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by vintermann 223 days ago
Who knows?

Everyone whose native language is not English knows. Seriously, people with this attitude should be forced to run their browser and mail client with a plugin to run everything through a couple of machine translation roundtrips. Give it two months, and I guarantee you'll understand.
1 comments
avhception 223 days ago
My first language is German, but I've got most of my devices set to English. Because of that, Youtube started machine-translating German video titles and audio into English at random. The audio quality is just bad, everything sounds muffled. And the translations are often complete garbage. I absolutely detest this "feature".
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CalRobert 223 days ago
I’m in the Netherlands and I get ads for Bol.com on YouTube now with narration that would be more appropriate to Fitter, Happier. I’m surprised advertisers are ok with it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tepztGLNYcE

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avhception 223 days ago
I have a feeling that advertisers have yet to catch up. In Germany, the supermarket chain Lidl recently started running a pretty heavy advertisement campaign on Youtube. Of course, Youtube auto-translated the advertisement into English. The effect is really, really uncanny. "LIDL IS WORTH IT! JA!"

If I were Lidl, I'd shut that down immediately.

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agos 223 days ago
this is hilarious, thanks
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rtpg 223 days ago
the wild thing is you _know_ there are so many people at YouTube who speak multiple languages and have issues with this. What engineering team is only filled with single-language-speaking people, especially at a prestige-y place like Google?
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greatgib 223 days ago
It happened to me in French also, one day I was looking at a video that was trendy, podcast like, and the voices were more than shitty, like a badly translated movie. I looked at comments and everyone was praising this video, so it did not make any sense to me. Until I discovered that Youtube somehow decided to auto enable this feature that I never asked for.
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Gud 223 days ago
Now imagine you are like me, someone who travels the world for work. I get everything in Dutch, German, Swedish, Finnish, Arabic and of course Schweizerdeutsch. And some other languages.

There used to be an “international English” setting.

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