Recently, I got tired of having multiple languages in my YouTube subscriptions. Even with separate playlists for each target language, there were too many languages clamoring for my attention each time I opened the app or the website – and the German titles and descriptions of one channel’s videos were being automatically (and obnoxiously) translated into English. At the same time, I was becoming annoyed by Chrome’s constantly asking me, every time I logged into a different Google account, whether I wanted to browse in a separate profile.
You can perhaps see where this is going – and perhaps you’ve already done what I did. It occurred to me that I could create a separate Google account for each language and access them in separate Chrome profiles: that would allow me to have only German videos in my German Google account, only Spanish videos in my Spanish account, etc., etc. It also meant that I could consciously decide to watch videos in a particular language – say Spanish – switch to my Spanish account, and see only (or almost only) content in Spanish. I was particularly happy that, as it turned out, YouTube stopped auto-translating titles and descriptions when the video’s language matched the account language.
Now my YouTube watching is much more immersive: after I switch to the Chrome profile for a given language, all my subscriptions are in that language, along with almost all my recommendations, and the YouTube interface is also in that language without my needing to change my browser’s language or my operating system’s.
As you can see from the image, I can also add bookmarks that appear only in that Chrome profile; when I specifically choose to study German, the German-related bookmarks are prominent. If I had those bookmarks in my regular browsing profile, they’d be buried.
None of this is earth-shattering, and many of you may have been doing this for a long time already. But I thought I’d write it up since it’s made such a difference in my online language habits.