Anybody knows the business reason for this feature to exist? most people here and in other places are incredibly frustrated with auto-translate and the inability to turn it off. I include myself in that bunch.
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.
Well, surely the idea is that anyone can watch any video in any language. Especially enabling the non-English-speaking world to consume the much larger corpus of English-speaking content.
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.
If you can't turn it off, it destroys the platform as a host for language courses. I'm a native English speaker, I want the German language stuff to be presented in the original German as a way to learn German. I don't want the English stuff dubbed into German, because my German isn't good enough for e.g. PBS Space Time in German.
I think the idea is to eventually get machine translations just generally work, by start shooting in the general direction and pushing forward / throwing solutions at the wall and seeing which sticks. They must really not like how YouTube cross-language viewership currently work.
You gotta remember that "think of the average person, and then remember 50% are dumber than that".
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.
I've disabled dubbing on my channel completely. I think the world was a better place when people made an effort to learn languages, and making material in any language available in any other removes some of the magic from the world.
Most Americans speak one language. Therefore American product designers think everyone speaks one language and only ever wants to hear everything in their one language...
I agree, it's annoying. I speak multiple languages and like to consume the original whenever possible.
Funny thing is that people are complaining with channel creators. Was in a discord where the moderators desperately asked people to explain it to them because people in English speaking countries most likely do not have this terrible experience and don't understand the rage.
I wouldn't mind and I would actually prefer if things were translated correctly, adapting to local slang, cultural references and the likes. As of now translations are weird if not outright cringey. This is a problem with LLMs in general (probably because they're trained mostly on English data), although to a lesser degree, but enough that I have to correct them daily.
My experience with LLMs (OpenAI) is that it translates Romanian very well (including local slang), but that Google Translate (which I assume is not LLM-based) is very bad. Take for example this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azwUg6cP9BQ .
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.
Maybe youtube push audience to view auto translated/dubbed foreign language content from regions where they don't have to pay out to creators, or pay as much. TBH the more content I can view the better, just give me a toggle to set default language and a button to native video language.
- some non-guru added a potentiality useful feature, but since there is no strong engineering culture around UI quality (which also translates into inability to do proper A/B or any other testing you capture the dissatisfaction in relevant metrics), the pain persists
It's extremely sinister. The grand prize is feeding people AI-generated content, and completely removing the human factor. Many platforms started as social media, but converted into content delivery platforms. Which is cool, except content creators can be problematic. If you remove them out of equation, you basically get audience to watch whatever slop you want them to watch, with zero human interaction at all. Spotify is already taking serious steps by promoting AI-generated music. In this context, forcing AI-generated translations onto people is a step towards getting them used to listening AI-generated voice. And you can market this easily by saying "we just want people to have more cross-cultural communication, no evil here".
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.
AFAIK it's up to the video owner to choose whether or not they enable these translations. When I found this out, I lost respect for so many creators, because they turned on this shitty feature.
I have been using an untranslate add-on like this one and have been absolutely loving it. Since YouTube has been AI translating video titles and dubbing contents it has been suggesting foreign videos in users' home feed.
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.
Unbelievable that YouTube has not made this feature configurable. I am a language learner and use YouTube to find target language content. It’s very difficult now because you can no longer trust the title of the video to tell you what language it was intended for. Would have been very simple to add a settings toggle. This is one of the worst app inconveniences I’ve come across in recent years.
This is what baffles me the most. It's not just that they're foisting machine translation on people to boost some nonsense KPI, but that they're assuming that everyone speaks only one language. Tech is awfully hegemonic, sure, but it is unimaginable that only oblivious monolingual people worked on this feature. Did they just ignore internal complaints about this before they shipped it? How does a feature even get built like this?
most open source clients allow you do pick the language and subtitle just fine. youtube backend is pretty decent, despite the frontend team being there just to add ads.
i recommend "PipePipe" on android.
if you are waiting for them to add that feature on the native player, remember google haven't added a single feature to gmail app besides reading email... you cannot even create a filter.
Google has always been a pain when it comes to internationalisation.
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.
Every time I find a video that was shot in my mother tongue auto-translated into English I want to bang my head against the wall. I've told Google in multiple ways that I'm multilingual and it just doesn't get it. It's worst on mobile, where you can't switch the audio channel to the original sound.
Respectfully, at this point, do we need Googlers to explain?
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.
After 25 you can’t really learn new languages without considerable investment and effort. Translating is the only option for the vast majority of people.
> After 25 you can’t really learn new languages without considerable investment and effort.
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.
This is a misleading take. Do you consider the decade of language “learning” that a child does before they are “fluent” to not be a considerable effort?
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.
>Translating is the only option for the vast majority of people.
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.»
Not true at all. I've learned one language after I hit 39 and started leaning another when I hit 45, 7 months in learning it ~15 min a day and I'm bordering B1 level.
I am not alone in saying that I am a product of learning another language after 25, far after 25. It takes work for sure, and effort. But you're missing the point in that YouTube has now made that level of effort that needs to be committed, impossible.
One thing this kind of thing severely hurts is a lot of devices, services are affected by local laws, units, concepts, brands sometimes severely altering their function.
- 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.
- 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.
This is so annoying. I can't believe they couldn't understand this, and there are many multilingual people.
YouTube settings are notoriously volatile even on the same device and being logged in. Subtitles are enabled every other day all of a sudden without any need (even for my natural language content).
Since they rolled out the auto-trabslation thing the same happens, I have to switch to original English every few days.
Readit News
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.
But is that content really watchable for them?
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.
I agree, it's annoying. I speak multiple languages and like to consume the original whenever possible.
Dead Comment
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.
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.
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.
i recommend "PipePipe" on android.
if you are waiting for them to add that feature on the native player, remember google haven't added a single feature to gmail app besides reading email... you cannot even create a filter.
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?
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.
Logged into Twitch in Ukraine once, now Twitch fills my recommendation with _russian_ channels.
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.
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]:
[0] https://www.gwern.net/docs/culture/2018-micola.pdf- 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.
This is so annoying. I can't believe they couldn't understand this, and there are many multilingual people.