[zorrolovsky]

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.

[hombre_fatal]

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.

[ben_w]

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.

[tirutiru]

Hey I am trying to get back into German. What are some of the good channels that you've found? I remember Fokus Deutsch.

Spent 4 years in Germany but never took a course out of sheer laziness. I can read children's books but every native speaker sounds like they are zipping along at 2x speed.

[ben_w]

On YouTube, by far the best is Easy German. Their playlists also divide the content by levels from A1 to C2, as well as by theme: https://www.youtube.com/@EasyGerman/playlists

They also have podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/easy-german-learn-germ...

More generally, there's also good podcast content from:

• DW news: https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/langsam-gesprochene-na...

• Coffee Break German: https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/coffee-break-german/id...

> I can read children's books but every native speaker sounds like they are zipping along at 2x speed.

I generally play most of the podcasts at double-speed precisely because of this. Real speakers are much faster than the careful slow pace of most internet content, and double-speed playback forces me to develop gist-comprehension even if I miss the odd word here or there.

[andix]

Sure, but it kills the UX for people who speak more than one language. Which is probably the majority of YouTube users (outside the US).

[numpad0]

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.

[lbotos]

in my feed there is a small pill that reads "auto-dubbed". Easy to miss though.

[hombre_fatal]

Yeah, and that's only for auto-dubbing which barely has any penetration. Most videos don't have that, just a translated title that doesn't match the audio track.

[lbotos]

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.

[vouaobrasil]

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.

[SkiFire13]

> By doing this, Youtube has probably 10x'd available content for "dumb" ppl to watch.

But is that content really watchable for them?

[danielscrubs]

A generic algorithm is leaving money on the table if that’s the case.

[ahmedfromtunis]

What's dumb about watching dubbed woodworking videos? And what part of watching japanese videos in japanese makes superior?

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.

[b3orn]

> And what part of watching japanese videos in japanese makes superior?

Bilingual people exist and the AI translation YouTube currently uses sounds very unnatural and destroys everything that isn't voice.

[redwall_hp]

Multilingual people not only exist, but they're the majority in the world, with some estimates reaching over 60% of the global population (others are low 50s).

Even the US, which is a pretentious bubble, has a great many multilingual people. English is by far the most common, but many people speak it as a second language or not at all.

Another issue is not all people, whether they are proficient in one language or more, speak the dominant language of the country they reside in. Which language does some geofence decide Indians speak? Do Eastern Canadians speak English or French? (Officially both, and bilingual signage is a legal requirement.)

Maybe I'm travelling in Japan and I only know very basic Japanese, but the geo-targeting decides everything should be in Japanese. Or maybe someone is immigrating to the US and doesn't speak English (which is not a legal requirement in any way). We have many non-English speakers who live in the US.

Honestly, if it gets to the point that it's providing pressure against the use of a language where it's commonly spoken, it could arguably be considered ethnic cleansing adjacent...

[dzhiurgis]

Subtitles is way to go, esp. for likes of movies. For educainment I’m fine with dubbing. Obviously let me disable or enable multiple subtitles.

[unpaydijk]

>What's dumb about watching dubbed woodworking videos?

Nothing necessarily as long as the user knows it's dubbed and not the original, and so has the potential to judge whether the content is reliable knowing things may be off. Doing everything as instructed, with just some mistranslated units can be at best frustrating and at worst very dangerous

[stingraycharles]

Your comment appears very hostile considering the fact that the parent you’re replying to was actually doing exactly that, being considerate that there are many people that prefer things to be dubbed as they don’t master English all that well.

[lbotos]

> And what part of watching japanese videos in japanese makes superior?

We do have to acknowledge that putting in the effort to learn a second language (whatever language) "takes more skill" than watching a dubbed video, ya?

I took up the hobby of learning a second language to challenge myself. If I watch the videos dubbed in English, where is the challenge?

> failing to acknowledge that the world is diverse and people have diverse needs that we can't even start to imagine.

I think you missed my point because I (lovingly) called my dad dumb -- Youtube has absolutely liberated him and given him access to a rich world of woodworking content that cable TV could never. This feature is helping him access more of that.

Youtube also gave me a world of Japanese content that I could never imagine, but this feature is hurting me by making it harder for me to get the content I'm looking for. Maybe I'm no longer Youtube's target audience, but 1 toggle switch to disable this feature and I'm back in the target audience.

[dismalaf]

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.

[Macha]

The execs want everyone focused on AI and building features related to AI. This is AI. So it is built.

[riedel]

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.

[beached_whale]

I want more of it. Just make it clear it is auto translated. It opens up a lot of views outside the english sphere

[maksimur]

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.

[xdennis]

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.

[maxglute]

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.

[eviks]

- 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

[anal_reactor]

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.

[7bit]

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.