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Comment by torben-friis | Hacker News Reader

Language is one of the silliest things in modern tech.

I speak fluent English, but my native language is Spanish. I should be the most basic case of bilingualism for an app to handle - my native language is popular, English is the poster child of second language you learn for global communication, the combination itself is common as well...

The amount of stupid assumptions apps and sites make about me is mindboggling.

"Your app and OS is set to English, you watch mostly English content, you use no subtitles and your subscriptions are mostly US-based. let's give you an extremely fake dub over the content you usually watch."

Reddit also auto translate the links I enter and makes them gibberish if I'm not logged in, chagpt switches languages halfway through a message regardless of what I use...It's becoming borderline hostile.

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It's mind-boggling and insane how hostile YT became to multilingualism. You'd think that out of the hundreds of people involved in this project, at least one would've been bilingual and experienced this hostility firsthand. I can't even come up with any explanations for how this happened, except for no one important being bilingual (or even having thought of bilingual people), and/or some kind of systemic flaw that lets these breaking changes slip into the final product.

YouTube doesn't care about the languages listed in your Google account, as everything else does. It doesn't care what content you watch. The algorithm seemingly takes your display language and forces poorly AI-translated content down your throat, more often than not completely obliterating any coherence the original video had. And this change is forced upon you, you must watch it in the language YouTube decides you have to watch it in.

There is a browser extension that reverts this behavior to how it used to be and makes YouTube load the proper audio track. What happens when that stops working?

These companies are not actually diverse, even if they attempt(ed in the past) to hire diverse ethnicities.

But the strangest thing is that you don't need to be of a certain ethnicity to speak multiple languages. Sure, I think it's less likely for some average US-born employee, but I would still guess that probably >10% have got to speak a foreign language, especially since they're all highly educated people who had more exposure to other languages and cultures than the average American.

Aha! I too have seen thumbnails of videos with context clues (product brands in the thumbnail which doesn't exist under that brand in my country) yet with a video title in my native tongue, which a clear "machine translation"-feel to it.

Until I read this thread I assumed that it was the content creator doing shenanigans (low quality AI slop video mass-produced in many languages and targeting my locale with videos for my locale), but it does make so much more "sense" that it would be YT doing this.

And my reaction to those thumbnails, thinking it was the creator doing low quality AI slop, was to "reward" them with "Don't recommend this channel".

So I have been punishing innocent channels for crap that YT is doing...

Those AI translations fail all the time - I am looking at woodworking, and a "plane" gets translated variously as an "avion", a "surface", etc... and never as a "rabot".

It is "English to French" translation. Two close langs, with a humongous corpus to train on.

I'm certain it boils down to money. Someone like you (fluently bilingual) would provide the best translation but also the costliest. Every other option is cheaper, and Youtube will strive for the cheapest available.

Google Translate and Gemini are essentially free to Youtube, so why not?

The crazy part isn't that the feature exists - I'm sure YouTube wants to make foreign content available to people who don't speak that language, and of course they can't manually translate every video in the world - it's that it's mandatory.

I would buy this argument, except the cheapest thing for them would be to offer me the regular original experience in English, which is always my preferred option (maybe with some optional subs once in a blue moon, for thick accents and the like).

It’s pretty much impossible to set this preference the moment you have _something_ (a location, a keyboard, whatever) not set to the American default. And even if you do, it would then mangle Spanish content (or whatever your other language is)

Try to drop a foreign phrase into MS Word to add a little color and watch it go completely berserk.

I've been downvoted for this and I'll be downvoted again, but average user is monolingual and for them, shitty automatic translation is better than no translation. Nobody cares about the fact that a small percentage of users speak more than one language. It's mind-boggling that HN users don't understand that they're not the target audience of most major platforms.

Anyway, I recommend Revanced. It has an option to turn off both subtitles and dubbing. This makes YouTube usable again.

Average American is monolingual, anyway.

While even in America (as in USA) there is a large community of people speaking English and Spanish. And tech companies (including Google) have a lot of immigrants, who should be aware of the existance of bilinguals.

For broader America, including Canda there is Quebec with French+English. etc

Apparently about 20% of the US is multilingual (per census data). So while the median might be monolingual, it is still so large of the US as to be a market segment worth catering to.

> but [the] average user is monolingual

That's certainly true in America, but my understanding (as an American myself) is that it's not true in much of the world! In Romania for example people speak Romanian and English; in Ukraine they speak Ukrainian and Russian. I'm not sure how this nets out in terms of the overall population of technology users, but it's a large chunk of people!

P.S. For what it's worth, I downvoted you because you said "I'll be downvoted for this", not because I thought the rest of your comment was bad. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's just frustrating to see how clueless people here are on the topic of multilingualism, despite being otherwise well-rounded. They genuinely think that the reason why platforms support multilingualism so poorly is different from "market forces proved that multilingual support is not an important feature".

It could also be a market failure borne of how America-focused the big tech companies are!

Not really because in many cases American big tech replaced local solutions, so from purely economic perspective, they must've been better.

> small percentage of users speak more than one language.

Are you paid by Google to astroturf us into being accepting of their laziness? We're only asking them to allow us to specify two languages in the YouTube app, nothing more.

> Anyway, I recommend Revanced. It has an option to turn off both subtitles and dubbing. This makes YouTube usable again.

Really? I happened to check this today and found no such features.

> Really?

Yes.

It was a rhetorical question, I checked the GitHub and all. There is no such features. I don't know why you keep lying through your teeth, that's frankly disturbing and rather lame.

https://github.com/ReVanced/revanced-documentation/blob/main...

Number 5

Am I talking to AI chatbot, or a plain-old idiot?

Or to respect user language settings at all, rather than geolocate and assume.

> Nobody cares about the fact that a small percentage of users speak more than one language

Everything I can find online claims that ~40% of the world, if not more, is at least bilingual. It's not some crazy rare single-digit percentage trait. In some nations, multilingualism is near-universal. Do you think it's reasonable for a company like YouTube to deliver a frankly hot garbage experience with no opt-out to about half of its userbase, if not more? That's billions of people we're talking about here.

My advice would be to stop feeding this troll. Just look at their comment history.

This statistic is complete bullshit because it relies on self-reporting. When you ask average person "do you speak English?" they understand "can you ask in English where toilet is?", not "can you consume content in English comfortably?". Ignoring this, sure, there are some countries where true bilingualism is common, but even there, most people are effectively monolingual consumers because what happens is that they just pick one favorite language and consume most content in that language.

> This statistic is complete bullshit because it relies on self-reporting.

Do you have a source for this? I couldn't find the primary source for those numbers (everyone says 43%, quoting each other), but my assumption for anything that quantifies people across the entire planet is that it's probably not based on polling, but making statistical inferences and relying on other data from individual countries, so a mix of different things.

Regardless, even if you disagree with that number, true fluency in multiple languages is still extremely common. And it's not just countries that have multiple official languages. People from one country who live close to another country with a similar language will commonly be fluent in both. Depending on your culture, you may be exposed to English to an extent where you'll have a good understanding of it. Try talking to a Dutch person in their language without being fluent in it.

And sure, if what you're watching is news or knitting videos, you'll watch them in your first language. The reason why I watch content in another language is because there's often stuff that doesn't even exist in my own. Lots of people with bad formal English education became proficient in English because of the internet, they want to consume English-speaking content because the English internet is far larger and more international than, say, the Norwegian, Polish or Korean internet.

It's very, very common.

After watching several well-produced videos from my fellow Americans to try to learn how to hand spin, the one that made it click was a barely-edited one done by an older Chilean/Peruvian woman in Spanish.

I have an American high school language course (granted, I did all four years) level of Spanish understanding - maybe because of the language gap, I paid more attention to her motions. Either way, I think having the video in the original language made it work better for me.

Google Maps has been doing the most counterproductive thing for quite awhile now: it translates German business names. Instead of seeing "Stoff Bauer," which is the sign I need to look for while driving, I saw "Fabric Farmer," and ironically, only because I actually speak German, I was able to figure out that they had translated that rather common German family name, and what it really should be.

Excessive, compulsory auto-translation is awful.

even if average american is...

then launch that cesspool of feature in US only.

Everyone who finished highschool with me knows at least 2 languages. Anyone who wants uni knows 3 at least vaguely. And that's in a country with a single official language. There are places with 2+ of them.

60 million people in the US are spanish speakers.

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