Why do you do this, Youtube? (translating titles)

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tungemål
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Why do you do this, Youtube? (translating titles)

Postby tungemål » Fri Jul 22, 2022 7:03 pm

Don't automatically translate titles and descriptions of videos, youtube! Especially since you are not that good at it. Even if I live in Norway, I don't want a badly machine translated Norwegian title of youtube videoes that I'm about to watch. (Not good ones either, actually). This is annoying.
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Re: Why do you do this, Youtube?

Postby Le Baron » Fri Jul 22, 2022 8:19 pm

Completely agree.
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Re: Why do you do this, Youtube?

Postby Iversen » Fri Jul 22, 2022 10:36 pm

I also dislike enforced (and bad) translations. I have noticed that the first items in a Google search may be translated - those that typically are conmmercial drivel - but after that I see the original languages. And in Youtube I don't see a wholesale translation frenzy, as described by tungemål. Individual homepages may be besot by the infectious malady described in the first message.

My current test example was Nyon "suisse" -tour -Switzerland (the negative terms were added to get out of the Anglophone maelstroem). And then all my results were in French, both on the list and if I tried to play one of them it wasn't translated. Btw I inadvertently discovered something totally superfluous called "shorts", which seems to be a reference to worthless and nauseating short videos in a different layout - I hadn't noticed that category before. Without my exclusion terms most of the videos were in English, but they probably were from the beginning - even though Nyon is a city at the Lac Leman, safely within la Suisse Romande.

So something in my setup must be different from that of Tungemål, but I can't say precisely what it is. If I see an offer of translations in any situation I'll also refuse it, and maybe I hit gold once.
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Re: Why do you do this, Youtube?

Postby sporedandroid » Sat Jul 23, 2022 6:09 am

Iversen wrote: Btw I inadvertently discovered something totally superfluous called "shorts", which seems to be a reference to worthless and nauseating short videos in a different layout - I hadn't noticed that category before.

Shorts aren’t very good, but at least they’re short. They’ve actually been pretty good listening practice for me because they’re short and fast. They’re a good warm up for me. I don’t care as much if I don’t understand them well.
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Re: Why do you do this, Youtube?

Postby leosmith » Mon Jul 25, 2022 2:53 am

tungemål wrote:Don't automatically translate titles and descriptions of videos, youtube!
Can you give an example? From my end at least, titles that have been translated appear to be done by the video owner.
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Re: Why do you do this, Youtube?

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Mon Jul 25, 2022 5:07 am

leosmith wrote:
tungemål wrote:Don't automatically translate titles and descriptions of videos, youtube!
Can you give an example? From my end at least, titles that have been translated appear to be done by the video owner.


There was a certain Japanese guitarist whose clips all of a sudden turned up in Swedish. At least some of them did. Sometimes the language was so strange you could barely get an idea of the content. No, I don't think that guitarist had translated the titles. Most likely Google translate. Or something.
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Re: Why do you do this, Youtube?

Postby tungemål » Mon Jul 25, 2022 9:07 am

Yes, it only happens with the very occasional video. Obviously machine translated. For instance, in one title, "keys" of a piano keyboard was translated as "nøkler".
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Re: Why do you do this, Youtube?

Postby Le Baron » Mon Jul 25, 2022 11:41 am

leosmith wrote:
tungemål wrote:Don't automatically translate titles and descriptions of videos, youtube!
Can you give an example? From my end at least, titles that have been translated appear to be done by the video owner.

You can often see that the title has been translated because the video itself is in e.g. English with the title actually on the video thumbnail; whereas the text title has been translated automatically by google. It turns up a lot on cooking videos.

YT is reading what language your OS is using or the language you have YT set to, because even changing the country content has no effect. For the record my OS (Zorin Linux) has the Spanish language pack installed and on some videos it offers me Spanish titles for English-language videos.
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Re: Why do you do this, Youtube?

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Mon Jul 25, 2022 5:03 pm

Le Baron wrote:YT is reading what language your OS is using or the language you have YT set to, because even changing the country content has no effect. For the record my OS (Zorin Linux) has the Spanish language pack installed and on some videos it offers me Spanish titles for English-language videos.


This may be true to some extent - my OS settings are in Swedish and so are my Google/Youtube settings. This being said, only some videos from the same channel(s) are translated. All the original titles are in English.
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Re: Why do you do this, Youtube?

Postby sporedandroid » Wed Jul 27, 2022 7:50 pm

sporedandroid wrote:
Iversen wrote: Btw I inadvertently discovered something totally superfluous called "shorts", which seems to be a reference to worthless and nauseating short videos in a different layout - I hadn't noticed that category before.

Shorts aren’t very good, but at least they’re short. They’ve actually been pretty good listening practice for me because they’re short and fast. They’re a good warm up for me. I don’t care as much if I don’t understand them well.

My YouTube shorts algorithm is ruined. I used to get bad shorts in Hebrew. Now I get them in English, random Indian languages and Vietnamese as well. Why does YouTube think I’ll understand random Indian languages and Vietnamese? This has happened with my regular YouTube algorithm as well. I do get why Arabic and Russian show up once in a while.
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