It is terrible and took me a while to realize what was happening. I though some videos were generated spam.

Reddit does something similar now. It auto translates posts and they show up in Google in my native tongue. Really annoying since when I search in that language I specifically don't want English sites.

I live in the Netherlands and speak German in addition to English. My Dutch is ... not that great.

Thanks to the geniuses at Reddit, I now frequently find posts on /r/de or similar German subreddits translated from my native language into one I'm worse at!

I noticed this "feature" after wondering why everyone was using "sie" instead of "du" while searching for reviews on reddit for a new graphics card I wanted to buy. This "shoving AI down your throat" is not just annoying, but also insulting and the accelerated enshittification of the web makes me sad. Thinking about "the good old days" also puts me in a state of nostalgia.

you can use old.reddit.com to avoid having stuff be translated.

Doesn't work for Google, it shows the translated titles and descriptions.

The Reddit translations are so insanely terrible. They are so much harder to read the the original English posts. It's like every word has been translated independently

The problem isn't the the translation isn't done well enough, but rather its underhanded nature that tries to sell a translated website as a genuine discussion.

Indeed. If I search Google for terms in my specific language other than English, I expect to find results that are relevant to my country. Auto-translated Reddit posts that "fake" being from that language are deeply annoying, because then I click them expecting to find some local references but in fact they are invariably talking about some US-specific market or situation that's useless to me.

For reddit things get even worse: not all commenters realize that the original post has been translated, so you get a flood of comments from people commenting in their native language. Getting modern day tower of babel vibes from that.

Ye it is some sort of dark pattern and deception to auto-translate like that.

It took me some minutes to realize what was happening. At first I though it was some language specific sub before too many post had strange language.

Fake culture and putting things in the a strange cultural context and trying to hide it.

> not all commenters realize that the original post has been translated

Does it actually say it is somewhere obvious? My girlfriend and I both looked something up and each got the same Reddit thread, but one in English and one in Chinese. She had no idea hers was translated.

But I also thought it was supposed to do the reverse if someone comments in the translated language, adding an original-language comment instead of a translated-language one.

Depends what you consider obvious - there's a parameter in the URL, I think called `tl`, which you can remove to get the original.

First time I saw an autodubbed video, within seconds I was literally screaming at my buddy to turn it off, TURN IT OFF! It's so unnatural and badly done, it creeps me the hell out and hurts my ears.

It's like they saw WP plugins that auto-translate articles for SEO spam and thought that was a great idea.

My friend thought a video was ai generated because it was translated to 17 languages. But the voices were natural, fit the pace of the video, and had emotion and impulse. They had been paid for.

The YouTube auto translation is not that. It's stilted and awkward, robotic voice with none of the context. It's not ready for release and it does a disservice to any creator that uses it because their vision is not going to be anywhere near correctly delivered.

The bare minimal would be to implement the Accept-Languages http header correctly, not just a randomly picked subset in it. They cannot seem to even bother to do that.

> at least let me disable it for specific languages.

At the very least make use of https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/...

... instead of relying on whatever stupid magic that places me in Germany when I live 5km from the border.

It can't be geoip because that IP is from a French ISP and has been in consistent use at this location for the past 5 years.

(but yeah even then it is horrible)

I'd say that dubbing in general is the worst ever. Where I'm from (Belgium/Dutch) nothing is ever dubbed, we just read the subtitles, much better like that.

Google has had ample time to figure out I speak more languages than Swedish. Auto-translated subtitles. Translated video titles. Reddit posts. I hate it. I hate hate hate it.