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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 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

What is it with Youtube and adding things no one asked for? I especially dislike when they make it default, so I have to figure out how to disable new features. My browser language is EN, my preferred language in YT settings is EN, I live in a European country, yet, videos get translated into Arabic? What the hell Youtube. Why can't I just visit your platform, look up videos I am interested in and watch it.

The old Youtube was way nicer, it felt snappy, easy to interact with and didn't have all that bloat we have today. I also miss when the ads where a popup at the bottom of the video instead of having to watch double ad segment every 5 minute.

Thanks for sharing this, this type of hostile behavior from YouTube is terrible, this should be opt in. I'm currently using YouTube Anti Translate [1], which is also open source [2]. Not sure if this one has some advantages, will check it out.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-anti-...

[2] https://github.com/zpix1/yt-anti-translate

the youtube translations aren't really good either. i'm constantly puzzled by videos with absolutely nonsensical titles until i remember that it's probably auto-translated and have to work out what the original meaning was.

for example, "more plates more dates" has been translated to "Mehr Teller mehr Termine".

not allowing this feature to be disabled is such an user hostile decision.

On the topic of multi-lingual - I frequently use airplay to cast to my apple tv from my laptop but a large number of videos now have alternative language tracks that apple decides to play and there's no way to change it. No language tracks show up. Worse is it changes language tracks after a few seconds.

Any have any idea how to fix this?

As a person with a YouTube channel with most Italian content, and only coding content in English: as it is today, it is horrible. But if they fix it to the stop AI standards of voice translation, it will be a game changer. I'm referring to natural voice (matching the original one) lips sync, and there will no longer be language barriers on YouTube.

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.

The worst part of this so-called “feature” is when very diligent creators from non-English-speaking countries already present in English language. But YouTube just assumes it's in their native language, so you have this horrible AI voiceover by default instead of their voice or VO artist that they use.

Standard American thing - thinking everyone speaks only one language, and that language being the language of the country you live in.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

It is incredible how many addons I need to make YouTube usable. Here's my list (all Firefox):

- uBlock Origin - ad block

- SponsorBlock - to skip in video ads (some other nice features like highlights too)

- YouTube Row Fixer - for the tiles to adjust to the window

- Return YouTube Dislike - self explanatory

- YouTube No Translation - thanks for the suggestion!

So Google assumes that its user only speaks one language and needs translation for everything else. Is this the educational standard in America?

YouTube on my phone automatically replaces English audio with machine-generated Japanese audio. YouTube on my desktop computer automatically replaces Japanese audio with machine-generated English audio.

It's honestly quite incredible.

This is such a Google thing. I'm browsing from a German IP address, have my language set to English only and my region set to the US. This is still not enough for Google, and Youtube by extension, to not show me German search results. It is honestly incredibly frustrating. Same goes for the trending page on YT. This appears to only be based on your IP address.

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 wish there were a YouTube app with this + no reels, I have YouTube premium, I am already paying, stop forcing stuff on me.

It's embarrassing that something like this is needed. For some reason Youtube has always been weird about languages. They have language and location information, yet they won't let you search by language, will return other languages when you search, won't search by location, won't default to another language in videos and now they are force translating video titles/descriptions and force dubbing videos. Nobody asked for any of this. They have been asked plenty of times to provide options related to languages yet they have not implemented any of it. Super super weird. When did we start to accept such bullshit even in paid products?

The same plugin for Chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/youtube-no-translat...

The interface to YouTube used by yt-dlp does still list the different audio tracks and labels the original one.

The problems reported by everyone in this thread sound to me like UI bugs of the player, official app or javascript in the browser, picking the wrong audio track automatically.

Nowadays to use youtube efficiently with ADHD, you practically need all of:

(a) uBlock - this one is debatable but deals with the worst distractions especially if you're trying to learn from a video your professor put up and you have an exam to prepare for, (b) unhook - hides most of the "recommendations" that attempt to keep you on the site because you're planning to do the copmprehension questions your professor gave you for after the video, (c) something to disable "autoplay next" for the same reason as above (a uBlock rule will do it), (d) no translation. Soon we'll probably need (e) something to block AI.

I've been using "YouTube Anti Translate" for a year or two. I think the developer figured out all the bugs and quirks by now and it's pretty good.

Via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44413749

Isnn't there any settings on Youtube to disable translation from Turkish into English? Why Youtube assumes that I am single lingual? It makes me crazy! I use Android and Youtube in English because it is thr original language. I watch sometimes Turksh videos from Turkish people but why the hell it translates into English?!

Due to this anti-feature I have many bookmarks with broken title and now looking for a way to automatically refresh them with the original one.

> Size: 123.22 kB

A not so small extension for getting rid of a problem seems so tiny. Feels a bit like overkill and I hoped there would be something I can forcibly set without any extension. Even with disabled cookies youtube uses local storage. Why not have there some variable for that purpose!?

Personally I find the translation and dubbing of videos to be super helpful as someone who is only fluent in English. I found a few creators from around the world that I follow now because of this. But I can understand the frustration if someone knows more than one language. Been seeing more and more posts about this complaining about it. Hopefully Google adds this as an option on Youtube instead of requiring a third party add-on.

I honestly can't wrap my head around what some users do just to have the "stock" experience.

In order to get a vaguely usable stock YouTube, you need to install at least UBlock, SponsorBlock, No Translation, and arguably DeArrow as well. And this only works for browsers, many people will cope with their mobile YouTube experience being hell on earth. Why do all this when you can get an alternative cross-platform client like GrayJay with all the same features (minus DeArrow for now), which works out of the box, has more privacy, and won't be completely useless the next time Google decides to shift things around a bit?

Same goes for Windows: you'll see people who go to great lengths to disable telemetry, remove Edge and sponsored content, often having to run random scripts from the internet with administrator privileges, just to have everything reset on the next Windows update. Remember how Windows users made fun of Linux users for having to open a command line for installing a browser (which isn't even true)?

I could go on: you can get Firefox and spend hours tweaking about:config to disable the anti-features, or you can get one of the dozen forks with the same patches pre-applied, yet some people will still defend the stock experience with their lives.

Can I get the same for Google Play store? I will always take original version over shit-tier automatic translation.

Few days ago I was surprised when video started in dubbed mode… I always watch everything in original audio, and turn subtitles when needed. At least for audio I found a setting, but titles… WHY?!

Thanks for sharing addon :)

I'm working on an app that's based around youtube videos for language learning. I had to solve the same problem of youtube automatically changing the audio track to match the device locale.

Even thought about making a spin off app with only the no-translate feature, that simply always uses the original title and audio. I guess revanced can do this too, but maybe there's enough people who don't use revanced, or don't know about this feature. Thoughts?

Oof a lot of hate for this feature. I agree more configuration would be nice, but at the same time, this is absolute science fiction come to life. Even for people who speak multiple languages: let's say you speak English, German, and French. That means you understand about 25%[1] of other people on the planet. That's 75% of videos which you would otherwise _never see or understand_. This feature is for people who _don't_ speak the most popular languages -- it lets _their_ videos get views when otherwise they would never be seen. And that's been my experience with the feature. I saw a recipe fully in Spanish because of the auto-dubbing. I actually want this enabled more globally, I want to see more fully non-English videos recommended to me from around the world.

And this feature is relatively new, I think they started rolling it out only a few months ago. I'm sure configuration options will pop up.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num... and assuming the videos in a language is ~proportional to L1+L2 speakers . That's a simplifying assumption, because I would guess English is more highly represented. Because people likely make more videos in English because there's a bigger audience for it. If only there was a way to allow more non-English speakers to be able to be understood/gain traction....

Oh my God this is auto translation business is so incredibly annoying. Especially for people that know multiple languages. But I imagine it is the worst for people who are trying to learn another language...

As someone whose native language isn't English but uses English across devices and daily life, this add-on is incredibly useful. I still prefer seeing video titles in my own language.

in sourcecode this snipped looked interesting https://github.com/YouG-o/YouTube_No_Translation/blob/91061a...

    // Prevent translation on all levels
        [element, attributedString, snippetAttributedString].forEach(el => {
            if (el) {
                el.setAttribute('translate', 'no');

sadly magic translate="no" attribute does nothing on its own :( Probably related to standard https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/... so obviously Google doesnt honor it.

following

                    el.style.setProperty('translate', 'no', 'important');

is kinda funny too, CSS translate is about positioning not language :) and since 'no' is not a valid value this instruction is ignored anyways.

as a pakistani natively bilingual in urdu and english, it's doubly annoying, because it doesn't have urdu, it has hindi. While the languages are very similar but still different enough to get annoying and confusing.

So it tries to dub urdu videos (as 'hindi' videos) into english, or dub english into hindi, which is useless for me both ways.

Instead of dubbing, make better subs! YouTube subs fail to track when using the video speed feature, so if i am using any other speed playback than 1x, the subs don't load on time, and sometimes get skipped, fix that!

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.

Thanks for this! The automatic title translation are so low quality I'm surprised the same company created Google Translator. In a lion share cases they are plain wrong, in most they are awkward, in all - they are misleading that the content somehow promises native experience.

It's kinda wild how monolingual people can come into a thread of multilingual people pointing out specific problems that are happening due to forced autotranslation and be like, "well this hasn't happened to me personally so it's probably fine for normal people and not a real problem."

<edit> as pointed out by @addandsubtract, I misunderstood the extension, it's about audio translation, not just titles. Sorry about that. </edit>

If you're using DeArrow, there is an option to disable those translations.

DeArrow is from the same team as SponsorBlock, it removes the clickbait thumbnails and titles with more descriptive ones. It makes the experience sooo much better. https://dearrow.ajay.app/

YouTube has become annoying with the AI thing. I live in the US but speak Spanish and consume almost 80% of content in Spanish and my OS and Keyboard are in Spanish, yet the thing is not able to respect the Accept-Language headers :(

I‘ve seen YT randomly deciding to translate videos shown in the the Telegram iOS client. No way around it other than view it on YT directly.

Yeah, Yandex browser also has this and its annoying. Terrible actually even if their auto-dub is way better than youtube's.

Reddit is the worst offender. I really wonder what goes through the mind of the management clerks at these companies.

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

Please this trend needs to stop, it’s so annoying. Subtitles are good enough and more respectful than this crappy uncontrolled auto transactions

Not surprised it's unfathomable for Google drones that for 74 % of English speakers it's their second language.

Google's stupidity knows no bounds.

forced autotransation of anything is the worst. useless. whoever thought this was a good idea is just bored and seeking justification for their employment tbh

Unfortunately the extensions are not available for android....

I won't be contributing much to rational discussion, but this "feature" annoys me so much that I just have to rant for a bit.

----

Like, is nobody in Google multi-lingual? Who the fuck thought this -- not auto-translation, but forced auto-translation -- is a good idea? Surely for an organization that purportedly only hires the cream-of-the-crop, they'll have a larger fraction of employees that speak more than one language? Look, I'm resting-and-vesting like the rest of y'all, but if I were in the team that implemented this, I'd definitely speak up, and let them, up to my skip-level, know that this is terrible. The implication of either possibilities had occurred, yet the feature still shipped, is harrowing.

Even if the developers only speak one language, they must know at least three -- cream-of-the-crop, remember? -- programming languages, right? Imagine if, when you're first hired into Google, you declare your programming language of choice, say Go; then, henceforth whenever you check out the source code, irrespective of its original form, it gets auto-translated into Go, and you can't turn that off? Checking out Pixel first-stage bootloader code, almost certainly written in assembly -- nope! We know better: you're getting that in Go. Fuck, I shouldn't be giving them ideas!

Could they not imagine how horrible this would be, and by analogy when applied to human languages, be also just as horrid?

YouTube's often been cited as a great resource for learning new things. Well, now it's useless for, that's right, learning a second language! I wonder why this Spanish for beginners video's all in English? /s

Speaking about shit features, let's throw "Stable Volume" into the pile. At least this one remembers your preferences...most of the time. When I watch ASMR -- yes I'll admit in public I'm that guy -- videos, and am just about to fall asleep, I just love to be jolted awake by a loud robotic voice's rendition of tapping sounds. Maybe my grumpiness's due to my lack of sleep!

Currently the extension doesn't work in Firefox for Android. I hope this feature is added in the future.

Thank you!

i am so glad firefox addon is being discussed. looks to me normally browser extension posts are all chrome only for some reason and when i nag them about firefox version, they dont bother

If only I could add this to the YouTube app on my TV (as well as uBlock Origin)

I really hate YouTube translations. I DO NOT want YouTube in Italian because I don’t care about Italian content or watching videos in Italian!

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.

The fact that there's a massive delay for auto dubbing is crazy to me, it's not done in real-time, why have the delay?

Unfortunately not available for android where it would be very useful.

For years YouTube would randomly change my language to Italian and auto translate all the titles, which was annoying but I can change the language back to English and it was fine.

Thing is, I haven't lived in Italy for well over a decade. I don't consume much Italian content. I've tried my best to purge my Google account of any possible trace of Italian language settings, I've never saved an Italian address etc.

And yet Google must be convinced that, because I was in Italy over a dozen years ago when I made the account I must be Italian, and that cannot possibly change.

i dont mind the others, but the automatic audio switch is very offensive to the creators

thanks

Is there any way to achieve this on mobile iOS?

So embarrassing they thought this was a good idea, these are the people earning the big google salaries? What a clown show

Why would I want this? I watched a translated YouTube video and it was great.

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?

Is this an example of developers assuming they know what users want without actually engaging with and asking said users? Or are the people reaching for plugins like this actually in a minority?

The worst thing about this for me is not the language issue but that the translations are AI generated shite. If it was a case of multilingual channels producing videos in multiple languages then it makes sense that a user with language set to German would receive the German version by default. But to give users an AI generated translation by default? That's horrible.

I get the impression someone in Google/YouTube has this grand vision of it being like a Babel Fish just seamlessly translating voices into your own language. The trouble is Babel Fish is science fiction. Douglas Adams described it as "feeding" the speech centres of your brain directly, not translating the audio into a shitty generated copy.

Now we need one that detects and filters AI narrators.