hey, could the Youtube product manager who decided that when a Dutch household puts on a video from the Dutch national news, the audio should automatically be replaced with a TTS voice reading a machine-generated English translation, come meet me in the darkest corner of the Amsterdamse Bos where there's no cell coverage? I just want to talk.
small languages have it hard enough without American tech companies saying "we know you probably understand English anyway, so how about we just replace this authentic human audio in your native language with some nice cozy machine-generated English, isn't that better 😌 "
[Dutch is not my native language. But it is my husband's and it was his computer]
Oct 12, 2026, 6:54 PM
@0xabad1dea Get in line. This automatically dubbing that you have to manually turn off per video is absolutely horrible for those who tend to watch videos in multiple languages.
Oct 12, 2026, 7:05 PM@schoentoon @0xabad1dea it's so annoying, i've automated the manually turning it off.
@yetzt @schoentoon @0xabad1dea isn't it just this setting?
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/13339776?hl=
@thibaultmol @yetzt @schoentoon @0xabad1dea not really. Because it would translate English videos into one of your favorite languages.
There is no "don't translate any audio" option.
@CaptainMalu @yetzt @schoentoon @0xabad1dea fair point
Oct 12, 2026, 6:58 PM@0xabad1dea FYI this is controlled by the languages setting on your YouTube profile. If you tell them you speak Dutch you won't get the annoying auto dubbing. You can also change the audio track in the video player.
Some people actually put in that they speak every language so auto dubbing never happens.
I feel like they messed up this feature trying too hard to push it on people who don't want it.
Oct 12, 2026, 7:01 PM@ask @0xabad1dea There was a while at the beginning of the rollout where it affected ads too. I like to think decreased click-through rates actually led them stopping it there
@ask Since when is this a multiple choice option (and does it actually work?)?
For the longest time there was only a single selection (defaulting to app display language) and setting anything there would simply dub a random subset of videos into that language, i.e. you could choose to dub English into Dutch or Dutch into English, but not get the original track always.
Oct 12, 2026, 7:00 PM@0xabad1dea Let me join you, so that when you're done talking to them I can talk to them too
@0xabad1dea The translated titles are often hilariously wrong. What are the chances of finding a “slot” in a narrowboating video.
@0xabad1dea
I (Swede in Scotland) thought I was having a stroke when I was trying to watch a clip in German and got this weird bland American accent mispronouncing all names and getting basic vocabulary wrong.
But I bet your pm is close to or the same that made sure random Google services will occasionally switch to Swedish language for me, which I haven't intentionally used since the 90's.
@unixsmurf @0xabad1dea Imagine you're looking at maps of a bilingual country, and it appears that which language is chosen for any given label is chosen by a PRNG. You'd think that the rule would be simple: if the user has selected one of the languages as their locale, always use that one; otherwise, use the one that is the majority language for the location in question, because that's the one foreigners are most likely to see. But NOOOOOOO.
@unixsmurf @0xabad1dea (Can you tell I've been looking at maps of Finland recently? I know which parts of Finland are Swedish-speaking. I am not a Swedish speaker, and if I know the name of anything it's probably the Finnish name if not just the English translation. Showing me Swedish, unless it's like Karis or Mariehamn(*), doesn't do me a bit of good, especially when I'm not physically there to read a street sign.)
(*) Which I know as Maarianhamina but it's officially monolingual Swedish.
@0xabad1dea 30 million speakers is "small"?!
@whitequark relative to the top 20, it's definitely in the long tail
@0xabad1dea mmmmm, tuna
@0xabad1dea (sorry, this is an incomprehensible answer. i have many of my computers named after types of tuna. longtail is a type of tuna, which your post reminded me of)
@whitequark as far as incomprehensible posts from you go, this was one of the less worrying ones 😂
Oct 12, 2026, 7:32 PM@0xabad1dea a cursed inverse of the tendency of some websites to equate location with (one!) language
@0xabad1dea FWIW, this crap happens with French as well, so if they're targeting languages with "small" populations they have a pretty high bar for "small".
Oct 12, 2026, 7:36 PM@0xabad1dea this is weirdly similar to how I already experience written Dutch as a native English speaker with no Dutch, but a smattering of other Germanic languages and an interest in linguistics. For some reason, my brain will just often fail to distinguish Dutch from English, and I’ll think I read a passage, then realize it made no sense and isn’t even English, then look at my closer and realize that I did actually successfully tease some (often accurate) meaning from it.
Very disorienting, whenever it happens.
@0xabad1dea It's also probably the exact opposite of what I want when viewing a video in a non-native language. Either it's a language I speak, or it's a language I would like to practice; I don't watch stuff I have no ability to understand and hope for magic. In the first case, your machine translation is, at best, a superfluous annoyance. In the second case, maybe if I'm having trouble with it I'll try turning on subtitles in my native language, but I still want to experience the original.
@0xabad1dea A bit more to the south, in .be, they would probably have translated it into French.
I know our accent and vocabulary is a bit different from our cousins to the north, but the majority language of Belgium isn't French, especially in the north of the country... But for example for crunchyroll or netflix .be === .fr 😓
@0xabad1dea
I totally feel you. I think this is not limited to Dutch (or the same person manager really managed to integrate his idea)
At work I'm not logged into YouTube and I'm working on a German widows system set to English
YouTube regularly gives me an generated English audio track on German videos and i hate it 🤬
@0xabad1dea boy am I glad I stopped watching YouTube about 10 years ago now.
Wait for me. I want to talk to them, too.
Oct 12, 2026, 9:06 PM@0xabad1dea You could use Airplay. The moment i use Airplay, videos switch randomly to a different language track and Youtube hasn't fixed this for years...
Oct 12, 2026, 9:08 PM
Oct 12, 2026, 11:11 PM@0xabad1dea they probably got their promotion.
@0xabad1dea
They'll dub any language with English. Even English with English!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DgV4GPjMlQ
My condolences. YouTube's terrible. I wish institutions would at least self-host.
Oct 13, 2026, 10:01 AM@0xabad1dea same thing with German, except I’d meet at a lovely spot in the Black Forest :)
@0xabad1dea omg you read my mind. I noticed this happening recently for any Russian language videos that come into my YouTube feed. So weird 🫠
@0xabad1dea
Just another reason to use an alternative frontend App like NewPipe, FreeTube, LibreTube or similar. It also helps with those adverts.
There are also alternative web frontents
https://docs.invidious.io/instances/
https://piped.video/
@0xabad1dea Actually, I came across this happening the other way around as well the other day, i.e. an English video being dubbed into crappy Dutch.
Annoyed the sh*t out of me.
Apparently creators have a setting to toggle it off when they publish the video.
If anyone responds and you need a second, I'll happily join you in that dark corner of the Amsterdamse bos ;-)
Give me a note, I'll be with you!
@0xabad1dea
Horror.
Even Brits would be unhappy about dubbing it in pseudo-English (we generally prefer subtitles). This case is quite insane.
Unfortunately Youtube's new automated subtitles are best read as comedy, but at least you can turn them off.