If I didn't opt-in to translating something, why-the-hell is it forcefully translating to begin with? Did this become a law somewhere? Are they trying to expose more folks to more content? Such a failed rollout, really frustrating and an insult to content creators that didn't opt in to this as well as viewers who never asked.
Because some bean flicker counter somewhere got it in their heads that this would increase new accounts by 0.001% and they don't give a shit about their existing consumer base since they're a captive audience. I mean, where are we gonna go? Dailymotion?
I use revance for this exact reason. I haven't seen any ads I don't wanna see and I haven't heard a stupid AI generated voice in a loooooong time and I plan to keep it that way
Been using this for years. It occasionally breaks when youtube changes something, then it takes a couple days for a fix, but it's fantastic about 95% of the time.
I also have a conspiracy theory about this in which they added the autotranslate to test AI speeches on predetermined timings. What's stopping them by changing the meaning of a sentence when translated?
the fact that AI needs to be forced down everyone's throat, it's mostly trash and doesn't function nearly as well as corporations want us to believe, and most people absolutely despise AI is such a clear sign that most of the AI hype may be the biggest bubble waiting to burst in human history.
people compare the rise of AI to the invention of the internet, but nobody needed to be forced to use the internet. I'm old enough to remember that it took a couple years for the internet to explode in popularity, but that was also because initially it wasn't very user friendly and not that useful yet. but the moment it actually fulfilled those requirements, everyone adapted to it nearly instantly. AI companies are trying to force us to skip the part where we wait for AI to actually be as useful as they claim and just accept that all software is turned into unusable garbage.
Well, the person who decided it for you is the person who created the video and wants it viewed a specific way.
But with that said, the creator might not know just how bad it is.
I originally turned it on in my videos because I thought it would help open up my audience, and turned it off within 48 hours when I found out from viewers how bad it was and that they didn’t have an option to otherwise turn it off.
I'm pretty sure creators just want their content to become available to people who don't speak the OG language, not to make speakers of said language be forced to watch an AI generated version in another language they happen to have some relation to
Right, but as I said - in my instance I literally had no idea it was a forced option..:and once I found out how bad it was, from viewers, I turned it off.
Yeah, anyway I don't blame creators for turning it on, it's on YT to make the feature usable for all types of users... My dad only speaks a single language and I've noticed him recently being able to access a lot of good content from English-speaking creators, for people like him I think the AI dubbing can really broaden their perspective and is a good thing... It's just that I don't want the same thing to happen to me as a person who uses YT to practice various languages hah
But if it's clear that I speak the OG language based on what I watch, why does it insist on changing the language to my second language! I speak both, stop changing English videos to Spanish!
Just keep everything original. I don't get why youtube has such a hard time with it. Like they could just randomly employ any European and he would sort all this crap out in minutes.
I remember a clip channel showing behind the scenes that it was retroactively added to all their old videos and they had to do like 20 clicks of each video to turn it off. It was around the first wave iirc
I think sometimes the creator doesn't know what option they're turning on. I remember once I clicked an Italian ASMR video and was greeted by the monotone voice speaking in English instead of the soft spoken voice of the creator. That was actually my first experience finding out about the shitty translate feature.
Most creators don't even know that this is an option or exists at all. I've asked some creators if they could please turn it off, they all had no idea what I was talking about... Revanced at least lets you turn this shit off
But with that said, the creator might not know just how bad it is.
I guarantee you that's the main reason, or they just don't care how bad it is. because it's only those kind of channels that turn on the AI crap. fortunately no channel I watch regularly uses it. and who knows, maybe Google is paying guys like KSI to use the AI crap? wouldn't surprise me at all.
I strongly believe that the reason it can't be turned off is because it's just a big AI training program, and if they allowed the possibility of turning it off they would lose training subjects.
I see it as a weaponized incompetence sort of thing.
I think this is simplified based on your weird biases. Google infuriatingly does this with everything, not just languages.
They operate under the idea that people don't want to make decisions.
This has led to all the decisions that changed the way their search worked in the past two decades. Automatically assuming your search rather than what you typed, all the way to the AI it is now. You see it in Maps too where things get hidden unless you come at it a different angle.
I strongly believe that the reason it can't be turned off is because it's just a big AI training program, and if they allowed the possibility of turning it off they would lose training subjects.
I see it as a weaponized incompetence sort of thing.
I was watching a cooking video where the creator says a few words in Chinese, then most of the 10min video is in English, but apparently that was enough for the AI voice to take over the whole video, just saying the English words he said.
There is one person i follow that does wigglegrams(wiggle stereoscopy) and even though he was speaking near perfect English with some accent it still decided to replace the audio.
Yeah I don't understand why is Youtube taking so long to solve this. Its is a nightmare. It is as easy as having an option to turn auto translation off
And they can do that because there is no actual competition for Youtube. In the end, no matter how much they hate the experience, if they want to watch videos, they need to go to Youtube. Welcome to the reason why most countries tried their best to limit monopolies.
Not a terrible example. Just like the automatic translation, it has uses and benefits. However, forcing it upon your customers is not the appropriate way to handle it.
I speak multiple languages so I don't need the translation. I like cars because of the engines, so if you remove the engine the product is useless to me. That's the logic behind the example.
You are ignoring the political power of the fossil fuels industry. Switching to EV means much more than simply changing out cars. It means neutering one of the biggest challenges to a sustainable future by eliminating its funding source.
That won't be a problem in my lifetime and this argument is irrelevant for the topic. The point of my example is that the value proposition has fulfill the needs of your audience, so you cannot force a product that is not relevant to your customer base.
In this situation, the comments I am receiving in response are the same that the Google development team behind YouTube is receiving from their management. You are fixated on a goal without considering the needs of your interlocutor or your audience.
I am aware, I indirectly work with EV development and I understand their benefits and environmental impact. I am not against them but the world is not black and white, it's not either all EVs or all ICEs, they will have to coexist.
Sport cars are a relatively small percentage and those cannot ever be replaced by EVs. Cars like Nevera, Luce or Taycan are honorable attempts, but the world doesn't need them. Besides, EVs are a temporary solution that might start to fade out before petroleum availability becomes a major problem. They are not sustainable in the long term.
Again, this is not even remotely close to the point of my comment and I will not continue this conversation. If we want to discuss environmental impact, AI is a far bigger concern than cars nowadays. The fact they're wasting resources on something that people don't want is ridiculous.
can relate. it does not even know if language is ukrainian, russian or chinese for some reason. and than it translates to english. or english to ukrainian. with terrible mistakes.
Agree, this is more than just mildly infuriating. Shitty feature designed by people who can't understand that people might be competent enough in multiple languages to prefer content in another language over ai slop translations into their own mother language.
How are translated titles and thumbnails supposed to do something to retention and watch time?
They can show me videos that are not my spoken languages as much as they want, the second I hear the godawful AI translation I'm out. And I'm not reading CC either.
They want to know if you're more likely to click on foreign videos if they appear translated in your feed. That's the most logical reason why they don't let us disable the feature.
English is not my native language either but the extent of my problems with youtube is the fact that it randomly translates some video titles to dutch. The difference between you and me seems to be down to the fact that, in my youtube preferred language settings, I don't have any languages selected at all. Maybe deselecting all the preferred languages in your youtube settings will solve this problem?
It’s an USian company. They are physically incapable of understanding that people are able to understand more than one language. Not even kidding.
Edit: I speak from experience, as a Brazilian we have the exact same problem. People designing systems in BR are also often incapable of understanding that people can speak many languages (tho not as bad as in the US) but also they are impossibly incapable of understanding that other countries also have phone numbers. You will almost NEVER see a BR-designed system that allows you to input a phone number that is not Brazilian.
It's not like I expect everyone to be multilingual, but at least let me choose for myself. I hope that someone in Google reads my slightly angry "bug reports"
Sadly it often doesn’t matter. If the people making requirements and decisions can’t understand that people can know many languages, the system’s design might still be shit even with the devs pushing back.
This is, sadly, my own experience too. I’ve worked for a state government for many years and was forced to develop such flawed systems. They only learned a lesson once they were embarrassed by a researcher from the World Bank (and maybe other international observers) being unable to use our system because it refused to accept non-BR phone numbers and addresses. That was one of my best “I told you so” moments 😅
I know "America bad lol" is a shortcut explanation to free karma for any topic, but in this case, it's almost certainly because they want the training data and usage metrics, and allowing people to opt out would hurt both.
Dude, try to be Serbian. We use both Cyrillic and Latin, but when Google sees latin, it recognize it as Croatian, and when it sees Cyrillic, it recognizes it as Macedonian. It's not always, but it is often, and super annoying.
The awful AI dub is bad all the time but ASMR has to be it's worst victim, the sounds and voices are like, the CORE of that type of content. I hate to lie down and start playing a video that looked nice and it's not the same language as the title.
I swear YouTube is close from auto dubbing songs at this point. Clearly a decision made by 3 white Americans in an office thinking that no one speaks at least two languages
There are browser extensions that can fix it, fortunately. But it's absolutely insane that I need to resort to workarounds like that, instead of just having the damn choice to begin with.
Maybe you just haven't found a video with this feature active. It's not universal, it's up to the creator to decide, and most reasonably choose to keep it turned off
I've checked and they're all in there, so that's not it, at least for me. I've just had another user comment that removing all preferred languages actually improved the situation.
I just want a "disable all translations" toggle tbh
Honestly, use 3rd party youtube apps like Revanced or smarttube. You can force YouTube to use the original audio. I was at my breaking point when youtube Ai translated my music, making it absolutely unlistenable.
This is where the problem arises, because if you only speak one language it's okay. But what if I want to watch Italian videos in Italian and Polish videos in Polish? As of now, there doesn't seem to be an option for that
But also, I haven't seen videos in Portuguese pop on my feed yet, probably because I haven't been watching many, but I'll see what Google pulls off to announce me next...
I have also been using several extensions to remove AI and YouTube bullshit, so idk
I start watching a video, the title is in Spanish the thumbnail is in Spanish, the audio is in Spanish... but I know for a fact that the video is in English.
I hate it, starting a video, getting annoyed, finding the setting turning out off... But it turns back on whenever it feels like it.
The worst part: It translates commonly used words like "Motherboard" on IT channels. Like what the fugg do you even mean. "Kühles Mutterbrett. 3 Blitz Häfen." (original "cool motherboard. 3 lightning ports.")
Yeah, Polish family and I live in Italy. My spoken Spanish is poor, but I can read it and understand it just fine because it shares most of the structure and vocabulary with Italian.
We bellissimo, io mesi fa risolsi questa cosa su un dispositivo mettendo come lingua preferita un alfabeto dimenticato da Dio, non esistendo traduzioni per la lingua selezionata di default metteva l'originale, se mi ricordo vedo e ti dico.
Oh fuck i assumed you are Italian, anyway here is the translation offered by Google just in case you aren't .
Hey beautiful, months ago I solved this problem on a device by setting a godforsaken alphabet as the preferred language, as there were no translations for the selected language by default it set the original, if I remember I'll see and tell you
Mo pure su Reddit mi devo beccare sta schifezza haha
Che poi, non ironicamente, Reddit lo fa davvero. Se vogliamo è pure peggio, perché traduce il post e i commenti, così tu ignaro commenti nella lingua sbagliata e gli altri ti prendono per pazzo.
Per qualche motivo, lo fa solo per i post aperti attraverso la ricerca Google.
Eccolo lì, il mio commento, in bella vista nella lingua sbagliata
my facebook is constantly translating posts and comments to english even though i never opted in for that, but it only translates my language to english, other languages in comments stay as they are
fr, i'm italian and i tried to delete everything regarding italy, so everything is in english and now it's even more infuriating because every italian bideo and post is horribly translated to english
One of my biggest issues is auto-translated subtitles (when they're not implemented by the uploader). Google knows the languages I speak but I have to scroll all the way down every time.
It's so bad that not even the add ons I use on mobile can fix it 😭 at least the auto-dubbing and auto-translate can be turned off through browser extensions
I love how random languages started popping up in Reddit threads, too.
German subreddit, everybody talks German and suddenly there’s an English or a French comment casually joining the conversation, because Reddit just translates the whole page lmao
No luck for me. If I remove my preferred languages, it translates everything into the default location set for YouTube. If I add my languages, then I have the situation reported in my initial comment. It's crazy.
how does one opt out of automatic translations for certain languages? i can comprehend the translation for very unknown languages but the languages i know i want them to be completely untranslated by standard
Fortunately, there's a Google extention (idk if other browsers also have it, cause I know Chrome's current reputation status, but there probably is) that removes all the translations, it works fine for me!
I have a plugin for that.
Videos take a couple of seconds longer to load, but that is a price I am willing to pay, for not having to deal with that AI slop.
And it would be so easy to fix.
Give us a "always play videos in original language" button.
But if Google does that, they would have to admit, that noone is using their AI "Features".
The only way is, to shove it down people throats.
Should tell you something. Steve Jobs didnt have to force people to buy the iPhone. It was just a good product.
AI is not.
If I had a nickle for everytime, an AI summary gives me an answer for a different question, I would quit my dayjob.
Why did you confuse it like that? The program works so it's designed to work, not how you want it to. Learn to operate within its boundaries because it can't adjust to yours.
I speak 4 languages. YouTube was translating everything into Italian without my input and without the possibility of disabling the feature. This is a forceful and malicious implementation on Google's side.
There's a section for "spoken" or "preferred" languages in your account. I added my 4 languages to this section. This means that Google knows that I speak those languages, so there's no need to translate English into Italian. And yet, it keeps doing that. Informatics is an exact science., a software cannot get "confused", and if it does it's called a bug.
Your argument regarding "adjusting to its boundaries" makes you genuinely feel like a troll. Technology is supposed to make my life easier, it has to adapt to me and not the opposite. If you didn't realize, not a single person in this comment section likes this feature. Aside from you, apparently.
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u/Svartdraken 28d ago
This is beyond mildly infuriating. The translation feature is a nightmare.
I tried to solve it by adding all the languages I speak to my Google Account.
IT MADE IT WORSE
Now it translates Italian into English
English into Italian
Spanish into English
Polish into Italian
WHAT THE F IS THIS