I have been using an untranslate add-on like this one and have been absolutely loving it. Since YouTube has been AI translating video titles and dubbing contents it has been suggesting foreign videos in users' home feed.
The way these untranslate add-ons work (layman's explanation) is that they fetch the original title and audio and reinsert it, but the recommendation for the video stays in your feed. This has resulted in loads of super interesting foreign language content in my feed which is just awesome.
Cars are one of my YouTube interests and seeing loads of cool old car content from different parts of the world has been fascinating. Not only were different models popular in different places but the things people value in a car are also wildly different across the globe. And I get to listen to a cool foreign language while discovering this!
One downside is that to the YouTube algorithm, it probably seems like I absolutely LOVE this autodubbing feature, going crazy for all these translated videos. That could not be further from the truth: my youtube feed has become completely unusable without an untranslate add-on since this update.
rickcarlino · 47m ago
Unbelievable that YouTube has not made this feature configurable. I am a language learner and use YouTube to find target language content. It’s very difficult now because you can no longer trust the title of the video to tell you what language it was intended for. Would have been very simple to add a settings toggle. This is one of the worst app inconveniences I’ve come across in recent years.
bilekas · 12m ago
The fact that this is needed and not configurable is so frustrating. I'm almost certain nobody even asked for this.
What a great way to stop people ever needing to learn another language. God forbid people use their brains for anything that 30 second shorts.
Maybe enshitification is entering its dadaist phase? That's the best explanation I have for how youtube decided to implement this feature.
sjmulder · 49m ago
Great! Dutch living in Austria and YouTube is randomly dubbing videos from one language to another with no way of turning it off, which is my real WTF here.
CivBase · 1h ago
I didn't know video translations were a thing. Is this not configurable?
Version467 · 1h ago
Surprisingly, it isn't. You can change the language in your google account and it will take that into account for what to translate and into what language, but you can't turn it off completely.
I don't know who thought this was a good user experience, because it's one of the most frustrating features I've ever had to deal with. I'm german, but almost all of the things I watch are in english. So usually I will just ignore recommendations with german titles. Except I can't do that anymore, because there's no guarantee that youtube didn't randomly decide to translate the title of an english video into german. And recently, they've added auto-translated audio, which is even worse, because now I'm opening an english video and a terrible robotic german voice is talking to me and I manually need to switch to the original source.
It's also not consistent behavior. It's not like all videos on the front page are looking like they're in german. It's just some of them and afaik there's no way to tell.
And you genuinely can't turn it off completely. Incredibly frustrating and I'm just puzzled by the thought-process that lead to this decision. This would be a pretty cool feature if it was consistently applied and freely configurable.
rtsil · 1h ago
I'm in France, but my Google, browsers and devices languages are English. So Youtube randomly auto-dubs (and auto-translates the title of) some French videos into English, and some English videos into French. But they're never the same videos depending on the devices or the browsers. However, the automatic subtitles during the preview remain in the original langage.
lloeki · 6m ago
I'm in France, my devices are set to en-GB, I've watched only English videos (plus the odd French one) yet youtube decides to auto translate audio in German and lately in Spanish.
Go figure.
vladvasiliu · 16m ago
I'm in the same boat (living in France, browser and google account configured to use English) and I've never noticed this.
Now I'm not a hardcore Youtube user, but whenever I browse it, French-titled videos are in French, and the same for English.
I'm mostly using Firefox on Linux, and occasionally Edge on Windows.
lloeki · 9m ago
> Except I can't do that anymore, because there's no guarantee that youtube didn't randomly decide to translate the title of an english video into german
Sp you clicked when you wouldn't have, somewhere an engagement graph went a notch up, and someone will get a pat on the back.
silvestrov · 58m ago
> thought-process that lead to this decision
highly likely to be monolingual people as they cannot understand you would like movies to be in any other language than your mother tongue.
troupo · 54m ago
> highly likely to be monolingual people
Which is insane to me. Silicon Valley is filled to the brim with multi-lingual people. And yet so many decisions that are coming out have no understanding of languages
WesolyKubeczek · 11m ago
I wouldn't be surprised at all if they one day decided that to have an experience of having no user content automatically translated, you have to pay for the privilege. Call it a multilinguality tax.
WHA8m · 1h ago
I'd love to have a robotic german voice. All I get is the clickbait MrBeast TikTok voice. I get a real reaction when I hear it. I try so hard to avoid the current social media content. It's unbearable. The shock is even greater when I do stumble across it.
Youtube is really the only website that is straight up unusable for me without a set of Addons (uBlock, sponsorBlock, Unhook).
chii · 1h ago
> I don't know who thought this was a good user experience
the product manager(s) and the team who needed to show impact in their performance reviews.
MrGilbert · 1h ago
To add to that, the german translation most of the time is absolutely horrible and more clickbait then the original wording.
HPsquared · 1h ago
It should really be an option in the advanced search, or be able to say something like lang:de
troupo · 52m ago
> I don't know who thought this was a good user experience
Which youtube decision of recent years ever thought about user experience?
It's all "company bets" and "promotion tracks".
When it was a fight against TikTok you got Shorts that you can't get rid of.
Now you probably have to "show commitment to our AI offerings" or something. So you get autotranslated videos by a team which will get 500k bonuses and will move on in a month
Zealotux · 1h ago
Apparently not, or the setting is not easily accessible, and it baffles me it's the case and someone at YouTube probably is proud of it on top of getting their promotion for such a terrible feature.
sigio · 1h ago
On desktop you can at least change it at runtime (like auto-dubbing), but on mobile they have made this completely impossible. I keep running into (originally) german video's that have been auto-translated to english for me, which I really dislike, since I can perfectly understand german. There's no way to disable this and just get subs only (which can be toggled on/off)
rjsw · 36m ago
I thought that yt-dlp uses the mobile interface, it shows the different language options and identifies the original one, the official mobile player must be making the choice of which one to use.
thrance · 1h ago
You'd guess so but no. If you're bilingual you have to choose one language, and videos in the other will get this ridiculously bad literal auto-translation treatment. Pure insanity, and something that makes me mad daily.
torlok · 1h ago
As a polish YouTube user who wants to watch content in both languages, it's an infuriating no. YouTube started translating titles recently for me, and the translations are pure nonsense. I'm not exaggerating, it's dumb word for word translation with no context. I have to reverse engineer titles now. Even more recently they turned audio translation on too with the most ear piercing voice possible, but that can be turned off. Title translation can't be turned off.
WesolyKubeczek · 8m ago
Yup. I look up videos with Polish titles precisely because I want local content made in Poland telling about things specific to Poland, not some other stuff which turns out to be in English made for other locales.
But I guess they see my frustration as "engagement".
The way these untranslate add-ons work (layman's explanation) is that they fetch the original title and audio and reinsert it, but the recommendation for the video stays in your feed. This has resulted in loads of super interesting foreign language content in my feed which is just awesome.
Cars are one of my YouTube interests and seeing loads of cool old car content from different parts of the world has been fascinating. Not only were different models popular in different places but the things people value in a car are also wildly different across the globe. And I get to listen to a cool foreign language while discovering this!
One downside is that to the YouTube algorithm, it probably seems like I absolutely LOVE this autodubbing feature, going crazy for all these translated videos. That could not be further from the truth: my youtube feed has become completely unusable without an untranslate add-on since this update.
What a great way to stop people ever needing to learn another language. God forbid people use their brains for anything that 30 second shorts.
I don't know who thought this was a good user experience, because it's one of the most frustrating features I've ever had to deal with. I'm german, but almost all of the things I watch are in english. So usually I will just ignore recommendations with german titles. Except I can't do that anymore, because there's no guarantee that youtube didn't randomly decide to translate the title of an english video into german. And recently, they've added auto-translated audio, which is even worse, because now I'm opening an english video and a terrible robotic german voice is talking to me and I manually need to switch to the original source.
It's also not consistent behavior. It's not like all videos on the front page are looking like they're in german. It's just some of them and afaik there's no way to tell.
And you genuinely can't turn it off completely. Incredibly frustrating and I'm just puzzled by the thought-process that lead to this decision. This would be a pretty cool feature if it was consistently applied and freely configurable.
Go figure.
Now I'm not a hardcore Youtube user, but whenever I browse it, French-titled videos are in French, and the same for English.
I'm mostly using Firefox on Linux, and occasionally Edge on Windows.
Sp you clicked when you wouldn't have, somewhere an engagement graph went a notch up, and someone will get a pat on the back.
highly likely to be monolingual people as they cannot understand you would like movies to be in any other language than your mother tongue.
Which is insane to me. Silicon Valley is filled to the brim with multi-lingual people. And yet so many decisions that are coming out have no understanding of languages
Youtube is really the only website that is straight up unusable for me without a set of Addons (uBlock, sponsorBlock, Unhook).
the product manager(s) and the team who needed to show impact in their performance reviews.
Which youtube decision of recent years ever thought about user experience?
It's all "company bets" and "promotion tracks".
When it was a fight against TikTok you got Shorts that you can't get rid of.
Now you probably have to "show commitment to our AI offerings" or something. So you get autotranslated videos by a team which will get 500k bonuses and will move on in a month
But I guess they see my frustration as "engagement".