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'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.
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.
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.
> Or it's just as dumb as this was on some product managers "designed and implemented" line to get promoted?
I'd suspect it's something banal, such as: $goal --> translate by default --> enough users click through by mistake (AB test shows user interest) --> more preroll ads shown to users (AB test shows business value) --> promotion
Whether the $goal was {accessibility, show off translations, UX improvement} is quite irrelevant for a business that optimizes for revenue from ads.
I think statistics show that multilingual users are minority enough and most likely people who understand "help" or "guess" quit as soon when they see anything else so they don't consume the content. So YT doesn't care.
As others have commented already: Most people in Europe can speak at least two languages, and even the minority who can just speak one can typically understand several. Even my old parents, when they were alive, could understand at least three languages, and English wasn't one of them. Africa? Most people can handle several languages. South Africa, for example, has 11 official languages, people can often speak a bunch of them and understand several more.
Asia? Varies, but multi-lingual is common in many regions, though not so much in Japan.
It's not that you have to be able to speak multiple languages, understanding several is still common.
Honestly, its infuriating. There are three languages that I speak and understand sufficiently well for consuming youtube videos. I don't ever want these to be translated.
And then, the translation of video titles etc. is often surprisingly bad, because (I think) they don't consider the video context / content while translating, so it almost looks like a translation-by-dictionary-lookup translation.
Most infuriating though is when you watch a video of a channel you watched for years and all of the sudden the audio is auto-translated into your primary language. So cringe.
I’ve been learning a new language, and I’m constantly encountering language-learning videos that get translated entirely into my native language, effectively useless until I revert the audio track.
Annoyingly, there’s not a native way to revert the translated description and title as far as I know. And this seems to be done without the knowledge of the creator!
I watched a language-learning YouTube short today that was entirely not in English. But YouTube was automatically dubbing it into English. A commenter replied with “but why the bad ai voice?” And the creator replied “it’s not, that’s my voice”
I fear the future won't make us more educated but even dumber as the tech and ai tries to do all thinking for us, even thinking we don't want to learn languages as this is just one more "inefficiency" in humans to eradicate. And who is Ai trying to emulate? Right, people like these managers at Google resposnsible for such decisions (or like sama, not sure what's worse)
Google as a whole is hostile to the user's browser's language settings. I have to append ?hl=en to every Google URL when connecting from an IP address that they determine is a non-English region.
As a multilingual user: half the time YouTube "translation" is just gibberish, it's a total word soup. The closest thing is AliExpress listings, you know, the "Original 2025 Nintendo DS Inflatable Bedroom Wireless USB-C Potato Masher" stuff.
I 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.
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.
Even if it is, Google is itself is very international and multilingual, including the literal head of YouTube. They obviously know what the world looks like, and decided to do this anyway.
When I first encountered this on Reddit I was really confused... They were (are?) translating even the text INSIDE an image. Can't believe how expensive that must've been across the entire frontpage.
But hey, another way to shoehorn AI into being "useful".
ah yes, and the auto translation on reddit broke a very useful trick I used all the time
- need information about something in general -> search in English
- need information about something specific for my home country (laws, local events, local shops, etc) -> search in my native language
now, I get weird auto translated content informing me about laws that are only applicable in the US and recommended products that are not even available in my home country.
Even worse - if I search something in my native language, it's because I want to see things relevant to my country! I don't care about experiences of someone in USA or Brasil if I look up for something in Polish :<
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.
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 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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 83.9 ms ] threadIf 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?
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.
I'd suspect it's something banal, such as: $goal --> translate by default --> enough users click through by mistake (AB test shows user interest) --> more preroll ads shown to users (AB test shows business value) --> promotion
Whether the $goal was {accessibility, show off translations, UX improvement} is quite irrelevant for a business that optimizes for revenue from ads.
But yeah, it's incredibly stupid.
It's not that you have to be able to speak multiple languages, understanding several is still common.
And then, the translation of video titles etc. is often surprisingly bad, because (I think) they don't consider the video context / content while translating, so it almost looks like a translation-by-dictionary-lookup translation.
Most infuriating though is when you watch a video of a channel you watched for years and all of the sudden the audio is auto-translated into your primary language. So cringe.
Annoyingly, there’s not a native way to revert the translated description and title as far as I know. And this seems to be done without the knowledge of the creator!
I watched a language-learning YouTube short today that was entirely not in English. But YouTube was automatically dubbing it into English. A commenter replied with “but why the bad ai voice?” And the creator replied “it’s not, that’s my voice”
I 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.
Even if it is, Google is itself is very international and multilingual, including the literal head of YouTube. They obviously know what the world looks like, and decided to do this anyway.
But hey, another way to shoehorn AI into being "useful".
- need information about something in general -> search in English - need information about something specific for my home country (laws, local events, local shops, etc) -> search in my native language
now, I get weird auto translated content informing me about laws that are only applicable in the US and recommended products that are not even available in my home country.
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.
It's unfortunate that YouTube is only usable with these extensions, but here we are.
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.
It's honestly quite incredible.