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Comment by veeti | Hacker News Reader

I've come across these auto translated videos while traveling, and actually found them quite helpful. Lot of local "authentic" content that I wouldn't have seen otherwise.

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Its all kinds of annoying if you’re bilingual. Youtube now autotranslates ads served in my mother tongue to English and I have not found a way to turn it off.

This is an incredibly annoying feature

I have uBlock Origin.

Set your mother tongue to some esoteric language Google has not enough training data on. Then it defaults to the original language.

Unfortunately it also changes the interface. And I would like my interface be in English.

This is how I got rid of ads on facebook!

I really hate them. Once again, Google have completely failed to consider multi-lingual people. Like Google search, even if you explicitly tell it what languages it should show results in, it's often wrong and only gives results in Russian when searching in Cyrillic, even for words that do not exist in Russian but do in the language defined in the settings.

Also the voice is pretty unemotional and nothing to do with the original voice. And it being a default that you can't even seem to disable...

Last night, I came across a video with a title in English and an "Autodubbed" tag. I assumed it would be dubbed into English (my language) from some other language. But it wasn't. It was in French, and clearly the creator's original voice. The automatic subtitles were also in French. I don't know what the "Autodubbed" tag meant, but clearly something wasn't working.

I am by no means fluent in French, but I speak it well enough to get by with the aid of the subtitles, so that was fine. In an ideal world, I'd have the original French audio with English subtitles, but that did not appear to be an option.

Recently they added a setting for default language

I dont want default language. I understand multiple of them. And it is even ridiculous that I have to set it up.

Provide option to turn on that bad quality dubbing for those few people that want it.

And for crist sake, be transparent instead of auto translating titles so I dont even know the video was not made that badly by its original author.

> I dont want default language. I understand multiple of them. And it is even ridiculous that I have to set it up.

For Silicone Valey, it is difficult to comprehend, that people may be speaking more than 1 language. That's why you get programs in other languages than intended (phone set to English - get the English version of app) or they "offer" ( ok/not now) to translate.

But I'm fluent in multiple, and wouldn't want a video in a language I'm fluent in to be shittily AI dubbed to another language.

As if that's a solution. I feel we need a "Falsehoods programmers believe about language" campaign.

Falsehoods Americans think about language.

That list would be incomplete. Americans at least don't tend to "helpfully" automatically proxy their whole site through Google Translate when they detect foreign IPs.

The most baffling thing is that we aren't talking about Hurrah-Americans here. We are talking about Google, which is full of Indians on all levels of the company. They, if anyone, should have understanding of multilingual people, and yet... such an incredible mess, which is still not fixed after many months.

I bet you never used Microsoft or Mozilla products. /s

> about: Just trolling.

Hmmmmm.

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