I‘m German, watching a German creator in a German-language recording.
Only that YouTube decides to use their Mickey Mouse sounding AI voice to deliver an English audio track. Not every time, but at least a third of the time. I have to hunt for the audio setting each time, because you cannot turn off AI voices permanently.
I only love it when their Mickey Mouse sounding AI voice turns ads into a real clown show.
Imagine how they spent big money developing a slogan for their brand or product and then AI comes around with a near literal translation that makes no sense whatsoever and that is what people hear.
That is the only positive side, otherwise it is what you wrote. A real pain.
Reminds me of when Amazon came to Sweden and had machine translated product names - including for movies and games.
A friend showed me that the latest game I had worked on was hilariously mistranslated. It's originally "Need For Speed: Payback" but got translated to "behöver du hastighet: återbetalning" which would be more like "do you need speed: reimbursement"
Automatically translated titles are often just wrong and misleading, and there is no way to turn this "feature" off.
If you understand more than one language, you'll get half of the videos sloppily translated for no reason. There is no way to tell YouTube not to do this for specific languages.
I guess this extension is really aimed at multilingual viewers who don’t want English (or any language they already know) automatically translated into their native tongue.
A better solution would be a ‘blacklist’ of languages you understand—so YouTube only auto‑translates from languages you don’t speak, and always leaves familiar languages in their original form.
> A better solution would be a ‘blacklist’ of languages you understand—so YouTube only auto‑translates from languages you don’t speak, and always leaves familiar languages in their original form.
A better solution would have been to just not ship this disaster of a "feature" in the first place.
I wouldn't want my browser to automatically translate every page I go to (without my consent!) either, and that would've been a much easier job!
I don't know, maybe I didn't look hard enough but the last time it happened to me I couldn't find a way to hear the original.
It was a video in French over accents, so the automatic English translation kind of made it useless. I'm French anyway, why translate it to English? I don't even live in an English-speaking country either (not that translating to Dutch would have been better).
For example if you listen to music in a different language you may be familiar with the foriegn name of a song, but not the translation of it. This makes things confusing.
Also for the sound track sometimes there isn't even an option to disable it depending on what experiment or client you are using.
That's the perfect example! I honestly still can't tell what "match was draw" is supposed to say, but that's a really good match for the actual experience.
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?