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I do not understand how this got rolled out. Surely there are _loads_ of multilingual people working at YouTube. How is there not at least an option to flag multiple languages that you speak?

At least the audio translation I can turn off. I do not know how to get the actual title of a video or its description.

It's so frustrating that I've ended up just changing my UI language from English to another language so that at least those don't get butchered.

It got rolled out due to how MASSIVE the bounce rate is if the video is in a language users don't understand. I can easily see this on average providing a better experience and lead to less people bouncing. The false positives are not enough to counteract it.

Just feels relatively easy to change the language preference to be a multiselect though.... like ignoring user backlash, I'd assume _internal users of YT_ would just get extremely annoyed.

I don't really need magic, mainly want "if language not user's language" to turn into "if language not in user's language(s)"

>I do not understand how this got rolled out. Surely there are _loads_ of multilingual people working at YouTube.

Simple - at Google, feedback from internal users is ignored.

So is from external users. The only feedback that may be heard must be numeric and translate to $$$ KPI. Hint: Youtube viewers are not Googles customers.

> How is there not at least an option…

Haven't we learned in the last 15 years or so that options are bad for users? ;-)

Moreover, watching videos in a foreign language with subtitles in that same language used to be a popular tool for learning languages. Clearly, the proliferation of language skills is a serious danger to the market for AI generated instant translations and must be stopped at all costs.

Google knows which languages we speak... right? Surely...

Also, advertisers get that option, because they're the only users YT cares about.

Ah, well, the content has to fit localized ads! That's it!

(You don't want that distracting break in languages between revenue earning productions and embedding media fluff. I guess, in this context, the plug-in is as evil as ad-blockers are.)

Good point about avoiding the distracting break.

In fact, there must be an incentive here for Google to auto-translate a video only when it can sell an ad in the translated language for more than one in the original.

I suppose we should be glad that they've not (yet!) gone that far, or it would become even more of an unpredictable mess from the end user's point of view.

Can't wait for consuming content in its original form becoming a violation of the ToS! :-)

(I can see a bright future where smart TVs come with mandatory, non-optional instant translation… and maybe, if we were allowed to dream, with realtime character replacement and background adaptation to fit the next ad context. It's the logical step forwards from colorized B/W… /s)

> This is why I find some of the comments on this thread surprising.

Two words: Preference and choice. You prefer it one way and are happy. Other prefer it another way.

The fact that they are unhappy is not that you can do what makes you happy. It is that the choice isn’t easily available to choose to do what makes them happy.

But you're arguing for auto-translation of a language you don't speak. The problem is when it does it for a language we speak. If it auto-translated japanese or polish or whatever for me I wouldn't mind as I don't speak those. But it auto-translates titles from English to my native language which is just bonkers. That's the difference here.

That's a fair point.

I use English while using any YT client so I didn't notice it as much. So I changed the language on my browser to German, went to a couple of American channels and now I get some of the outrage on this thread. Weirdly, some videos get their titles translated and some don't. Not only the titles but also the descriptions get translated. Honestly, I'm surprised they aren't translating the comments at this point.

I still do understand and like the feature a lot. It's a good way to push the engagement rates I guess. A simple solution would be to show a dialog with languages where the users can pick what they speak, not touch videos in those languages and translate everything else.

I'm against auto-translate for the exact same argument. I don't want japanese band's name to be translated. Nor I want my own music titles to be translated into other languages. There are many reasons why I wrote or said something in a specific language.

That's a fair argument to make.

My main point was that I like the auto-translation because information retrieval was so much better. But the intent behind the video of the uploader has to be maintained and respected.

I also agree. Spotify actually went the other way, about six or seven years ago. They used to use translated song titles where available, but switched to using the canonical title in the canonical script.

My response to having whole playlists effectively change language was the most reasonable one: start learning Japanese. Now I can at least read kana and get a solid chunk of titles, and I pick out phrases here and there in the lyrics now.

I can't imagine trying to search for something with a specific title and having the results screwed by bizarre machine translation.

> This is why I find some of the comments on this thread surprising.

In general, some of the loudest voices in any given community are the ones who are dissatisfied with the thing in question. So, there are many people (or at least the two of us!) who are reasonably satisfied with this feature and find it helpful.

Well, it's not that I don't see how this feature can add value for others, it just doesn't add value for me (it directly detracts value, actually), and I would like to be able to disable it without installing a browser extension.