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.
I’ve been learning a new language, and I’m constantly encountering language-learning videos that get translated entirely into my native language, effectively useless until I revert the audio track.
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”
I've seen a bunch of different shorts which have the same AI-generated horrible voice. I always assumed this was just the author preferring to script the audio and generate the voice. Can I assume this is actually big-G auto-dubbing the short? If so, then I'm guilty of (incorrectly) complaining to the author of several shorts.
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.
I also have this problem with apps in my native language. I have my phone set to en,no because I prefer the English version over some bad auto-translated crap where some apps try to translate stuff. But then when I download a Norwegian app, then it prefers to use some badly maintained English translation instead, but here I would of course prefer the native version.
> 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.
I have all of my language settings configured to en_US. I've explicitly configured YouTube's country setting as well. I still get autotranslated titles for the local language in the search results. There are so many irrelevant results that YT search has become unusable. I'm increasingly noticing similar behavior in Google search, especially around news and current events.
I used to think this way, i.e. assuming a misunderstanding on the product development side.
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.
It baffles me that a ton of sites that have been translated into multiple languages still set the language based on IP rather than trying to determine it based on the client settings or defaulting to a set language with an easy way to switch it.
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.
I get this a lot in restaurant menus nowadays. My phone is set to English because I am more familiar with techy terms in English than my native language with its weird translations. I go to a restaurant, open the QR menu and tell them what I want. But they don't understand what I want because the menu is set to English because of my phone settings. A lot of places have English names in their regular menu (because cool) so I am not talking about speaking English to a nonspeaker. Like sometimes a wrap is called a wrap and sometimes it's called whatever the native thing is. That kind of thing.
I think you overestimate amount of multilingual users and tourists.
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.
Google as a whole is hostile to the user's browser's language settings. I have to append ?hl=en to every Google URL when connecting from an IP address that they determine is a non-English region.
> Or it's just as dumb as this was on some product managers "designed and implemented" line to get promoted?
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.
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 ).
Accept language header covers all that's needed. It's a ordered list of languages the user will understand in order of preference. You'd pick the first one as interface, don't translate anything that's in the list, and you can decide what to do with anything not in the list.
Sites that use ip of origin and just assume my language are such grating experiences.
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
I fear the future won't make us more educated but even dumber as the tech and ai tries to do all thinking for us, even thinking we don't want to learn languages as this is just one more "inefficiency" in humans to eradicate. And who is Ai trying to emulate? Right, people like these managers at Google resposnsible for such decisions (or like sama, not sure what's worse)
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.
I think statistics show that multilingual users are minority enough and most likely people who understand "help" or "guess" quit as soon when they see anything else so they don't consume the content. So YT doesn't care.
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.
My configured primary language is English, but I regularly watch contents in Chinese and Japanese, where I have sufficient mastery over to not need YouTube's subpar translation. YouTube's insistence in displaying video titles in English, starting a few months ago, and now also auto-dubbing in English, is incredibly annoying.
If only it was that easy. I'm French living in France. My account settings are in English, my browsers and apps (phone, TV) are in English but my Youtube region is France. So Youtube serves me:
- 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)
If you speak more than one language, which most non native language speakers do, you absolutely don't want your automatic translations. Hell, I don't want automatic translations even for languages I don't speak. If you want to allow me to have automatic subtitles go right ahead but forcing me to listen in one language is just absurd.
It also destroys language learning opportunities.
Google being anti user, probably so some director can boost AI numbers is pretty typical though.
No it doesn't. It's mostly based on your location in my experience. Also, there is a clear distinction between the language you want for content and the language you use for the youtube UI. They shouldn't be conflated.
It really feels like the youtube team doesn't have any multilingual experience, which would be surprised if that's the case?
Honestly, its infuriating. There are three languages that I speak and understand sufficiently well for consuming youtube videos. I don't ever want these to be translated.
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.
As a multilingual user: half the time YouTube "translation" is just gibberish, it's a total word soup. The closest thing is AliExpress listings, you know, the "Original 2025 Nintendo DS Inflatable Bedroom Wireless USB-C Potato Masher" stuff.
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.
I don't agree with the average user not being bilingual, but I do see your point about who the target audience is here.
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".
As others have commented already: Most people in Europe can speak at least two languages, and even the minority who can just speak one can typically understand several. Even my old parents, when they were alive, could understand at least three languages, and English wasn't one of them. Africa? Most people can handle several languages. South Africa, for example, has 11 official languages, people can often speak a bunch of them and understand several more.
Asia? Varies, but multi-lingual is common in many regions, though not so much in Japan.
It's not that you have to be able to speak multiple languages, understanding several is still common.
I think it's more that the YouTube developers are US Americans who overwhelmingly speak only one language and naturally assume this is the case everywhere else.
Most sources I can find claim that around 60% of the world's population is multilingual. I suspect that the number of internet users that are multilingual is probably pretty close to that.
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.
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)
Autodubbing is probably the worst feature Google has ever implemented.
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.
It is terrible and took me a while to realize what was happening. I though some videos were generated spam.
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.
I live in the Netherlands and speak German in addition to English. My Dutch is ... not that great.
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!
For reddit things get even worse: not all commenters realize that the original post has been translated, so you get a flood of comments from people commenting in their native language. Getting modern day tower of babel vibes from that.
The Reddit translations are so insanely terrible. They are so much harder to read the the original English posts. It's like every word has been translated independently
First time I saw an autodubbed video, within seconds I was literally screaming at my buddy to turn it off, TURN IT OFF! It's so unnatural and badly done, it creeps me the hell out and hurts my ears.
My friend thought a video was ai generated because it was translated to 17 languages. But the voices were natural, fit the pace of the video, and had emotion and impulse. They had been paid for.
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.
The bare minimal would be to implement the Accept-Languages http header correctly, not just a randomly picked subset in it. They cannot seem to even bother to do that.
Google has had ample time to figure out I speak more languages than Swedish. Auto-translated subtitles. Translated video titles. Reddit posts. I hate it. I hate hate hate it.
I'd say that dubbing in general is the worst ever. Where I'm from (Belgium/Dutch) nothing is ever dubbed, we just read the subtitles, much better like that.
It is insane to me that you cannot turn it off in the setting even as a premium user. Or better yet, make this opt-in for everyone.
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.
I find it puzzling that they haven't any respect for user agency in relation to cultural and language preferences. Yet, in other areas we have been browbeaten with performative endorsement of other identity politics trends.
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.
But every speaker of swiss german is expected to also speak and write standard german. "swiss standard german over swiss german dialect" is enforced in school, sometimes even during breaks.
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'
I wouldn't fault youtube on that specific point. Swiss german isn't really recognized as a distinct language, and it is pretty fragmented by regions/cantons.
What is more complicated is more the fact that we have 4 official languages :)
German is my first language, but I prefer consuming English content in its original language.
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.
It's the same in portuguese. The last few months, for every brazilian video I need to play a guessing game and decide, based on the ridiculously "translated" english title, if I really want to watch it. Since I use Firefox on Android to consume Youtube, I need to open the video and then switch to Desktop mode to be able to change the audio track to the original pt-BR. There's no such option on Youtube mobile. I have lost count how many videos I decided the hassle wasn't worth it. Great job YouTube team, you're screwing your metrics in order to provide a horrible feature multilingual users never asked for.
I prefer the same. It gets even better when youtube starts translating a video only available in your native language to English and you have no way to enable the native language audio.
I had the opposite experience. I usually watch US/english content on Youtube, and only follow one or two german channels. Anyway, a new german video came out, but instead of their regular german content, it was in english. I thought it was a bit at first or a special video they tried to do for the english market. It wasn't until I logged in through another account that I noticed that Youtube had auto-translated the video to english - without any prior notice. Such an annoying and distracting thing to do unannounced.
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?
Their language detection is really bad. I have everything set in French, I am in France, I go to watch a video by a French guy but YouTube decides to serve me the English audio track, like hello YouTube? Happens to me more frequently when I watch on TV.
There are some cases where YouTube serves me Indonesian subtitles for some reason
Remember this is YouTube that (in the web browser) refuses to make a proper setting for turning off the annoying video previews, instead having a locally-stored setting that keeps reverting to off for me (it’s either because I am logged in across devices and some off them move between three or four networks daily, or my browser security settings, or that I have a few Google accounts, or some combination of those). I end up having to re-set this stupid thing at least every week on one of my devices (sometimes on two or three).
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.
> There really isn't any similar UX decision by any other reputed company
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".
Youtube translations is such a dumb feature. I watch in german and english and have my language set to english. The english translations for german titles are most of the time garbage, because they translate names and fixed expressions we keep in english all to german. The result is just utter garbage - an complegtely unwanted. Especially since the underlying google account does support multiple languages, and I have set both languages that I speak there.
This. I could excuse them (or reddit for the matter) if their translations were in any capacity decent or at least understandable. In reality most of the time they're plain italian or french word salads. Their automatic audio translations engine could be easily renamed "Mechanical Italian Brainrot Generator".
It feels like they did not even test the feature before pushing it to production.
Reddit's one is crazy, I didn't know it exists until I was researching some tax laws in my country. I saw a Reddit thread in my language and it took me a while to realize it's a US-centric subreddit just automatically translated. Translating content about US laws makes 0 sense!
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.
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.
What drives me nuts with this is that they'll go for a weird guessing game instead of using the language settings that the browser is providing in every single request.
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.
When you look around the comments here, you will see that while people agree on how this should be handled (list of languages spoken, in some preferential order) there is no consensus of where this should list come from.
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.
Yes, I know Sundar is Indian.
This doesn't stop Google from being one of the worst major tech companies I use at internationalisation and localisation.
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.
Except both the head of YouTube and literally the CEO of Google are of Indian decent, have lived in India, and as such are almost certainly multilingual. Plus the fact that Google attracts developers from all of the world probably means very many developers at both Google and YouTube are multilingual. They obviously know how the world looks like, and still decided to do this.
I'm Indian. I can use four languages at full proficiency, and am in the middle of picking up two more. I can't explain how confusing and frustrating the past two weeks has been for me on YouTube. But there are people who handle even more languages. I wonder how they're doing emotionally! I'm confused about the planning and logic that goes into decisions like these.
Yes. In America, there are over 60 million fluent Spanish speakers, which is more than the entire population of Spain. In many southern and southwestern parts of the country you can do just about anything you need to in Spanish and being bilingual is a big plus for any kind of public-facing work.
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?
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.
I really just wish YouTube would detect captions embedded in their videos and stop displaying the same text (often incorrectly) on top of it. You do all this machine learning, why not put it into production? It's easy to cache the results and you're already scrubbing audio data and automatically doing STT, so extend it to do video to text and compare. It's not like this is an unsolved problem, even if imperfect. The audio provides a strong feedback for OCR errors
So you're saying that they should analyze both audio and video to increase the quality of the captions, if the video has hard-coded captions? I guess that's possible, just a question of effort vs. payoff.
Inaccurate auto-captions for videos with hard coded captions probably isn't a big enough pain to warrant big investments?
Agree. We build custom video analytics tools at Axon, and syncing OCR with audio-based STT isn’t rocket science anymore, especially with modern models. YouTube has all the ingredients, but seems slow to apply them at scale. Even basic alignment of audio captions with hardcoded subs would fix so much UX noise.
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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”
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Dead Comment
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?
- 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.
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.
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!
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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.
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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'
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.
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?