YouTube No Translation
63 comments
·July 19, 2025zorrolovsky
hombre_fatal
Well, surely the idea is that anyone can watch any video in any language. Especially enabling the non-English-speaking world to consume the much larger corpus of English-speaking content.
The idea is great. They just botched it at the UI level.
In practice it means clicking a video you think is in your native language but it's actually in English with low quality auto-subs, but there's no reason Youtube couldn't improve the UX here, like indicate that it's been auto-translated or let you easily filter out content that's not in your language.
ben_w
If you can't turn it off, it destroys the platform as a host for language courses. I'm a native English speaker, I want the German language stuff to be presented in the original German as a way to learn German. I don't want the English stuff dubbed into German, because my German isn't good enough for e.g. PBS Space Time in German.
andix
Sure, but it kills the UX for people who speak more than one language. Which is probably the majority of YouTube users (outside the US).
lbotos
in my feed there is a small pill that reads "auto-dubbed". Easy to miss though.
hombre_fatal
Yeah, and that's only for auto-dubbing which barely has any penetration. Most videos don't have that, just a translated title that doesn't match the audio track.
lbotos
You gotta remember that "think of the average person, and then remember 50% are dumber than that".
By doing this, Youtube has probably 10x'd available content for "dumb" ppl to watch. Respectfully, my parents are in that cohort, and I suspect my father will happily watch AI translated and dubbed woodworking channels and not care at all. He "wins" here.
I have to acknowledge that there are probably more people like him then like me who want to have Japanese videos in Japanese in my US feed.
YT needs to make it configurable and I'm fine to turn it off, but the fact that I need an extension to do so is very much lame. As well as that I'm not sure uploaders are aware of their videos being displayed in this way.
SkiFire13
> By doing this, Youtube has probably 10x'd available content for "dumb" ppl to watch.
But is that content really watchable for them?
ahmedfromtunis
What's dumb about watching dubbed woodworking videos? And what part of watching japanese videos in japanese makes superior?
You know what's dumb, though: failing to acknowledge that the world is diverse and people have diverse needs that we can't even start to imagine.
I'm happy for your dad that AI has opened for him the gates to even more content to watch from around the world about his hobby.
b3orn
> And what part of watching japanese videos in japanese makes superior?
Bilingual people exist and the AI translation YouTube currently uses sounds very unnatural and destroys everything that isn't voice.
stingraycharles
Your comment appears very hostile considering the fact that the parent you’re replying to was actually doing exactly that, being considerate that there are many people that prefer things to be dubbed as they don’t master English all that well.
dismalaf
Most Americans speak one language. Therefore American product designers think everyone speaks one language and only ever wants to hear everything in their one language...
I agree, it's annoying. I speak multiple languages and like to consume the original whenever possible.
RandomThoughts3
[dead]
anal_reactor
It's extremely sinister. The grand prize is feeding people AI-generated content, and completely removing the human factor. Many platforms started as social media, but converted into content delivery platforms. Which is cool, except content creators can be problematic. If you remove them out of equation, you basically get audience to watch whatever slop you want them to watch, with zero human interaction at all. Spotify is already taking serious steps by promoting AI-generated music. In this context, forcing AI-generated translations onto people is a step towards getting them used to listening AI-generated voice. And you can market this easily by saying "we just want people to have more cross-cultural communication, no evil here".
I don't want to completely disregard AI-generated content. Some of it can be actually good, and I use AI as a talking companion. But at the same time it's a technology that can easily be abused. And it will be abused. And we'll love it. Except those few nutjobs who resist, but nobody will care. Free speech doesn't matter when nobody's listening.
SkiFire13
That looks very useful, thanks!
I _love_ when youtube auto-translates english titles to my native language and then asks me if I want to translate the rare comments in my native language to english.
It seem they just don't contemplate people speaking two or more languages, *even though the setting in the google account is there*.
miggol
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
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.
kaoD
I don't even need a configurable toggle. I just need YouTube to understand I am native Spanish and English speaker and leave those untouched.
RandomThoughts3
Google has always been a pain when it comes to internationalisation.
The number of hoops you have to jump through to get results from the actual Google page when you are outside of the US is mind boggling. I don’t even know if it’s still possible.
culturestate
> The number of hoops you have to jump through to get results from the actual Google page when you are outside of the US is mind boggling.
Do you mean results in English, or results that are specifically US-centric?
TrackerFF
Just came back home from a 3 week travel in south- and east-Europe. Visited 4 different countries. I have a newfound hatred for:
1. Sites/apps that automatically change language based on your location, and force that auto-translation onto you.
2. Reddit that translates reddit posts to your location based language. Those will quickly populate your search feed for almost any search you do.
alkonaut
How did they fail to make this an option in the first place?
To be very clear, I don’t even want to translate videos in languages that YouTube know I don’t understand. Much less in videos languages I do understand.
Also I don’t think it’s a good idea to use AI in any part of this chain unless there is user driven corrections. Seems like even big TikTok/Instagram accounts use some auto subtitling machinery and it’s invariably wrong. Why even bother? Or why not just manually subtitle if it’s a 10 second English video and the text is in English? Why use automation at all for that?
bilekas
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.
dcow
After 25 you can’t really learn new languages without considerable investment and effort. Translating is the only option for the vast majority of people.
Andrew_nenakhov
Not true at all. I've learned one language after I hit 39 and started leaning another when I hit 45, 7 months in learning it ~15 min a day and I'm bothering B1 level.
culturestate
> After 25 you can’t really learn new languages without considerable investment and effort.
It takes considerable investment and effort before you’re 25, too, you just don’t notice it because it happens slowly over a long period in school and via immersion.
I move around a lot so I’ve had to learn a few new languages as an adult - at least to basic proficiency, if not approaching fluency - and I don’t think it’s really any more difficult than it was when I was a kid, except that I now recognize how difficult it is.
Mordisquitos
>Translating is the only option for the vast majority of people.
The key word here being 'option'.
>After 25 you can’t really learn new languages without considerable investment and effort.
And by enabling this translation by default, without any obvious way to disable it, they are also making it harder for < 25 year-olds to be exposed to other languages, which will itself make it harder for them to learn them. For instance, consider the effect of TV and film dubbing on Spain's proficiency in English[0]:
«Spain and Portugal share many geographical and cultural traits. But the number of Spanish speakers is double that of Portuguese speakers. Again, maybe in part because of this, Portugal uses subtitling while in Spain television is dubbed. And, as a result, Portugal’s results in the TOEFL exams are much better than Spain’s.»
yurishimo
This is a misleading take. Do you consider the decade of language “learning” that a child does before they are “fluent” to not be a considerable effort?
Many people learn new languages all the time for a variety of reasons. In some regions of the world, it is expected of you to learn a half dozen languages throughout your lifetime.
I’m not against translating but it should not be the default in society if there is also no opt-out.
As someone who started learning a new language in my late 20s after a move across the world, I haven’t found it any more difficult than any other skill that requires diligent practice. Guitar, programming, driving; language is a skill. Since western humans tend to only learn them at a young age it can be easy to forget that.
vivzkestrel
I ll give you an even better idea for a youtube extension, if nobody makes it, i ll most certainly do. I need to pin a particular comment on a set of videos matching a criteria and change this pinned comment across all these videos every now and then, like for example when i put a new video out, i would like to link to this from the pinned comment of relevant videos. this is such a hassle doing manually in current times. i am amazed nobody has come up with a pinned comment manager for youtube yet
sjmulder
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.
atum47
The fact that this needs to exist is a testament to how bad some things in YouTube are. They were able to make me quit being a paying customer with shitty things like that.
waschl
YouTube settings are notoriously volatile even on the same device and being logged in. Subtitles are enabled every other day all of a sudden without any need (even for my natural language content). Since they rolled out the auto-trabslation thing the same happens, I have to switch to original English every few days.
Anybody knows the business reason for this feature to exist? most people here and in other places are incredibly frustrated with auto-translate and the inability to turn it off. I include myself in that bunch.
There are two potential reasons in my mind: - Youtube folks A/B tested it and it got more engagement - n/ views, time viewed per video, etc. (but were they tracking the right metrics? ie did they capture user frustration) - Some 'guru' at Youtube decided "it's good UX" and "it's what everybody wants". In such case, the damage the 'guru' is doing is unbelievable. Millions of people annoyed across the world... every single day.