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.
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.
It doesn't work, you can set all the languages you speak on your Google account settings, and Youtube will still change every video title and audio track to either your default language on settings, or your system language. At this point I don't even know what stupid decision between the two above the Youtube backend is choosing.
> 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.
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.
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 ).
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
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.
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)
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"
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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)"
> 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.
> 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.
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.
This change has really been annoying me and as far as I tested, no extension worked. Quick look through network activity and it confirmed that it was done server side, no original titles were supplied anywhere. Only option was display language and titles were pre-translated to it. Just give me option to see original content, that is why I'm here
I've just installed this extension, and confirmed that -- at least for now -- it works. The translated tiles will be flashed first, then replaced by the original title.
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.
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.
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.
I feel like its profoundly American to assume everyone wants to see everything in one language.
I regularly consume content in two languages, my partner 3, and many of my friends are in the same boat. Please either allow me to just blacklist languages to not translate automatically or always keep content in the original language but allow changing after engaging with it. Its insane that this requires an extension for a company with as much resources as google.
The translations of video titles are absolutely atrocious and rarely mean anything near the intent of the original title.
I‘m German, watching a German creator in a German-language recording.
Only that YouTube decides to use their Mickey Mouse sounding AI voice to deliver an English audio track. Not every time, but at least a third of the time. I have to hunt for the audio setting each time, because you cannot turn off AI voices permanently.
I only love it when their Mickey Mouse sounding AI voice turns ads into a real clown show.
Imagine how they spent big money developing a slogan for their brand or product and then AI comes around with a near literal translation that makes no sense whatsoever and that is what people hear.
That is the only positive side, otherwise it is what you wrote. A real pain.
Automatically translated titles are often just wrong and misleading, and there is no way to turn this "feature" off.
If you understand more than one language, you'll get half of the videos sloppily translated for no reason. There is no way to tell YouTube not to do this for specific languages.
I guess this extension is really aimed at multilingual viewers who don’t want English (or any language they already know) automatically translated into their native tongue.
A better solution would be a ‘blacklist’ of languages you understand—so YouTube only auto‑translates from languages you don’t speak, and always leaves familiar languages in their original form.
I don't know, maybe I didn't look hard enough but the last time it happened to me I couldn't find a way to hear the original.
It was a video in French over accents, so the automatic English translation kind of made it useless. I'm French anyway, why translate it to English? I don't even live in an English-speaking country either (not that translating to Dutch would have been better).
For example if you listen to music in a different language you may be familiar with the foriegn name of a song, but not the translation of it. This makes things confusing.
Also for the sound track sometimes there isn't even an option to disable it depending on what experiment or client you are using.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
This extension can control subtitles so maybe there is hope that this or another extension will offer this kind of fine granularity
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 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.
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 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.
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)"
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.
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 unfortunate that YouTube is only usable with these extensions, but here we are.
"More $$$!!1"
I regularly consume content in two languages, my partner 3, and many of my friends are in the same boat. Please either allow me to just blacklist languages to not translate automatically or always keep content in the original language but allow changing after engaging with it. Its insane that this requires an extension for a company with as much resources as google.
The translations of video titles are absolutely atrocious and rarely mean anything near the intent of the original title.
If I don't want the translated sound track there's a button right there in settings to change it. Why do I need this extension?
Only that YouTube decides to use their Mickey Mouse sounding AI voice to deliver an English audio track. Not every time, but at least a third of the time. I have to hunt for the audio setting each time, because you cannot turn off AI voices permanently.
Tell me again how I‘m wrong.
Imagine how they spent big money developing a slogan for their brand or product and then AI comes around with a near literal translation that makes no sense whatsoever and that is what people hear.
That is the only positive side, otherwise it is what you wrote. A real pain.
If you understand more than one language, you'll get half of the videos sloppily translated for no reason. There is no way to tell YouTube not to do this for specific languages.
It is beyond annoying.
A better solution would be a ‘blacklist’ of languages you understand—so YouTube only auto‑translates from languages you don’t speak, and always leaves familiar languages in their original form.
It‘s even the other way around!
It was a video in French over accents, so the automatic English translation kind of made it useless. I'm French anyway, why translate it to English? I don't even live in an English-speaking country either (not that translating to Dutch would have been better).
>"Why would I want this?"
Also for the sound track sometimes there isn't even an option to disable it depending on what experiment or client you are using.