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Comment by WA | Hacker News Reader

I love YouTube, so many things to learn. But their recent push to just ignore people capable of speaking two or more languages with their auto-translated bullshit and no way to turn it off makes me use YouTube way less.

It’s a bummer that nobody there seems to realize this. They only see a very dumb metric. Probably something like "did this German dude watch at least one Spanish videos, because we auto-translate titles and voice". It feels disrespectful.

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"to just ignore people capable of speaking two or more languages"

I'm terribly annoyed by this, and even more so with their latest push to translate the titles, so now you have to click and listen in on the video in order to know which the original language is.

I speak 3 languages, and I want the title and voice to be in the original language. And I won't bother nor would settle with watching an AI translated video even if it is translated from a language which I do not understand. Then I simply do not want to see that video.

Me too. I hate the auto-translation feature. Both on YouTube and other websites that force it on you, such as the new Reddit (I'll just stop using Reddit when they turn off Old Reddit).

Likewise. Reddit just took the preference for old UI away on mobile for my account (seems to be some sort of testing they are doing maybe?). The new UI is jarring an not useful to me. And "old*" always seems to have a broken failure mode, that some links within reddit default to new.

I strongly advise any 3rd party app (I use Relay for Reddit) and it costs me $3/mo for decently heavy usage. About half of that goes to API fees and half to the developer. I consider that fair given the excellent features and lack of ads

And if paying for reddit is unacceptable, it's easy to get it for free.

Either use one of the still-supported third party apps with an accessibility exemption (RedReader for Android or Dystopia for iOS), or use any of the classic 3rd party apps with your own API keys - which you can get for free, if you mod your own subreddit. Takes 5 minutes to set up.

It isn't a feature, at least not for users. I strongly suspect youtube's autotranslate has more to do with regulatory compliance and content moderation. Rather than having people who speak X/Y/Z languages, they want each every video to be translated into English by default so they can be feed more easily into the the system that vets content. Having translated and non-translated copies floating around is probably seen as a needless complication.

Once a monopoly has been established, the next step is to actively make the product worse in order to either reduce costs or push users towards premium features.

I speak at least 3 languages at a native level. Google's autotranslate 80% of the time selects a language I'm not just unfamiliar with, but can't even read due to the writing system difference (i.e. sudden arabic appears).

Considering I'm using it with an account that is about 20 years old now, that gave Google all of the permissions in the world and has all the possible data one might need to make the conclusions on which language I prefer, it is absolutely absurd that it cannot make a solid guess.

It’s typical Google… “here’s the 80% solution that will never go beyond 90%… NEVER… you got that? Stop asking!”

My favorite is Google street view for my EU account translates streets in any random EU city to Japanese. Because why not?

As another multilingual person, I keep getting reminded how bad software "features" can be for us. First, from early computers up to at least the Windows XP era, things sucked due to code pages and all that, but that was understandable, technical limitations after all. Now things suck due to what's supposed to be convenient UX.

Google Chrome broke Ctrl-F functionality for my native language ages ago and it's still broken because the breakage is apparently by design.

The Amazon website for my country appears to mostly auto-translate the English product pages into the local language. Product titles sometimes mean totally ridiculous things because of course the translation is poor.

Nobody cares about the Accept-Language header. Way too many websites like to use GeoIP and switch to the local language. Sometimes the geolocation is wrong, sometimes their location-language mappings are, and even when everything is working "correctly" it's a pain if I'm traveling. I have my browser set up with a correct Accept-Language list, but during travel I definitely see websites switch to a language I can't read.

Then of course there's the huge problem, related to autodetection, that you cannot deduce a user's language from their residence. Countries don't have a surjective mapping onto languages.

Why is ctrl-f broken?

Because it ignores diacritics. Searching for ā will find a, searching for š will highlight s. This may make sense for some languages where diacritics are used sparingly to indicate an aspect of pronunciation, but in my language and many others diacritics are used for entirely different letters. The letter ā is not a. Treating them as equivalent makes as little sense as treating e and o as equivalent would in English.

If I'm trying to find kāzas (wedding) in a page, I will get hits for kazas (goats). If I'm looking for šauš, a letter sequence that words about shooting begin with, I will also get hits in šausmas (horror) or sauss (dry). It's nonsense. Windows 3.1 notepad.exe could find the actual word I entered in a text file (though the input required setup), the dominant browser in 2025 cannot do that and finds entirely unrelated words because an English speaker has decided they're visually similar.

There is a simple fix to disable auto dubbing.

Go into your Google account settings, under General, then add any languages that you watch YouTube videos in. I did this for Spanish and all my Spanish videos stopped getting dubs and translated titles.

This only works if you login to YouTube, something I will never do.

They still track you? Is there much of a difference? Get an account you only use for YT, I can't imagine the difference in data leaking will be that much greater if they track you just by IP/other fingerprinting vs a session?

You would need a Google account and that requires another mobile phone number burned.

You used to be able to make a google account without a phone number through Android TV. Not sure if that still works.

Google requires a phone number?

Only if you use a bad / risky ip or browser.

What's a bad browser?

What about video titles themselves? It's very annoying.

Didn't work for me, at least instantly. Maybe it takes a while to process through their services. No idea

Doesn't always work, I irregularly get autodubbing on certain creators, like Mark Robber

Thanks, I went there and added spanish since google and youtube were auto translating some stuff for me lately out of nowhere and I saw that there was a language already added for me by google, Uzbek. WTF?

Err, from a quick check, this might actually work. Thanks I guess, but how come this isn't an easy option in the YouTube UI?!

It's especially annoying when you're searching for things that are done very differently in different parts of the world. No, I don't want to learn how to build walls or wire up electricity from e.g. Americans.

Watching any dubbed video is a big no for me. You lose ALL original expression, this was already the case with TV dubbing and it's far worse with anything auto generated. People with accents get translated poorly at best, resulting in garbadge.

The excuse is "most people want it so we force it", hooray for the dictatorship of the masses (by assumption, I've seen no research papers on the matter published by any platform).

It unfortunately could be true. I mean I hear people in my own family listen to the always same sounding auto generated narrator voices on YouTube and it has me thinking: "Oh my god why do you even listen to this crap???" and the portrayed ideology that comes along with such content is very questionable as well. Usually some low effort (a)social drama shit. It has zero worth. No, it is net negative! But apparently people watch or listen to that crap.

And so we see it playing out over and over again. Dumb masses creating market incentives for bullshit products and product decisions, ruining everything. If you want it with a pinch of capitalism critique: Oh right capitalism makes it so that we get the best products!!! lol

I was so confused by this when it first happened to me....

Watching quite some youtube content, and more than willing to pay any content provider for a worthy dose of content... I refuse to hand youtube any money and will happily play the adblocker cat and mouse and use clunky scripts to remove shorts. Starting to archive the most interesting channels myself. Thanks yt-dlp.

so many websites do this. ebay is another offender, where if you buy international items and speak english, it just gets in the way and introduces mistakes, which is especially bad if you're about to pay money for something. And of course, no way to turn it off.

If I click I’m not interested on every short presented to me and I’ve never watched a short, why can’t YouTube get the point? At least give us the option to remove them. I don’t deal with the translation issue but not giving you the option is what is beyond frustrating for me.

if your on firefox or one of its clones, firefox can auto run javascript scripts to remove shorts with the extension Greasemonkey, scripts can be found at 'the greasy fork'. there is also a decent youtube abdroid app called litube which can be found on f-droid which has a built in option to remove shorts (among other great options)

If you're using ublock, you can remove elements on webpages, including the area where shorts are on the YT pages. It's what I did on my mobile to stop watching them.

It took a little while but YouTube has stopped recommending shorts after doing exactly this. They still appear in my subscription feed but it’s less bothersome because they’re from channels I actually watch.

You can use unhook or similar extension

No, you don't understand! Being interested in anything works only in one direction, and that is the direction of getting you to engage with content that brings ad money!

This feature is so annoying. YouTube is always trying new stupid features that I wonder who they make sense to. The hype thing now, the games, I wonder for who are these things useful and if it's relevant in any sort of metric. I use unkook on desktop and Newpipe or my phone for a more minimal watching experience now

What's even more bullshit is that this is easily fixable on their side without impacting the goal of the feature. They just need to take into account all the languages of the user, not just the first one.

I've even seen it happening on pure music videos. It was the pinnacle of how brainlessly this feature was implemented.

A similar case: for those who haven't seen it, Jimmy Kimmel's "Unnecessary Censorship" videos are regular videos with added bleeps to make it sound as if the person is talking about something censorship-worthy.

YouTube auto-translates these videos, with the end result being a random toss between the original uncensored speech, the modified speech with some sex term added in there (and unbleeped!), and random nonsense - all of it read in a robotic monotone voice.

The end result is completely unwatchable, except perhaps as a dadaist experiment. I can't understand how someone hasn't noticed it yet.

I currently dislike and comment every video that has out dubbing enabled. I hate this approach but it is the only way to somehow make this awful feature more visible.

Yeah this is infuriating. I read 4 languages and now I'm left trying to reverse-engineer/guess what the title I'm reading was supposed to mean.

Add on top of that googles persistent (14 years and counting) inability to decide which of the three countries I've lived in they attribute my account to (sometimes it still opens maps centered on Stockholm 12 years after I left) and I understand why I watch way less video these days...

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