But, surely someone sane there has to realize there is a large number of users out there who speak more than one language, and don't need Google do "help" them or "guess" for what language they like more.
Annoyingly, there’s not a native way to revert the translated description and title as far as I know. And this seems to be done without the knowledge of the creator!
I watched a language-learning YouTube short today that was entirely not in English. But YouTube was automatically dubbing it into English. A commenter replied with “but why the bad ai voice?” And the creator replied “it’s not, that’s my voice”
It's a toggle in their creator profile that I believe was auto enabled at some point.
It's especially horrendous when the short has foreign language music. I was a following some Japanese cooking/baking channels some time ago, until this feature made them intolerable through the music translation.
Anyway, you can easily see wherever YouTube ruined it via this feature: it gets a small "dub" badge next to the title - and you can manually switch the audio via the gear icon... Which isn't available for shorts, so you need to open these via the regular video URL... Which is way too much effort, obviously.
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/15569972?sjid=1621...
If your IP is coming from country X, you must want the content to be served in language X.
No, there are tourist from country Z, long term resident who prefer language A and people from country X want to learn language B.
- If your browser Accept-Language say X,Y, then you must want all the content to be served in X.
No, I want my search result to be predominantly in X, but when I search for things about Y, show me language Y, and when I search for this band from country Z, please show me in language X.
As a hongkonger (zh_hk + en_gb), living in Singapore (zh_cn + en?), following JPOP. This is the daily fight I have with browser.
I would rather all application, including web app just give me the option to choose and say, interface language, english, content language, follow origin.
Can't win.
Make reasonable assumptions or provide good defaults. Make them overrideable. Make user settings stick.
I have the same problem, by the way — my phone is in English, which means I get to enjoy Apples hilarious English pronunciation of German street names while navigating.
Back in the 2000s, dutch wasn't very common but it usually was pretty good (my understanding is that one of the things that helped is that everyone followed the Microsoft style guide for dutch translations?)
Nowadays you get overly literal translations (meaning some form of MTL), translations that don't care for the length of the text (so it gets cut off with ... at the end for interface buttons) and so on and so forth. It all just reeks of automatic translation with little care put into the presentation. This is pretty much a universal experience across every single system I've ever used and why I usually just set all my devices to English. - It's simply not worth it to deal with the botched translations to try and figure out what was actually meant.
What I would like is a browser and os which allows you to set which languages (multiple) never need translating and the site sticking to that.
So for me having no,en (in the future where this works I would dare to have no first):
app is in english, has auto translated norwegian: choose english
app is in norwegian, has auto translated english: choose norwegian
app is in norwegian and english equally: choose norwegian
app is in french, has english translation: choose englishIt's like modern apps have forgotten all lessons learned about internationalization.
Same in Windows. The "modern" system apps use just one setting (Windows language) for internationalization, ignoring the old date format and time format settings. So if I set my Windows language to English, I get AM/PM and dot as decimal separator in some parts of the UI and not in others.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/...
Google is notorious for ignoring browser language preferences not only in Youtube but also in its main product, and inferring from the (often faulty) geolocation.
And for some reason, Apple/iOS doesn't allow you to set this for some system apps. For example, Music (Apple Music) app on iOS doesn't offer this option, which I desperately need because I don't want the music metadata I listened got translated.
> If your IP is coming from country X, you must want the content to be served in language X.
I would assume there are multilingual speakers in mostly every single team at YouTube. Or at the very least enough nerds who just like some random content from another country.
People who would both want their UI to be in a language A but also to consume content from languages B, C...
I do not understand how that assumption holds in any product decision except in one where the YT product teams are entirely and totally separated from the engineering teams.
But then Google serves up wikipedia articles auto-translated from English, often with made up (but plausible looking) domain terminology: "Russula cyanoxantha, ofte kjent som kullbrenneren eller spraglete russula" - No, that's not true, Google, Russula cyanoxantha may be known as the coal burner in English, but I have NEVER heard anyone call it kullbrenneren in Norwegian, and "spraglete russula" is also not something it's ever called.
And of course it weights its own AI translated garbage above the search results.
Oh, you're using Norwegian keyboard layout? Well surely you want Norwegian display text to go with that.
Oh, you're using US keyboard layout? Well surely you'll want US date and time formatting to go with that, along with the display text.
All the while ignoring the setting that's been there for ages and worked reasonably well.
Worse than that is, as you say, software that makes dumb assumptions about my language preferences. It gets especially interesting when graphic drivers translate strings like ambient occlusion, screen space reflections, temporal anti-aliasing, subsurface scattering. The result is incomprehensible gibberish - I mean levels far beyond the baseline gibberish danish already is :D
Win10 regional settings are so terrible, and it's pretty much impossible to set keyboard, date/number formatting and basically everything but display language to danish, while keeping the display language english (The King's English, thankyouverymuch). Thankfully Linux has the locale "en_DK.UTF-8" which instantly makes everything show like I want it.
One thing I've always found a bit peculiar between Norwegian and Danish computer words, is that in Danish they're often not translated but the English word is just used. My Danish family would say words like computer, download, password, cloud, software, while I would say datamaskin, nedlasting, passord, sky, programvare. And then they would mock our silly Norwegian words, heh.
A language is much more than a protocol for communication - it's culture. I'm not a purist (only a little), but I think this is a concerning development. I can only imagine how much worse it is in Copenhagen, because that's a very silly place.
Nowadays I think its more of a conscious decision many times. Like "We know someone could travel to france as a tourist, but its a small fraction of french IP addresses so screw these people". etc.
Countless times I landed on websites I use relatively frequently in foreign countries to see them in a language I don't understand, having to rely on my browser's translation functionality to find the language switcher. My operating system + browser are set to English, yet I still get served the one in the language I don't understand.
The worst offenders in my opinion are the ones assuming language based on IP for multi-lingual countries like Switzerland. People living in the French or Italian parts almost always get served the German content. It's bad UX.
But even setting the client right is not really possible. I'm danish. I understand english and german. Norwegian and swedish are similar enough to danish that I can read it without too much trouble. Websites, if they're translated at all, usually offer their native language plus an english translation. So if I visit a website in any language I understand, I'd prefer the original. But for any other language I want the english version.
If I set my accept-language to "da,en", I get a lot of horrible machine translated danish on a lot of websites. If I set it to "en,da", all danish government websites are now english. I can't win.
I think the UK is something like 9% English as a second language, and the USA is 22% ESL?
(Wnes i fy ngradd prifysgol yn Aberystwyth).
Is that really true though? I think it's a bit optimistic to say "first language". I know that many people do speak Irish, but the number of people who can speak Irish better than English is abysmal.
No Béarla[1] is one of the saddest documentaries I've ever seen. It follows a native speaker who tries to do mundane tasks in Ireland using only Irish, but can barely get anything done.
And yes, it's not exactly common but there are still people who were taught Gaelic as their first language. Some of them I consider to be friends.
Scots is a bit different, because for many speakers it's just seen as an informal register of English. My grandparents, for example, were primarily Ulster Scots speakers - they could understand English but would have struggled to speak it naturally. My own internal monologue is peppered with plenty of Ulster Scots but fowk wid luck at me quare an funny if I were to use it much in my daily life in London!
Accept-language doesn't do anything at all for google, either.
I see it as the other side of Hanlon's razor: we know there's competent people there, we should fully attribute this to malice.
Ah yes as a Korean living in Japan with locale set to English, this truly is a daily fight.
> I would rather all application, including web app just give me the option to choose
I've left websites for other competitors because they wouldn't have a button to change language.
If you have 40 million country and you have 10 mil tourists over whole year given week you might 200k users that happen to be in that country.
Even if you have another 1mil expats living in that country. it still is 35mil of people vs 1mil of people for whom "your IP is from country X you get language X" is pretty good heuristic.
That said I am also pissed off by that approach but I do understand there is much more people who happen to use only that language in that country.
Optimizing for Expats or Tourists would be stupid as those are exceptions not the norm.
Of course, I'm multilingual even if I stay at home. Do we know how many people are multilingual? About half of Europeans speak more than one language. That's hundreds of millions of Youtube users. 22% of Americans for 76 million in the US. That's just numbers from Google's own Gemini (which is doing a bit of a half-assed job). Note that all EU countries except Ireland mandate second language teaching in schools (23 out of 27 mandate at least two foreign languages); you don't need to be an ex-pat, tourist, longterm resident or second generation immigrant to be multilingual.
Not taking input from multi-lingual users is not just bad practice from Google, it's actually impressive how they manage to ignore people they probably know and are working with.
Yes, but learned at school doesn't necessarily count for much. I grew up in the UK, secondary school was post-Maastricht so I was in the EU at the time; French was mandatory, but my grasp of the language is still so bad that when I tried to say "I don't speak French" in French in front of a French person, she couldn't tell if I was trying to say "I can" or "I can't".
I have pushed myself quite a bit in other languages since school, but I'm also a nerd who likes learning for its own sake. I suspect a lot of people are only just about barely able to function in tourist settings in the languages they learned at school.
That said, auto-translation of videos is kinda an existential threat to hosting a language course on YouTube.
Ireland does mandate second language teaching in schools, it's just not a foreign language, it's Irish (separate language, not a dialect of English). And it's taught atrociously badly. The vast majority of graduates, after about 13 years of mandatory Irish classes, cannot functionally speak it.
Of all the languages spoken in the UK and Ireland that argument attracts, I've never heard anyone claim that about Irish - an actual Gaelic language.
> The vast majority of graduates, after about 13 years of mandatory Irish classes, cannot functionally speak it.
They just need to get out their word book - that's right, their focal leabhair
♫ oh get out your focal leabhair, get out your focal leabhair
and we'll have you speaking Irish in a half-an-hour
Sea means yes and Níl means no
get out your focal leabhair and we'll all have a go ♫
Many people from other parts of the world don't know it exists, so when you say "Irish language", they just think you mean hiberno-english. I've never heard anyone claim it either, just assume, then get confused in conversation until I clarify.
I don't know what their reasoning is. They can plainly see around them foreigners struggling to speak, but they somehow think that it won't happen to them?
I grew up in a country where we had mandatory lessons in a little-used local language imposed on us by politicians.
That I learned nothing isn’t the teachers’ fault - they were simply set an impossible task.
Besides that they also get German, Dutch, Finnish or Indian stuff translated that they don't understand.
I have no idea what a flight costing 781,667 blergs is, Google. Is that a lot?
If I knew what blergs are worth, I'd set my regional settings to blergs.
So you set the currency to your own. Then navigate away, then come back. Now it's blergs again.
I'd suspect it's something banal, such as: $goal --> translate by default --> enough users click through by mistake (AB test shows user interest) --> more preroll ads shown to users (AB test shows business value) --> promotion
Whether the $goal was {accessibility, show off translations, UX improvement} is quite irrelevant for a business that optimizes for revenue from ads.
Sites that use ip of origin and just assume my language are such grating experiences.
Accept language is set at the browser level, where you usually want a single default with granular per-site (or even per-content) control.
There will be whole sites and apps that I want in a specific language that aren't my first preference. E.g. I might want my news and browser user interface in English but Google Maps in a local language, Netflix in the language of the content I watch the most etc.
Reality is just too complex for a single ordered list IMHO, having the default set to whatever heuristics that best matches the site, and give a very easy, prominent and persistent way to change the language is I think the best approach.
This extension can control subtitles so maybe there is hope that this or another extension will offer this kind of fine granularity
But yeah, it's incredibly stupid.
I think that depends on the country. And maybe region of the country.
At any rate I can turn off subtitles in my YouTube - can other people not do that?
on edit: am in Denmark, I don't notice any automatic translation of the three languages I see most often - Danish, English, or Italian.
on second edit: but maybe I am just not observing it in action when it happens or maybe I don't watch the kind of videos they do it to - anyway I'd like to see it.
For the sake of completeness, this is what it looks like in the same account with 2 devices with different languages
This is a best case scenario, it's at least respecting device language* (Which isn't always the case, and the inconsistency adds insult to injury), note translation and dubbing isn't marked when clicking, and both languages are enabled on the account
PD: I take back my other comment, apparently I also get them on videos for my regular feed, apparently by now I just filter it out and ge t ocasionally angry when I realize
* But not really, United States Spanish isn't quite right, and it's jarring even when not comming from an AI Voice
As a point of anecdata, I go out of my way to avoid these, and report them any time I come across them, and now there's been a while I've not gotten them on content I want (But I do get them on some of the default feed YouTube places on home, even if I never interact with them)
I wish I could just say please never translate either of these languages, and while some apps have this many are very hostile.
I also have a weird setup where all my personal devices are in Spanish but my work devices and accounts are in English. It causes a strange mixup where I never really know what language I'm going to be served but its wrong more often than not.
- French videos auto-dubbed with AI and with the titles auto-translated in English.
- English videos auto-dubbed with AI and with the titles auto-translated in French.
- French videos not dubbed, but with the titles auto-translated in English.
- English videos not dubbed, but with the titles auto-translated in French.
- French videos kept as is.
- English videos kept as is.
Also, Youtube keeps suggesting me French accents videos, even though I never watched a similar video (but watched videos on American accents and Spanish accents years ago)
It also destroys language learning opportunities.
Google being anti user, probably so some director can boost AI numbers is pretty typical though.
It really feels like the youtube team doesn't have any multilingual experience, which would be surprised if that's the case?
And then, the translation of video titles etc. is often surprisingly bad, because (I think) they don't consider the video context / content while translating, so it almost looks like a translation-by-dictionary-lookup translation.
Most infuriating though is when you watch a video of a channel you watched for years and all of the sudden the audio is auto-translated into your primary language. So cringe.
I don't know your reality but literally anywhere in the 744 million users in Europe if you consider the technology literate average of internet users I guarantee that someone who is not even bilingual is precisely the exception.
I would hazard say the same is true in most of Asia and Africa perhaps less so in South America where Spanish/Portuguese are more monolithic.
A significant part of Africa, Benelux, The Nordics, a huge part of the indian subcontinent, most expats in any country, Canada...
Even if you live in a purely Monoglot country (And those are less common than people think), in absolute numbers it's a lot of people
I don't have any numbers but it seems plausible that the average user doesn't make an informed decision about where they consume their videos or which search engine they use. They buy a smartphone to connect to their family and friends, to learn and to use essential services.
Unfortunately the smartphone is not designed to help users with this goal. It is a medium for tech companies to shove garbage down the throats on people who are just trying to live their lives, and to perform the largest mass surveillance campaign in the history of mankind. Communication and connectivity is the Trojan horse used to sell the malware that the smartphone is.
This feature is designed for users who "don't know any better".
It's not that you have to be able to speak multiple languages, understanding several is still common.
[citation needed]
Movie companies sometimes don’t want things distributed on certain areas - ever. Like when there are different productions of the same movie for different areas.
The productions would compete against each other.
It’s one of the reasons DVD has multiple incompatible regions.
I don’t know if this is YouTube’s reasoning.
It has nothing to do with difficulties of offering translations. It's about declining complimentary ketchup squeeze on latte.
And many other sites that confuse country with language (geizhals.eu, ... etc)
It's OK if they want to offer it, but at least let me disable it for specific languages.
And for those languages which I don't understand, let me choose a default autodubbing language. Because I assume that auto-generated translations from French to English will be far better than those from French to German or Spanish.
Also, the voices they use sound like from a decade ago.
Reddit does something similar now. It auto translates posts and they show up in Google in my native tongue. Really annoying since when I search in that language I specifically don't want English sites.
Thanks to the geniuses at Reddit, I now frequently find posts on /r/de or similar German subreddits translated from my native language into one I'm worse at!
Does it actually say it is somewhere obvious? My girlfriend and I both looked something up and each got the same Reddit thread, but one in English and one in Chinese. She had no idea hers was translated.
But I also thought it was supposed to do the reverse if someone comments in the translated language, adding an original-language comment instead of a translated-language one.
It took me some minutes to realize what was happening. At first I though it was some language specific sub before too many post had strange language.
Fake culture and putting things in the a strange cultural context and trying to hide it.
The YouTube auto translation is not that. It's stilted and awkward, robotic voice with none of the context. It's not ready for release and it does a disservice to any creator that uses it because their vision is not going to be anywhere near correctly delivered.
At the very least make use of https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/...
... instead of relying on whatever stupid magic that places me in Germany when I live 5km from the border.
It can't be geoip because that IP is from a French ISP and has been in consistent use at this location for the past 5 years.
(but yeah even then it is horrible)
I live in a German speaking country, yet my native language is other and German is almost never preferred when I watch some content. All my UIs are in English.
Yet, I open a video by a Brit and he is autodubbed to German. There really isn't any similar UX decision by any other reputed company that would be comparably stupid as this. Google even has large presence in Switzerland, that makes it even more puzzling.
The user's personal computer is a personal space. You'd think that when users go out of the way to explicitly configure language and country preferences, they would respect it. Instead, everything is overridden by geolocation.
These days if there is a longform video I wish to watch, I download it. Typically I find it through other means than "recommendations" or search. YT as a platform for discovering content is becoming increasingly irrelevant.
It's a bit of an exaggeration, but it is as if a person is Lisbon would get their videos dubbed to Spanish.
There's no formalized system for writing swiss german. (We even call swiss german "Mundart", literally translated "mouth type".) Only with sms and social media written swiss german has become a thing amongst younger people.
I don't think youtube not serving content badly translated to swiss german is a problem, quite frankly I'm happy swiss german is "ours".
I just wish google realized that "German (Switzerland)" means no need to auto-correct anything to 'ß'
Disclosure: I do consider standard German a semi-foreign language.
I'd rather hear them speak in English than having them butcher the melodies of my language.
What is more complicated is more the fact that we have 4 official languages :)
The thing with youtube translated titles is that half of them aren't even propper German and half of that half is utterly nonsensical, because some English ideom has been translated too literally.
Several times per week, the video starts in English - and then after a few seconds switches to a horrible robotic French auto-dub.
Even if the dubbing became magically parfect - and no doubt AI will manage to do it (while still falling flat on its face as soon as someone is a little creative with langage or cracks a joke/wordplay), I still want to be, you know able to set a setting to enable or disable it. Crazy, right?
There are some cases where YouTube serves me Indonesian subtitles for some reason
This is a Premium account too. If the apparently best and brightest software engineers in the world can’t be bothered to fix that then how can we expect anything more?
They’re so lucky to have enough of a monopoly left over to keep all the creators on their platform while they further encrapify it, otherwise it would have died already.
Unfortunately here is. I remember around a decade ago I was buying Doctor Who DVDs on eBay. You would end up with ludicrous translations such as "Der Zeiteinmischer" for "The Time Meddler".
Here's an ebay thread with users expressing similar frustrations. https://community.ebay.com/t5/Buying/How-do-I-disable-Automa...
Let me introduce you to reddit.
It feels like they did not even test the feature before pushing it to production.
As someone who also lives in a country where I don’t speak the language (and certainly not well enough to understand tax law); having that content translated is potentially useful IFF it’s clearly labeled as such.
It's quite telling of how their developers "think" when they put the original language stream as the last one in the track list, instead of the sane first (zeroth?) position that it should occupy.
My browser states that I favour English, then French. My user profile on the website has "English" as language. Yet, when I get to the homepage, it tries to guess my language from my IP. NOOOO.
It could be system - but there is a surprising amount of people who set their OS to some language they are learning, or just English for convenience. And they do not want this to affect the web.
It could be the browser, but YouTube and most other services for that matter, are mostly used through apps.
It could be in the profile (but which one Google, YouTube, local app?)
This seemingly simple problem has an issue with discoverability.
Date formats, start of the week, 12/24h clock, auto translations, localised search results, language detection, it is all rubbish and clearly US-centric.
For all their (former) diversity dances, that company has very little to show for it.
However i haven't noticed this to be a problem with Google in general. All the Google products i've been using have been properly localised.
Inaccurate auto-captions for videos with hard coded captions probably isn't a big enough pain to warrant big investments?
Having said that I am against the automatic audio translation that some people are reporting. I have not experienced it myself but that seems poorly thought out. It should be easier for people to search through items in a foreign language but that content should be served in the content originally intended.
At least the audio translation I can turn off. I do not know how to get the actual title of a video or its description.
It's so frustrating that I've ended up just changing my UI language from English to another language so that at least those don't get butchered.
Simple - at Google, feedback from internal users is ignored.
I don't really need magic, mainly want "if language not user's language" to turn into "if language not in user's language(s)"
Haven't we learned in the last 15 years or so that options are bad for users? ;-)
Moreover, watching videos in a foreign language with subtitles in that same language used to be a popular tool for learning languages. Clearly, the proliferation of language skills is a serious danger to the market for AI generated instant translations and must be stopped at all costs.
Also, advertisers get that option, because they're the only users YT cares about.
(You don't want that distracting break in languages between revenue earning productions and embedding media fluff. I guess, in this context, the plug-in is as evil as ad-blockers are.)
In fact, there must be an incentive here for Google to auto-translate a video only when it can sell an ad in the translated language for more than one in the original.
I suppose we should be glad that they've not (yet!) gone that far, or it would become even more of an unpredictable mess from the end user's point of view.
(I can see a bright future where smart TVs come with mandatory, non-optional instant translation… and maybe, if we were allowed to dream, with realtime character replacement and background adaptation to fit the next ad context. It's the logical step forwards from colorized B/W… /s)
Two words: Preference and choice. You prefer it one way and are happy. Other prefer it another way.
The fact that they are unhappy is not that you can do what makes you happy. It is that the choice isn’t easily available to choose to do what makes them happy.
I use English while using any YT client so I didn't notice it as much. So I changed the language on my browser to German, went to a couple of American channels and now I get some of the outrage on this thread. Weirdly, some videos get their titles translated and some don't. Not only the titles but also the descriptions get translated. Honestly, I'm surprised they aren't translating the comments at this point.
I still do understand and like the feature a lot. It's a good way to push the engagement rates I guess. A simple solution would be to show a dialog with languages where the users can pick what they speak, not touch videos in those languages and translate everything else.
My response to having whole playlists effectively change language was the most reasonable one: start learning Japanese. Now I can at least read kana and get a solid chunk of titles, and I pick out phrases here and there in the lyrics now.
I can't imagine trying to search for something with a specific title and having the results screwed by bizarre machine translation.
My main point was that I like the auto-translation because information retrieval was so much better. But the intent behind the video of the uploader has to be maintained and respected.
In general, some of the loudest voices in any given community are the ones who are dissatisfied with the thing in question. So, there are many people (or at least the two of us!) who are reasonably satisfied with this feature and find it helpful.
It's honestly quite incredible.
