I noticed this too the other way round: as a german native speaker i notice more and more videos in youtubes recommendations that are just popular english videos with german titles. i somehow always assumed these are automatic translations from youtube itself.
My kids got deep into the weird kids bit of YouTube where Filipinos or Vietnamese kids are acting out skits in English, but the titles are in German or Turkish or Urdu.
I'd always figured it was an attempt at Youtube SEO - matching keywords in different languages with the same content.
Yes, these are automatically translated by YT. I'm seeing a lot of video titles that have suddenly been translated to Dutch when I log in.
I find this very annoying and have been looking how to turn it off, but couldn't find it.
In my observation not all videos have translated titles, I'd say about 20~30%. So my theory is that it is either some A/B test from YT, or that the channel owner can opt in/out of the automatic translations.
I'm French but have everything in English (system, browser & YouTube). I've seen a lot of French YouTube videos with their title auto-translated in English a couple of weeks after their diffusion.
(Bad for two reasons: (1) badly translated titles, sometimes hilariously so, and (2) the algorithm recommends me videos I have already watched. I guess (2) is because I don't usually watch the last 20 seconds, the static "my last video was", whatever it's called, so YouTube must think I haven't watched the video. Most times, the red gauge below the video thumbnail shows half-full even though I've watched the video minus these 20 seconds. There's still room for improvements...)
They are not automatically translated. The owner of the video has chosen to translate the title in several languages. For example this channel uses this feature [1]. The English titles are almost always "Sharpest * kitchen knife in the world". The original Japanese titles are more creative, usually something like "I tried to <do something>" and rarely mention knives at all.
From one of the comments, it is interesting how "-HINDI" in the search string does seem to eliminate most Indian videos (even ones in other Indian languages like Tamil) where "HINDI" does not seem to be present in the video description.
Looks like a real market need here, although maybe limited to videos in a particular segment (I searched for "Angular tutorial" for this example), because somehow I don't get these Indian hits at all -- despite being Indian and living in India.
The comments in that discussion seem a bit xenophobic.
There is value in being able to reliably filter by language. After all, if you can't understand a lecture video, then there's little point in watching it.
But how some of the commenters choose to express their thoughts comes across more as "I hate people from India" than "This is inconvenient".
But, the BlockTube extension from Chrome can be configured to hide channels/videos based on Unicode regexps. An equally honked off YT user asked about this problem on the project's Github page and got some suggestions.
Yes, I wondered if s/he is. Measured response, if so. It's a good extension and works well in combination with uBlock Origin to curb some of YT's excesses. The latest redesign makes life more difficult, though. Previously there were ways to block categories. Now, everything blends together and when the blocklists get large, pages get sluggish (as is to be expected.)
No problem. As a person of Indian origin, I feel somewhat guilty for glomming my own filtering questions on that Github thread. But, I continue in my quest to block YT's recommended pop music videos by any means necessary. I have my own visceral reactions to things... O for a Vevo -> /dev/null filter
There is too much of that going around these days. Almost as if it’s in fashion. It doesn’t really bother me, except for the ones saying, "I’m Indian too, and I hate my kind".
Also, some might not know this, but English is pretty widely spoken in India. It’s common to come across words from many languages, including English, interspersed in conversations.
And also, my YouTube is filled with these elaborate cooking videos from China and east Asia. Tech content from Germany, that I can’t understand. It’s never really bothered me though.
In general, it’s accurate to say that I’ve never come across great videos because YouTube recommended them to me.
> It’s common to come across words from many languages, including English, interspersed in conversations.
A bit more than common! If you watch Indian (or at least Hindi) TV, you'll understand about every third word. When I was there a lot of youth would either never use, or even not know what common words were in their native language, say words like problem or college.
That does not mean that they have a good grasp of English though. Vocabulary and sentence structure are different beasts entirely, and had I not known the native language, I would have had much more difficulty understanding English/Hinglish - lots of direct translations just didn't work in English. This is common for pretty much anyone that learns a language, though.
> my YouTube is filled with these elaborate cooking videos from China and east Asia. Tech content from Germany, that I can’t understand. It’s never really bothered me though.
I'm a little confused at how people are getting these bad recommendations from YouTube, because my recommendations - at least on my Samsung TV's YouTube app - are mostly spot on. It knows I'm interested in music production, long form studio tours and interviews, 8-bit retro gear & repair, and that's pretty much all it recommends. It can infer that from my subscriptions, but seems to go more by what I actually watch & like.
I assume you are clicking like on the videos that you enjoyed? Do you treat YouTube like a spam filter and rate things as "Not Interested" if it recommends something wrong? Or maybe Google's algorithms are just really really terrible outside of US / UK / Canada / Aus?
On the other hand, my recommendations on the mobile app aren't as good. It's almost as if YouTube treats each client as a separate account/context, even though I'm signed in on all of them.
> I assume you are clicking like on the videos that you enjoyed? Do you treat YouTube like a spam filter and rate things as "Not Interested" if it recommends something wrong?
I do those things often, but not all the time. They usually recommend every single video from a random channel, if you happen to watch just one of their videos. So it’s not all the popular Chinese cooking videos, rather all the videos from this one channel alone. That sort of stuff. Almost like they want some people to get large followings and become influencers, because it’s more profitable to have influencers on your platform rather than having many great videos from different creators.
In a way I’m happy that YouTube recommendations are not so great. That way at least, I’ll not get hooked on the platform and be even more of a time wasting failure than I already am.
I use YouTube almost exclusively for construction and woodworking related videos, but my recommendations are always filled with politics, sports, and music, and only rarely a video I'm interested in. I've given up telling YouTube I'm not interested because it has had no discernable effect.
Relax and keep your emotions in check. They are not irrationally scared of Indians, they are annoyed that Indian videos are flooding their feeds, they want different content and that is common sense in this context. If the Indian videos were if sufficient quality the problem would be somewhat tempered, but they are not of sufficient quality to overcome their inappropriate placement.
I don't think it's medically possible for me to relax more than I am right now without losing consciousness, thanks.
> They are not irrationally scared of Indians,
The term "phobic" doesn't just mean "irrationally scared", it also refers to cognitive distortions and feelings of contempt.
> they are annoyed that Indian videos are flooding their feeds,
The fact that the content is low quality or in a language the viewer doesn't understand is orthogonal to the people who made the video being Indian. Focusing on that fact instead of the actual problem shows a racial and/or national discriminatory motive and should be addressed.
> they want different content and that is common sense in this context. If the Indian videos were if sufficient quality the problem would be somewhat tempered, but they are not of sufficient quality to overcome their inappropriate placement.
Phobic means irrational, just because some people with agendas redefine and corrupt language does not mean it is correct.
It’s not orthogonal, the videos being from India is the exact reason there is a problem, for the problem to be fixed, in this context (not all) Indian videos must be discriminated against because users do not wish to tolerate them ruining their experience.
I'm from India, I upvoted this submission when it had 1 point.
I've only gone through the ones I could see on the first page, I personally think that OP and a lot of the people there are just frustrated with their Youtube search results and there's a lot more hate for Google's apparent callousness there than for India or Indian creators.
> But how some of the commenters choose to express their thoughts comes across more as "I hate people from India" than "This is inconvenient".
There's always gonna be those people in every single community. I found the page hilarious, wonder if I've become desensitised.
> There's always gonna be those people in every single community.
Violent crime is also a grim reality we all have to live with, even if things are as a whole improving (statistically).
> I found the page hilarious, wonder if I've become desensitised.
That's not necessarily a bad thing. Maybe it can come in handy (e.g. easier to remain calm in a bad situation). I hope neither of us ever has to find out.
I am Indian myself and so many times I have wanted a way to filter out Hindi videos in youtube because a) that's not what I was looking for b) they aren't always that great.
Neither Hindi nor English are my mother tongue. Between the two I am more comfortable in English although I speak a lot of Hindi at home. Some may argue that Hindi is the national language of India. It certainly is a national language. It also happens to be a regional language of some parts of North and central India that by happenstance got branded as a national one.
For me its Hindi not because I have anything against Hindi. Just that I get many search results in that language and I don't care so much about those videos and it drown out other results that I do care about. Hypothetically, it could have been some other language than Hindi.
A filter to choose the spoken language used in the video would be very nice indeed.
I seem to have thoroughly confused Google with regard to my region/language/currency preferences. Youtube regularly shows me videos in German, Google Maps keeps reverting to UAE dirhams for the currency it shows prices in, and Google Search always opens in Chinese.
I use Google products in a Firefox container which is always logged in to my Google account, which should contain enough information for them to understand that I read English best and would prefer prices to be shown in Euros (or any of a list of maybe 10 other currencies before I would consider dirhams), but there you go.
> I feel that the real problem is understanding the Indian accent.
Well there's many more than one. "The Indian accent" is really only a trope on American TV shows.
For instance, your username seems Indian/Bengali (sorry if you're not, just making a point) and I'm Indian/Punjabi and I bet we sound really different. Bengalis stress the first syllable in a word, Punjabis the second; Bengalis stretch the -ee- sound a bit, Punjabis truncate it especially when trailing. These are stereotypes, but they work well enough to place another Indian's state of origin instantly if you just hear their voice on the phone.
The main problem FOR ME is the title. It's in English. No indication that it's in Hindi.
I watch some Chinese / Japanese channels but I know what I'm going into before hand. Because both the channel name and the title would have hyrogliphs.
I wouldn't mind if I had unlimited data. But I can download 10 tutorial videos based on their title only for 3-5 to be Hindi.
Google search has been proven to forget old excellent articles. I think this amnesia is happening to YouTube as well.
For some people in India, it is difficult to read Hindi because it is not their first language. They can understand spoken Hindi. So some of these videos add English title so that everyone can read the title and listen to Hindi video.
I only search YouTube with Google video search as YouTube's built-in search always seems to be delivering much less relevant results for me.
Google Search seems to ignore the user's preferred language choice from the HTTP Accept-Language header and (for a not logged-in user) default to whatever can be inferred from the IP address/location but at least this behavior can be overriden.
Sarcasm Alert - Hey, as an Indian I am tired of American English videos. The accent is so bad, I can't understand anything!!
Btw, it looks like a good problem to solve. It is not easy to ML millions of videos to identify spoken language, but I guess google already has means to do it as they provide closed caption.
Also, the YouTubers in the comments seems to be searching for IT topics, which is heavily dominated by Indians
Search for anything related to computer science, you will get tons of videos and true enough most of them are very bad quality in both content and language.
Lols, you searched for Lattice reduction. We never studied that in our universities. Btw, My assumption was wrong. I searched many keywords, and there were no Indian videos at the top. Interesting!
After joining Industry I realized how much my university missed to teach me and took me a long time to grab whatever I can. Almost all Indian universities are teaching the same content from decades.
Nothing about Functional Programming, Big data, even Theory of Computation (that was mine :D )
The fact that you use quora, a network very popular in India, and expect indian content to not be there is like going to a Italian restaurant and asking why is the menu full of pastas.
I noticed this on Youtube: i keep getting more and more Indian Videos, for reasons unknown to me. I am not really "pissed off" by this, but a lot of these videos are just hard to understand for me, so it feels like a bad UX for me.
What really annoys me is that Google in general is pushing German content into my face, despite the fact that my OS, my browser-settings, my Google profiles and my search queries are 100% English. Just the fact that i am physically located in Germany seems to be enough for them.
I started switching to Google-alternative products almost 1.5 years ago because i am tired of them.
This whole language choosing thing seems to be an unsolved problem. It would be great if users could specify their preferred languages somehow in their browser/OS and websites and apps could respect that. But I guess users won't set it properly so websites will try to second-guess them.
You used to be able to do something like google.com/ncr to get US English Google but that doesn't seem to work anymore :( Too many people thinking they know what they want, I guess.
I'm assuming the poster is searching for videos in a niche IT area. Whenever I'm digging into a computer science topic I get tons of Indian videos. They're in English with a thick Indian accent. If you are able to understand the accent they're actually decent videos.
Not having search results / videos from languages you do not know is a valid concern, but some of the comments on that thread are essentially just racist.
I don't understand the complaints about the English accent being bad either, because there isn't an "ideal" English accent. It's just different. They also come off as extremely entitled. Guess what, everyone accustomed to a non-UK/US accent has to get used to them to actually understand pretty much any content on the web.
You can personalize the recommendations by clicking on the 3-dot menu and selecting "Not interested" and/or "Don't recommend channel". It even asks "Tell us why". I'm Indian and I hardly see any Indian videos. Here are my recommendations right now:
(Basically Anjunadeep, Patrice O' Neal, and Batman :-) ).
I believe their recommendation ML is top-notch and they keep improving it. For example, it seems to have finally learned that I absolutely effing hate "reaction" videos (it used to struggle with that ~ 1 year ago).
Some people on the website are complaining that people are putting their video titles in English but the content is in some other language. This is not a lame attempt to get more clicks, but driven by the fact that: (i) Hindi typing works only somewhat well on mobile phones and does not work at all on most desktops/laptops in India, and (ii) search in languages like Hindi sucks even more. Given that most tech savvy Indians are bilingual anyway, it just makes sense to have titles in English so that people can search for them conveniently.
You'll see this is something even Hindi newspapers do. I pulled these two articles from the front pages of the Dainik Jagran and Dainik Bhaskar, two of the bigger Hindi newspapers: [1] and [2]. Very little of the content, except for the title is in Hindi. This is so that people can search for content using English searches.
Sorry I had a typo. I meant to say very little of the content is in English. But the page title is in English and that matters because I can google for "Jagran UP budget" to get to the second article.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 145 ms ] threadI'd always figured it was an attempt at Youtube SEO - matching keywords in different languages with the same content.
In my observation not all videos have translated titles, I'd say about 20~30%. So my theory is that it is either some A/B test from YT, or that the channel owner can opt in/out of the automatic translations.
(Bad for two reasons: (1) badly translated titles, sometimes hilariously so, and (2) the algorithm recommends me videos I have already watched. I guess (2) is because I don't usually watch the last 20 seconds, the static "my last video was", whatever it's called, so YouTube must think I haven't watched the video. Most times, the red gauge below the video thumbnail shows half-full even though I've watched the video minus these 20 seconds. There's still room for improvements...)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCg3qsVzHeUt5_cPpcRtoaJQ/vid...
Looks like a real market need here, although maybe limited to videos in a particular segment (I searched for "Angular tutorial" for this example), because somehow I don't get these Indian hits at all -- despite being Indian and living in India.
There is value in being able to reliably filter by language. After all, if you can't understand a lecture video, then there's little point in watching it.
But how some of the commenters choose to express their thoughts comes across more as "I hate people from India" than "This is inconvenient".
But, the BlockTube extension from Chrome can be configured to hide channels/videos based on Unicode regexps. An equally honked off YT user asked about this problem on the project's Github page and got some suggestions.
https://github.com/amitbl/blocktube/issues/38
Also, some might not know this, but English is pretty widely spoken in India. It’s common to come across words from many languages, including English, interspersed in conversations.
And also, my YouTube is filled with these elaborate cooking videos from China and east Asia. Tech content from Germany, that I can’t understand. It’s never really bothered me though.
In general, it’s accurate to say that I’ve never come across great videos because YouTube recommended them to me.
A bit more than common! If you watch Indian (or at least Hindi) TV, you'll understand about every third word. When I was there a lot of youth would either never use, or even not know what common words were in their native language, say words like problem or college.
That does not mean that they have a good grasp of English though. Vocabulary and sentence structure are different beasts entirely, and had I not known the native language, I would have had much more difficulty understanding English/Hinglish - lots of direct translations just didn't work in English. This is common for pretty much anyone that learns a language, though.
I'm a little confused at how people are getting these bad recommendations from YouTube, because my recommendations - at least on my Samsung TV's YouTube app - are mostly spot on. It knows I'm interested in music production, long form studio tours and interviews, 8-bit retro gear & repair, and that's pretty much all it recommends. It can infer that from my subscriptions, but seems to go more by what I actually watch & like.
I assume you are clicking like on the videos that you enjoyed? Do you treat YouTube like a spam filter and rate things as "Not Interested" if it recommends something wrong? Or maybe Google's algorithms are just really really terrible outside of US / UK / Canada / Aus?
On the other hand, my recommendations on the mobile app aren't as good. It's almost as if YouTube treats each client as a separate account/context, even though I'm signed in on all of them.
I do those things often, but not all the time. They usually recommend every single video from a random channel, if you happen to watch just one of their videos. So it’s not all the popular Chinese cooking videos, rather all the videos from this one channel alone. That sort of stuff. Almost like they want some people to get large followings and become influencers, because it’s more profitable to have influencers on your platform rather than having many great videos from different creators.
In a way I’m happy that YouTube recommendations are not so great. That way at least, I’ll not get hooked on the platform and be even more of a time wasting failure than I already am.
I don't think it's medically possible for me to relax more than I am right now without losing consciousness, thanks.
> They are not irrationally scared of Indians,
The term "phobic" doesn't just mean "irrationally scared", it also refers to cognitive distortions and feelings of contempt.
> they are annoyed that Indian videos are flooding their feeds,
The fact that the content is low quality or in a language the viewer doesn't understand is orthogonal to the people who made the video being Indian. Focusing on that fact instead of the actual problem shows a racial and/or national discriminatory motive and should be addressed.
> they want different content and that is common sense in this context. If the Indian videos were if sufficient quality the problem would be somewhat tempered, but they are not of sufficient quality to overcome their inappropriate placement.
Only "somewhat" tempered?
It’s not orthogonal, the videos being from India is the exact reason there is a problem, for the problem to be fixed, in this context (not all) Indian videos must be discriminated against because users do not wish to tolerate them ruining their experience.
I've only gone through the ones I could see on the first page, I personally think that OP and a lot of the people there are just frustrated with their Youtube search results and there's a lot more hate for Google's apparent callousness there than for India or Indian creators.
> But how some of the commenters choose to express their thoughts comes across more as "I hate people from India" than "This is inconvenient".
There's always gonna be those people in every single community. I found the page hilarious, wonder if I've become desensitised.
Violent crime is also a grim reality we all have to live with, even if things are as a whole improving (statistically).
> I found the page hilarious, wonder if I've become desensitised.
That's not necessarily a bad thing. Maybe it can come in handy (e.g. easier to remain calm in a bad situation). I hope neither of us ever has to find out.
Neither Hindi nor English are my mother tongue. Between the two I am more comfortable in English although I speak a lot of Hindi at home. Some may argue that Hindi is the national language of India. It certainly is a national language. It also happens to be a regional language of some parts of North and central India that by happenstance got branded as a national one.
A filter to choose the spoken language used in the video would be very nice indeed.
I use Google products in a Firefox container which is always logged in to my Google account, which should contain enough information for them to understand that I read English best and would prefer prices to be shown in Euros (or any of a list of maybe 10 other currencies before I would consider dirhams), but there you go.
Some of the example -
> thanks man, i thought my pc was infected with an indain virus. sounds like its not only me ....
> İ sicked of fucking indi*n videos on youtube.
> This is so true, I totally hate those indian video
I feel that the real problem is understanding the Indian accent.
Well there's many more than one. "The Indian accent" is really only a trope on American TV shows.
For instance, your username seems Indian/Bengali (sorry if you're not, just making a point) and I'm Indian/Punjabi and I bet we sound really different. Bengalis stress the first syllable in a word, Punjabis the second; Bengalis stretch the -ee- sound a bit, Punjabis truncate it especially when trailing. These are stereotypes, but they work well enough to place another Indian's state of origin instantly if you just hear their voice on the phone.
I watch some Chinese / Japanese channels but I know what I'm going into before hand. Because both the channel name and the title would have hyrogliphs.
I wouldn't mind if I had unlimited data. But I can download 10 tutorial videos based on their title only for 3-5 to be Hindi.
Google search has been proven to forget old excellent articles. I think this amnesia is happening to YouTube as well.
We all have English keyboards and use it all day(I don't know whom you want to blame for this.)
So it's easy for us to read and write in English. We even type Hindi in English. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinglish)
See how the YouTuber put Hindi in the title of that video? That's what I'm talking about
Google Search seems to ignore the user's preferred language choice from the HTTP Accept-Language header and (for a not logged-in user) default to whatever can be inferred from the IP address/location but at least this behavior can be overriden.
Btw, it looks like a good problem to solve. It is not easy to ML millions of videos to identify spoken language, but I guess google already has means to do it as they provide closed caption.
Also, the YouTubers in the comments seems to be searching for IT topics, which is heavily dominated by Indians
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=bkz+reduction
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3Trwclh_Z4
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EapIVDlhvQU
3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cicTG3zeVQ
---- The scrollbar of my browser cuts here ----
4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9i9BCsHxofE
...
* random may or may not have been influenced by Dual EC
Sounds like a missed opportunity to me.
Nothing about Functional Programming, Big data, even Theory of Computation (that was mine :D )
There is nothing innately Indian about Quora. Indians are just overrepresented on it.
What really annoys me is that Google in general is pushing German content into my face, despite the fact that my OS, my browser-settings, my Google profiles and my search queries are 100% English. Just the fact that i am physically located in Germany seems to be enough for them.
I started switching to Google-alternative products almost 1.5 years ago because i am tired of them.
You used to be able to do something like google.com/ncr to get US English Google but that doesn't seem to work anymore :( Too many people thinking they know what they want, I guess.
...what WE want...
I blame Apple. They started the trend and everyone copied.
There is[1], but no one uses it. At this point its primary purpose is probably just browser fingerprinting.
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Ac...
I don't understand the complaints about the English accent being bad either, because there isn't an "ideal" English accent. It's just different. They also come off as extremely entitled. Guess what, everyone accustomed to a non-UK/US accent has to get used to them to actually understand pretty much any content on the web.
https://imgur.com/a/KlSamZA
(Basically Anjunadeep, Patrice O' Neal, and Batman :-) ).
I believe their recommendation ML is top-notch and they keep improving it. For example, it seems to have finally learned that I absolutely effing hate "reaction" videos (it used to struggle with that ~ 1 year ago).
You'll see this is something even Hindi newspapers do. I pulled these two articles from the front pages of the Dainik Jagran and Dainik Bhaskar, two of the bigger Hindi newspapers: [1] and [2]. Very little of the content, except for the title is in Hindi. This is so that people can search for content using English searches.
[1] https://www.bhaskar.com/bihar/patna/news/prashant-kishor-pol... [2] https://www.jagran.com/politics/state-up-budget-2020-yogi-ad...
This is what the sites look like for me: https://imgur.com/a/h6U1Un1