But, surely someone sane there has to realize there is a large number of users out there who speak more than one language, and don't need Google do "help" them or "guess" for what language they like more.

It's OK if they want to offer it, but at least let me disable it for specific languages.

And for those languages which I don't understand, let me choose a default autodubbing language. Because I assume that auto-generated translations from French to English will be far better than those from French to German or Spanish.

Also, the voices they use sound like from a decade ago.

I live in a German speaking country, yet my native language is other and German is almost never preferred when I watch some content. All my UIs are in English.

Yet, I open a video by a Brit and he is autodubbed to German. There really isn't any similar UX decision by any other reputed company that would be comparably stupid as this. Google even has large presence in Switzerland, that makes it even more puzzling.

Having said that I am against the automatic audio translation that some people are reporting. I have not experienced it myself but that seems poorly thought out. It should be easier for people to search through items in a foreign language but that content should be served in the content originally intended.

It's honestly quite incredible.

- uBlock Origin - ad block

- SponsorBlock - to skip in video ads (some other nice features like highlights too)

- YouTube Row Fixer - for the tiles to adjust to the window

- Return YouTube Dislike - self explanatory

- YouTube No Translation - thanks for the suggestion!

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-anti-...

[2] https://github.com/zpix1/yt-anti-translate

The old Youtube was way nicer, it felt snappy, easy to interact with and didn't have all that bloat we have today. I also miss when the ads where a popup at the bottom of the video instead of having to watch double ad segment every 5 minute.

for example, "more plates more dates" has been translated to "Mehr Teller mehr Termine".

not allowing this feature to be disabled is such an user hostile decision.

Any have any idea how to fix this?

It's unfortunate that YouTube is only usable with these extensions, but here we are.

The problems reported by everyone in this thread sound to me like UI bugs of the player, official app or javascript in the browser, picking the wrong audio track automatically.

(a) uBlock - this one is debatable but deals with the worst distractions especially if you're trying to learn from a video your professor put up and you have an exam to prepare for, (b) unhook - hides most of the "recommendations" that attempt to keep you on the site because you're planning to do the copmprehension questions your professor gave you for after the video, (c) something to disable "autoplay next" for the same reason as above (a uBlock rule will do it), (d) no translation. Soon we'll probably need (e) something to block AI.

    // Prevent translation on all levels
        [element, attributedString, snippetAttributedString].forEach(el => {
            if (el) {
                el.setAttribute('translate', 'no');

following

                    el.style.setProperty('translate', 'no', 'important');

If you're using DeArrow, there is an option to disable those translations.

DeArrow is from the same team as SponsorBlock, it removes the clickbait thumbnails and titles with more descriptive ones. It makes the experience sooo much better. https://dearrow.ajay.app/

Even thought about making a spin off app with only the no-translate feature, that simply always uses the original title and audio. I guess revanced can do this too, but maybe there's enough people who don't use revanced, or don't know about this feature. Thoughts?

> Size: 123.22 kB

A not so small extension for getting rid of a problem seems so tiny. Feels a bit like overkill and I hoped there would be something I can forcibly set without any extension. Even with disabled cookies youtube uses local storage. Why not have there some variable for that purpose!?

And this feature is relatively new, I think they started rolling it out only a few months ago. I'm sure configuration options will pop up.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num... and assuming the videos in a language is ~proportional to L1+L2 speakers . That's a simplifying assumption, because I would guess English is more highly represented. Because people likely make more videos in English because there's a bigger audience for it. If only there was a way to allow more non-English speakers to be able to be understood/gain traction....

So it tries to dub urdu videos (as 'hindi' videos) into english, or dub english into hindi, which is useless for me both ways.

Instead of dubbing, make better subs! YouTube subs fail to track when using the video speed feature, so if i am using any other speed playback than 1x, the subs don't load on time, and sometimes get skipped, fix that!

I regularly consume content in two languages, my partner 3, and many of my friends are in the same boat. Please either allow me to just blacklist languages to not translate automatically or always keep content in the original language but allow changing after engaging with it. Its insane that this requires an extension for a company with as much resources as google.

The translations of video titles are absolutely atrocious and rarely mean anything near the intent of the original title.

Thanks for sharing addon :)

Thing is, I haven't lived in Italy for well over a decade. I don't consume much Italian content. I've tried my best to purge my Google account of any possible trace of Italian language settings, I've never saved an Italian address etc.

And yet Google must be convinced that, because I was in Italy over a dozen years ago when I made the account I must be Italian, and that cannot possibly change.

The worst thing about this for me is not the language issue but that the translations are AI generated shite. If it was a case of multilingual channels producing videos in multiple languages then it makes sense that a user with language set to German would receive the German version by default. But to give users an AI generated translation by default? That's horrible.

I get the impression someone in Google/YouTube has this grand vision of it being like a Babel Fish just seamlessly translating voices into your own language. The trouble is Babel Fish is science fiction. Douglas Adams described it as "feeding" the speech centres of your brain directly, not translating the audio into a shitty generated copy.

In order to get a vaguely usable stock YouTube, you need to install at least UBlock, SponsorBlock, No Translation, and arguably DeArrow as well. And this only works for browsers, many people will cope with their mobile YouTube experience being hell on earth. Why do all this when you can get an alternative cross-platform client like GrayJay with all the same features (minus DeArrow for now), which works out of the box, has more privacy, and won't be completely useless the next time Google decides to shift things around a bit?

Same goes for Windows: you'll see people who go to great lengths to disable telemetry, remove Edge and sponsored content, often having to run random scripts from the internet with administrator privileges, just to have everything reset on the next Windows update. Remember how Windows users made fun of Linux users for having to open a command line for installing a browser (which isn't even true)?

I could go on: you can get Firefox and spend hours tweaking about:config to disable the anti-features, or you can get one of the dozen forks with the same patches pre-applied, yet some people will still defend the stock experience with their lives.

Google's stupidity knows no bounds.

----

Like, is nobody in Google multi-lingual? Who the fuck thought this -- not auto-translation, but forced auto-translation -- is a good idea? Surely for an organization that purportedly only hires the cream-of-the-crop, they'll have a larger fraction of employees that speak more than one language? Look, I'm resting-and-vesting like the rest of y'all, but if I were in the team that implemented this, I'd definitely speak up, and let them, up to my skip-level, know that this is terrible. The implication of either possibilities had occurred, yet the feature still shipped, is harrowing.

Even if the developers only speak one language, they must know at least three -- cream-of-the-crop, remember? -- programming languages, right? Imagine if, when you're first hired into Google, you declare your programming language of choice, say Go; then, henceforth whenever you check out the source code, irrespective of its original form, it gets auto-translated into Go, and you can't turn that off? Checking out Pixel first-stage bootloader code, almost certainly written in assembly -- nope! We know better: you're getting that in Go. Fuck, I shouldn't be giving them ideas!

Could they not imagine how horrible this would be, and by analogy when applied to human languages, be also just as horrid?

YouTube's often been cited as a great resource for learning new things. Well, now it's useless for, that's right, learning a second language! I wonder why this Spanish for beginners video's all in English? /s

Speaking about shit features, let's throw "Stable Volume" into the pile. At least this one remembers your preferences...most of the time. When I watch ASMR -- yes I'll admit in public I'm that guy -- videos, and am just about to fall asleep, I just love to be jolted awake by a loud robotic voice's rendition of tapping sounds. Maybe my grumpiness's due to my lack of sleep!

If I don't want the translated sound track there's a button right there in settings to change it. Why do I need this extension?