Hacker News Reader

Comment by charcircuit | Hacker News Reader

YouTube the second biggest site [0] has ~14 billion videos [1] and most of them have machine translated subtitles for all of the languages youtube supports. I could see how a niche language could have most of that language's content on the web could be in autotranslated youtube subs.

[0] https://www.similarweb.com/top-websites/

[1] https://tubestats.org/

View on HN

Not only does YT machine translate subtitles, it also machine translates video titles to your search language! I recently ran into a video about a cop painting pistols on some teens at a billiard party if you know what I (or YT) mean...

And you cannot disable it. I watch videos in several languages, but titles are translated into English unless I switch to another language (and then they are all in that language), but I can't tell Youtube to just present the titles in their original language.

Really annoying and limiting.

Multilingual support sucks almost universally, and that is understandable when most of the innovation comes from countries with low rates of bilingualism, but it is becoming increasingly problematic as platforms like YouTube default to translating everything into a single language that takes several clicks to change. How hard would it be to implement a boolean option for "don't serve me translations by default"? Did they forget to add a column for the default language in their video database? It is particularly mind-boggling when some platforms offer a myriad of accessibility settings that cater to a very small percentage of the population, yet fail to account for people who speak more than one language. It is (or at least was at some point) possible to disable translations of YouTube video titles through a browser plugin or userscript, but the fact that no thought was put into making this toggleable in the first place is insane. Am I the only one who would rather have to translate a few things on my own than to see translations by default? I guess ultimately, it's user attention metrics that lead to such decisions. I imagine it will only get worse with LLMs.

The majority of people are proficient in either one language, or that language plus English. We are in a minority not worth catering to if selling eyeballs is the business model, because we are by definition proficient in a language.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com