The way these untranslate add-ons work (layman's explanation) is that they fetch the original title and audio and reinsert it, but the recommendation for the video stays in your feed. This has resulted in loads of super interesting foreign language content in my feed which is just awesome.
Cars are one of my YouTube interests and seeing loads of cool old car content from different parts of the world has been fascinating. Not only were different models popular in different places but the things people value in a car are also wildly different across the globe. And I get to listen to a cool foreign language while discovering this!
One downside is that to the YouTube algorithm, it probably seems like I absolutely LOVE this autodubbing feature, going crazy for all these translated videos. That could not be further from the truth: my youtube feed has become completely unusable without an untranslate add-on since this update.
The number of hoops you have to jump through to get results from the actual Google page when you are outside of the US is mind boggling. I don’t even know if it’s still possible.
Do you mean results in English, or results that are specifically US-centric?
What a great way to stop people ever needing to learn another language. God forbid people use their brains for anything that 30 second shorts.
It takes considerable investment and effort before you’re 25, too, you just don’t notice it because it happens slowly over a long period in school and via immersion.
I move around a lot so I’ve had to learn a few new languages as an adult - at least to basic proficiency, if not approaching fluency - and I don’t think it’s really any more difficult than it was when I was a kid, except that I now recognize how difficult it is.
Many people learn new languages all the time for a variety of reasons. In some regions of the world, it is expected of you to learn a half dozen languages throughout your lifetime.
I’m not against translating but it should not be the default in society if there is also no opt-out.
As someone who started learning a new language in my late 20s after a move across the world, I haven’t found it any more difficult than any other skill that requires diligent practice. Guitar, programming, driving; language is a skill. Since western humans tend to only learn them at a young age it can be easy to forget that.
The key word here being 'option'.
>After 25 you can’t really learn new languages without considerable investment and effort.
And by enabling this translation by default, without any obvious way to disable it, they are also making it harder for < 25 year-olds to be exposed to other languages, which will itself make it harder for them to learn them. For instance, consider the effect of TV and film dubbing on Spain's proficiency in English[0]:
«Spain and Portugal share many geographical and cultural traits. But the number of Spanish speakers is double that of Portuguese speakers. Again, maybe in part because of this, Portugal uses subtitling while in Spain television is dubbed. And, as a result, Portugal’s results in the TOEFL exams are much better than Spain’s.»
If someone from Google could explain the rationale behind forcing this on users, I’d genuinely love to understand it.
There are two potential reasons in my mind: - Youtube folks A/B tested it and it got more engagement - n/ views, time viewed per video, etc. (but were they tracking the right metrics? ie did they capture user frustration) - Some 'guru' at Youtube decided "it's good UX" and "it's what everybody wants". In such case, the damage the 'guru' is doing is unbelievable. Millions of people annoyed across the world... every single day.
The idea is great. They just botched it at the UI level.
In practice it means clicking a video you think is in your native language but it's actually in English with low quality auto-subs, but there's no reason Youtube couldn't improve the UX here, like indicate that it's been auto-translated or let you easily filter out content that's not in your language.
By doing this, Youtube has probably 10x'd available content for "dumb" ppl to watch. Respectfully, my parents are in that cohort, and I suspect my father will happily watch AI translated and dubbed woodworking channels and not care at all. He "wins" here.
I have to acknowledge that there are probably more people like him then like me who want to have Japanese videos in Japanese in my US feed.
YT needs to make it configurable and I'm fine to turn it off, but the fact that I need an extension to do so is very much lame. As well as that I'm not sure uploaders are aware of their videos being displayed in this way.
You know what's dumb, though: failing to acknowledge that the world is diverse and people have diverse needs that we can't even start to imagine.
I'm happy for your dad that AI has opened for him the gates to even more content to watch from around the world about his hobby.
Bilingual people exist and the AI translation YouTube currently uses sounds very unnatural and destroys everything that isn't voice.
Even the US, which is a pretentious bubble, has a great many multilingual people. English is by far the most common, but many people speak it as a second language or not at all.
Another issue is not all people, whether they are proficient in one language or more, speak the dominant language of the country they reside in. Which language does some geofence decide Indians speak? Do Eastern Canadians speak English or French? (Officially both, and bilingual signage is a legal requirement.)
Maybe I'm travelling in Japan and I only know very basic Japanese, but the geo-targeting decides everything should be in Japanese. Or maybe someone is immigrating to the US and doesn't speak English (which is not a legal requirement in any way). We have many non-English speakers who live in the US.
Honestly, if it gets to the point that it's providing pressure against the use of a language where it's commonly spoken, it could arguably be considered ethnic cleansing adjacent...
Nothing necessarily as long as the user knows it's dubbed and not the original, and so has the potential to judge whether the content is reliable knowing things may be off. Doing everything as instructed, with just some mistranslated units can be at best frustrating and at worst very dangerous
But is that content really watchable for them?
I don't want to completely disregard AI-generated content. Some of it can be actually good, and I use AI as a talking companion. But at the same time it's a technology that can easily be abused. And it will be abused. And we'll love it. Except those few nutjobs who resist, but nobody will care. Free speech doesn't matter when nobody's listening.
I agree, it's annoying. I speak multiple languages and like to consume the original whenever possible.
Original title: "Swedish warm foundation for the house. Full construction process"
Actual title on YouTube in Romanian: "Fond de ten suedez cald pentru casa. Proces complet de construcție"
OpenAI translation: "Fundație suedeză caldă pentru casă. Procesul complet de construcție."
The OpenAI translation is perfect. The Google one is trash. It doesn't just omit diacritics, but translates "foundation" as "fond de ten" (literally "background of tan") a term used in makeup instead of "fundație".
LLMs have enough context here ("house", "construction") to know that "foundation" refers to the term used in construction not the one in makeup.
The required settings are quite simple (a lot of social media platforms have them): Setting a list of languages that should never be translated, and setting a preferred language the other ones should be translated to.
I guess the silicon valley people who develop YouTube can't grasp the concept that there are people out there who speak multiple languages.
1. Sites/apps that automatically change language based on your location, and force that auto-translation onto you.
2. Reddit that translates reddit posts to your location based language. Those will quickly populate your search feed for almost any search you do.
To be very clear, I don’t even want to translate videos in languages that YouTube know I don’t understand. Much less in videos languages I do understand.
Also I don’t think it’s a good idea to use AI in any part of this chain unless there is user driven corrections. Seems like even big TikTok/Instagram accounts use some auto subtitling machinery and it’s invariably wrong. Why even bother? Or why not just manually subtitle if it’s a 10 second English video and the text is in English? Why use automation at all for that?
I _love_ when youtube auto-translates english titles to my native language and then asks me if I want to translate the rare comments in my native language to english.
It seem they just don't contemplate people speaking two or more languages, *even though the setting in the google account is there*.
- Searching for a guide on say a car infotainment system would be totally different here from someone explaining in the USA or germany. Now I see a ton of titles in my language, only to find out it's information is completely useless to me because a menu, button or whatever doesen't even exist.
- Recommendations on cooking advice become almost worthless since a grading system for flours is arcane, brands I've never heard of, compounded by some imperial units in the mix. A recipe turns into a research project
- when searching for non-native content I may avoid content in my language, since I know the subject is definitely not relevant anywhere near me, so perfectly valid content will be missed
Worse yet, sometimes physical products claiming to have localized manual will instead have used some very inferior version to google translate and give dangerous advice about safe handling of the device.
I haven’t watched a single Arabic video.
Any Googlers here that can explain how Google can be so bad at designing products?
Structurally: launch-dependent levels/career advancement. Design wise: massive over reliance on A/B testing. Philosophically: a company hell bent on observing, categorizing, and exploiting us in extremis in exchange for only a tiny "relevant" slice of their potential deliverable.
Because of their focus on "scale", they have never cared about any individual user. The indifference of their technical systems is absolute.
Translated subtitles are useful though, even if often very bad.
CivBase•9h ago
Zealotux•9h ago
sigio•9h ago
rjsw•8h ago
bitwize•4h ago
Version467•9h ago
I don't know who thought this was a good user experience, because it's one of the most frustrating features I've ever had to deal with. I'm german, but almost all of the things I watch are in english. So usually I will just ignore recommendations with german titles. Except I can't do that anymore, because there's no guarantee that youtube didn't randomly decide to translate the title of an english video into german. And recently, they've added auto-translated audio, which is even worse, because now I'm opening an english video and a terrible robotic german voice is talking to me and I manually need to switch to the original source.
It's also not consistent behavior. It's not like all videos on the front page are looking like they're in german. It's just some of them and afaik there's no way to tell.
And you genuinely can't turn it off completely. Incredibly frustrating and I'm just puzzled by the thought-process that lead to this decision. This would be a pretty cool feature if it was consistently applied and freely configurable.
MrGilbert•9h ago
HPsquared•9h ago
WHA8m•9h ago
Youtube is really the only website that is straight up unusable for me without a set of Addons (uBlock, sponsorBlock, Unhook).
chii•9h ago
the product manager(s) and the team who needed to show impact in their performance reviews.
rtsil•8h ago
vladvasiliu•8h ago
Now I'm not a hardcore Youtube user, but whenever I browse it, French-titled videos are in French, and the same for English.
I'm mostly using Firefox on Linux, and occasionally Edge on Windows.
estebank•3h ago
vladvasiliu•2h ago
I am also not connected to my account when I browse in Edge (it's my work PC, it also uses a separate IP), so I don't think it's related to the feature being rolled out on a per-account basis.
lloeki•7h ago
Go figure.
silvestrov•8h ago
highly likely to be monolingual people as they cannot understand you would like movies to be in any other language than your mother tongue.
troupo•8h ago
Which is insane to me. Silicon Valley is filled to the brim with multi-lingual people. And yet so many decisions that are coming out have no understanding of languages
WesolyKubeczek•8h ago
estebank•3h ago
SkiFire13•3h ago
troupo•8h ago
Which youtube decision of recent years ever thought about user experience?
It's all "company bets" and "promotion tracks".
When it was a fight against TikTok you got Shorts that you can't get rid of.
Now you probably have to "show commitment to our AI offerings" or something. So you get autotranslated videos by a team which will get 500k bonuses and will move on in a month
lloeki•8h ago
Sp you clicked when you wouldn't have, somewhere an engagement graph went a notch up, and someone will get a pat on the back.
thrance•9h ago
torlok•8h ago
WesolyKubeczek•8h ago
But I guess they see my frustration as "engagement".
ntstr•7h ago
I used to use site:reddit.com as my go to must-use keyword whenever I wanted to look for something on Google, but since they introduced automated translation in my language (French) it has become a nightmare because I would find irrelevant content written for other places even when I type my search in French. You see, they had the great idea to not only automatically translate entire subreddits and comments but also have the translated forms be indexed by Google!
So now you would try to look for comments on, for example, great retail shops for niche products and click links that talk about shopping in the USA or Canada. Hateful.
I can't really describe how much I hate this without going into the most vulgar of expletives.
site:reddit.com was the last bastion of finding things quickly on google without stumbling upon ton of markov chain / copy paste crap content. Now it's being ruined by this translation nonsense + LLM bots.
deklin•6h ago
forinti•6h ago
YouTube seems to randomly translate the titles and it's irritating.
69tg69•4h ago
grishka•1h ago
Relatedly, Google and Microsoft insist on showing machine-translated developer docs by default. A translate button is fine, but doing it by default?! I struggle to understand who thought that this could possibly ever be a good idea.