I vividly hate these features. I use this service to help me with other languages, now they try to translate everything to me as if I'm a toddler. It makes things very hard to enjoy. Besides the ao voice sucks. Good thing i use newpipe now, and i can choose which audio track to play.
this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2025
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I fucking hate autotranslated titles!
I only watch YouTube videos in English but my native language is different. All the fucking videos have fucking ai translated titles that don't even make sense . And all the jokes are lost
And the automatic dubs sound horrible. People actually listen to those?
Now even ads for booking.com use the horrible ai voices. It's a 10 seconds ad and their revenue for 2024 was 24 fucking BILLIONS. CAN YOU GO TO FIVERR TO HIRE A NATIVE SPEAKER FOR $5 AND NOT RAPE MY EARS???
My 5 year old uses it, because he doesn't speak English yet, but thats about it.
The way some websites just guess your language via IP geolocation infuriates me.
And before changing language you have to accept cookies and ToS. In that language. And language selection doesn't use flags, but it's written. And the list of languages is translated into "local" language.
And good luck if you don't live in the main country of such language, I rather use english everywhere than use spain spanish.
God, so fucking annoying.
I am from Eastern EU, recently moved to Germany, but traveling often to the Nordics for work. All my devices are set to English, but these LoCaLiZeD websites don’t seem to fucking mind, and I get web pages in some forsaken local language I don’t understand.
If all the fucking tech in the world would just stop gathering all my data to try to guess what I want, and just do exactly what I tell them do, I would be so happy.
I don't mind them using that to guess, but the #1 thing a website should do when you first start using it is to allow you to select a language, and then to remember that language.
It's extremely irritating when they use GeoIP to guess your language and then require you to know the guessed language to know where to find the settings and how to change the settings back to English, or whatever other language you prefer.
As an aside, this is how I know that Google and Facebook are lying about having a "mind control ray" that knows you so well that they show you extremely targeted ads that you will always click on. Bitch, if you can't even figure out the languages I understand, you know nothing about me.
And then there's IGN, who blocks you from even accessing English articles and redirects you to their local website.
I currently live in Canada, so I don't experience that. But if I look up a recipe and it is on foodnetwork.com I immediately get a modal popup saying "Hello Canada! Were you looking for Food Network Canada?" asking me if I wanted to go to foodnetwork.ca. If I choose that option, it doesn't take me to the recipe on the Canadian site, it just takes me to the homepage. Utterly useless.
But, that's not because of a language thing. My guess is that it's a rights thing. The US and Canadian brands are probably owned by different entities, and there's an agreement to try to redirect all traffic hitting .com to the .ca site. I don't know if that's the case for IGN, but it could be.
Google keeps changing my country just as I get ready to move to another country. I haven't had currency in correct local units in almost a decade.
And, of course, there's no way to change this - it's done automatically, and always at the worst possible time.
Nothing should be 'auto' on a computer. Options are great, but everything your computer does should be a thing you are doing via the computer, not a thing the computer just does.
I hate these auto translations with a vengeance. I don't care if its English or my native language. Most of the time, I don't even notice which it is. Except when the audio of a channel I know suddenly is a desinterested robot voice.
As a Swede, we speak English incredibly well on average and automatic translations are very obvious (they can't adapt expressions as well as human translators can, etc). It's very annoying when automatic translations are forced on or the default.
That's what you get by allowing a US site to get a world-wide monopoly....
I'll just leave this here:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-no-translation
Ah nice one, thanks. I wish it worked for mobile too.
You and the creator of this extension are saints! Was a bit confused as to why the site was in Portuguese at first though lol
Anyways, thanks a lot!
Oh, I removed all the section data from the URL, but I didn't notice the locale.
IT IS SOOOOO ANNOYING! I'M CONSTANTLY HAVING TO MANUALLY CHANGE YOUTUBE'S LANGUAGE SINCE I WATCH VIDEOS IN TWO LANGUAGES LOL WHO IN THEIR RIGHT MIND THOUGHT THAT WAS A GOOD IDEA?
The translated titles are ok-ish, I've seen some funny mistranslations but most of the time it's understandable. But the auto-dub is actually unwatchable. Not only is it absolutely terrible both in terms of translation and actual watching experience, you also can't turn it off? What the hell man...
The translated video titles are the worst. You never know the language the video will be on, and YT is always translating to some random language without any evidence you can speak it.
Kurzgesagt has a German and a English channel thanks to youtube I never know which one it is before checking the vid
The channel names are different. How can you not tell?
Traslated titles are trash, at least for Spanish. Those are usually confusing due to the wrong translation of technical terms or even common words/slang. They can't be bothered to give you anything better than shit-tier google translated text.
Dearrow has an option to disable them and it's an absolute godsend; though I'm not using it now for performance issues.
This is one of the most annoying things in the recent internet! I guess the most convenient option would be to just ask me for the languages I understand, and only auto translate everything else.
The most convenient option would be to just not do it without an explicit opt-in.
You know how most browsers offer to do it.
Not even that. I’m logged in. I watch a lot of YouTube in English and my mother tongue. YouTube knows this. YouTube also knows I turn off subtitles/translation when they auto turn them on. Why the fuck can’t they just see what I’m doing and serve me shit untranslated in the two languages they definitely know I speak? They can’t tell me they don’t have that data. They’re fucking YouTube/Google
The most logical option would be to stop fucking auto translations.
i wonder why they don’t just do it like they do subtitles, letting you change the audio track (between original and a few translated ones)
i know they can (or could?) do this for videos with manual translations, why not the automatic ones as well?
It's so dumb, random video titles are translated into Polish and it just makes them worse
I am Polish, but I have language on Google services set to English, so I get random Polish YouTubers' titles auto-translated to English. It's so fucking dumb.
Usually when an unpleasant, inconvenient, non-optional 'feature' like this comes out, it's at least obvious how that'd generate the culprit company more profits. But with this one, Im genuinely befuddled as to how it benefits YouTube shareholders. Anyone have a guess?
I think it is marketing for Google AI and - as most things AI these days - a space reservation to prevent any competitor to come with a browser plugin that would add this feature without using Google. AI has to pee on everything to mark its masters territory.
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Speaking only one language has nothing to do with this, there have always been subtitles.
YouTube does this so that one way or another they can say that more people use AI translations, and that shows investors there's value in AI and Google gets more investments.
Love that Newpipe actually allows me to deactivate the audio translation globally.
But I don't think any frontend allows you to disable those shitty machine translated titles. Like what the fuck is this?:
That's why I like it when creators add text in the thumbnail so I know the original language even tho the title is translated. This shouldn't be necessary but alas it is
I'm sure google is already working on GenAI to "fix" that for you.
I hate the future.
I thankfully haven't encountered the translated titles thing in a long time (I think I remember noticing YT music would translate the titles of JP songs I was listening to like, 5-6 years ago???), but the AI audio dubs fucking KILL me. Especially since I use ReVanced on my phone, which means that I have to have stream spoofing on for videos to even play, but that also means I can't force the original audio, so I quite literally can't watch some videos in their original language on my phone unless I pull it up on Invidious.
Newpipe and Pipepipe seemed to have a stroke on my devices when I tried to use them (FreeTube is good about 80% of the days, but I really only use it on my laptop), so praying the browser Invidious is working is literally my only option in that case.
I am TRYING to learn a language Google, so please don't force a shitty AI dub on a video that quite literally says "Japanese Listening Practice" 🤬
trying to learn a language
Youre nit supposed to do that.
Thank god I speak a language which gets support for this kinda stuff really late. Even though I still sometimes get translated titles and it annoys the hell out of me. Sure 19 videos on your page are in english but 1 sticks out because it's in my language. Ok lemme click on it.
Ohhhh.... It is still in english just the title was translated. Great.....
i could put up with their constant attempts to block adblocks, that was fine, felt like a fun battle (which adblockers were obviously going to win)
but i draw the line at auto translation, if i start seeing the videos i want to watch auto translated to the langauge of the country i'm in i'm going to actually flip out. and probably start using freetube again
The vast majority of youtube viewers struggle to learn one language, let alone two.
As usual, catering to the lowest denominator makes the most money.
Are the americans americanning again?
Big tech always caters to the lowest common denominator
why did you delete the other post? or was it a mod?
it was a mod removal: https://lemmy.ml/modlog/14
they say rule 1, which is
Be civil and nice.
this look like a candidate for yepowertrippingbastards. what was that site that can show the mod that deleted the content, and sometimes the deleted content too?
Between videos that aren't in English being in robot-voice English, and videos that aren't NSFW being impossible to watch now cause they deem it 18+…
If I've learned anything from this 18+ thing, is that, if they wanted, you'd really need to log in to watch videos. FreeTube won't play 'em, yt-dlp won't download 'em. Short of sketchy websites probably implementing an account of their own in the background, nothing else. And even sketchy websites, it'll take you a hot minute to find one that works.
As for the English bot voice, I've learned to "Open Invidious link." Until FreeTube fixes this, at least. Heard it's on the way. Though idk if this is the same issue as the post mentions
Is this regarding the badly generated audio tracks? Just checked and couldn't find a single one with that on. Even on videos i remember having them. It's really sucks that new features even bad ones are decided seemingly on country, language, accounts status and other hidden variables.