete, as google sometimes, but at least without this nonsense.

Of course not. Because the decision makers at Google can't fathom that anybody in the world might be bilingual.

Nope. I follow channels in English, Russian, Portuguese, and Spanish.

YouTube seems to randomly translate the titles and it's irritating.

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