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Posted by doener 1 day ago

YouTube No Translation(addons.mozilla.org)
105 points | 46 comments
rdtsc 2 hours ago|
It's surprising how hostile youtube is to multilingual users. Probably all in some attempt to show off their translation capability or to improve the experience for users who may want to access content in a language they don't speak? Or it's just as dumb as this was on some product managers "designed and implemented" line to get promoted?

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.

phantomathkg 1 hour ago||
i18n and l10n are something that I have seen a company done right. It is easy developer to assume:

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.

rtpg 52 minutes ago|||
> i18n and l10n are something that I have seen a company done right. It is easy developer to assume:

> 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.

creakingstairs 1 hour ago|||
> As a hongkonger (zh_hk + en_gb), living in Singapore (zh_cn + en?), following JPOP. This is the daily fight I have with browser.

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.

pyrale 41 minutes ago|||
The worst part about it is the half-translated effect on many sites. I'm fine in my native language and in english, but having a page written in both is a purge. Add to this the disappearance of a way to select language quiclky and the web is becoming shit these days wrt i18n.
saretup 44 minutes ago|||
Doesn’t it just use the primary language you select in your account settings? Unless you’re talking about using it in incognito, in which case it does get annoying when it assumes a language based on region without asking.
hnthrowaway_423 1 hour ago|||
Right ? I am suprised that Facebook is actually the one leading in this UX: they clearly separate UX language ( singular ) and Languages which you don't need translation ( plural ).
nextaccountic 1 hour ago||
I really, really want to have a way to tell Youtube that if I enable subtitles and the content is either English or Portuguese, then the subtitles should be shown in the original language (either subtitles created by the author or auto-generated subtitles - sometimes I can't do audio), but if it's another language, it should be shown in English (again, either subtitles authored by a person, or auto-generated ones)

This extension can control subtitles so maybe there is hope that this or another extension will offer this kind of fine granularity

Kwpolska 29 minutes ago||
This used to work some time ago. They just didn't automatically enable translation and picked the default language.
pyuser583 1 hour ago||
There are some very complicated legal issues that come up with international video.

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.

bcoates 1 hour ago|||
If I remember right YouTube already provides the tools for that and you can just outright region lock an upload (possibly depending on having the right creator bits as a studio/large channel)
bl4ckneon 1 hour ago||
Yes, for CMS channels, which would be your movie studios, TV studios, etc. They have an option to block certain countries from watching it. If you are around in YouTube often enough you will find a video or two that will say something like "this video isn't available in your region/country"
numpad0 1 hour ago|||
No, the complaint is opposite of that. They're seeking ways to escape their translation efforts because it's so bad.

It has nothing to do with difficulties of offering translations. It's about declining complimentary ketchup squeeze on latte.

goku12 2 hours ago||
Kudos to YouTube for making it to the list of a rare few websites that require browser extensions to deliver a half decent user experience. What's more? YouTube also leaves the competition in the dust in the sheer number of extensions required to achieve this. I hear that you extend this privilege uniformly to both unpaid guests and the subscribers of YouTube Premium alike. I'm sure that the lack of alternatives helped you a lot in achieving this coveted status.
userbinator 1 hour ago|
I stopped using the site long ago because of what it's turned into, and only visit it for the occasional things I can't do with Invidious, yt-dlp, and a few shell scripts.

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.

chartered_stack 55 minutes ago||
I actually appreciate the YouTube's auto-translate feature a lot because it allows me to search through videos in languages I don't know but still like to view videos and listen to videos in. For example, I listen to a lot of city pop and anime title songs on YouTube and a lot of them have titles in Japanese only. I absolutely would not find it as easy as I do to search through this content and listen to the music if the auto-translation feature did not exist. It just makes it easier for people who don't know the language to view videos in that language. Sure the translation quality might not be the best but it makes search a whole lot easier. This is why I find some of the comments on this thread surprising.

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.

rtpg 53 minutes ago||
I do not understand how this got rolled out. Surely there are _loads_ of multilingual people working at YouTube. How is there not at least an option to flag multiple languages that you speak?

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.

charcircuit 24 minutes ago||
It got rolled out due to how MASSIVE the bounce rate is if the video is in a language users don't understand. I can easily see this on average providing a better experience and lead to less people bouncing. The false positives are not enough to counteract it.
rtpg 23 minutes ago||
Just feels relatively easy to change the language preference to be a multiselect though.... like ignoring user backlash, I'd assume _internal users of YT_ would just get extremely annoyed.

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)"

eCa 26 minutes ago|||
> This is why I find some of the comments on this thread surprising.

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.

supriyo-biswas 48 minutes ago||
> This is why I find some of the comments on this thread surprising.

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.

tilsammans 30 minutes ago||
I can recommend the DeArrow extension for this. It has an option to always show the untranslated title. Plus, it has the intended features such as thumbnail replacement and crowd-sourced titles. DeArrow works in Android Firefox.

It's unfortunate that YouTube is only usable with these extensions, but here we are.

tobi_bsf 30 minutes ago||
It’s unbelievable how broken YouTube is when it comes to language. I’m German. I want to see German content in German, and obviously I want to see English content in English. How is this not possible—especially when it worked perfectly for years? Is there a Chrome Variant of this?
RamRodification 22 minutes ago|
If you use Chrome, you are at the whim of the same people who are messing up the platform in the first place anyway. You should probably see if you can transition to Firefox or some other non-Chromium browser.
oc1 1 hour ago||
So Google assumes that its user only speaks one language and needs translation for everything else. Is this the educational standard in America?
kalleboo 1 hour ago|
What's crazy is the US actually does have a decent proportion of multilingual speakers thanks to its history of immigration (a quick search reveals 20% of American residents are bilingual). Even Google staff should be a pretty multicultural bunch of people as they recruit globally.
simongray 40 minutes ago||
I mean... 20% is not really a lot. It's probably a lot closer to 100% in most countries of the world.
oc1 1 hour ago||
Reddit is the worst offender. I really wonder what goes through the mind of the management clerks at these companies.
userbinator 1 hour ago|
I really wonder what goes through the mind of the management clerks at these companies.

"More $$$!!1"

0wis 51 minutes ago||
Yeah, short term. Because power users that are used to switch between languages using internet slang do not like half baked polished translation in their IP-location language. So they leave. Remain mainly low quality users who couldn’t or didn’t wanted to switch between languages. A more powerful forever September again.
vhcr 33 minutes ago||
Google is the worst when it comes to i18n, I speak both Spanish and English, it translates reviews automatically to English, but at the same time will show me content in Spanish when I searched for something in English.
seydor 39 minutes ago||
i dont mind the others, but the automatic audio switch is very offensive to the creators
doener 1 day ago|
Via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44413749
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