Everyone whose native language is not English knows. Seriously, people with this attitude should be forced to run their browser and mail client with a plugin to run everything through a couple of machine translation roundtrips. Give it two months, and I guarantee you'll understand.
My first language is German, but I've got most of my devices set to English. Because of that, Youtube started machine-translating German video titles and audio into English at random. The audio quality is just bad, everything sounds muffled. And the translations are often complete garbage. I absolutely detest this "feature".
I’m in the Netherlands and I get ads for Bol.com on YouTube now with narration that would be more appropriate to Fitter, Happier. I’m surprised advertisers are ok with it.
I have a feeling that advertisers have yet to catch up. In Germany, the supermarket chain Lidl recently started running a pretty heavy advertisement campaign on Youtube. Of course, Youtube auto-translated the advertisement into English. The effect is really, really uncanny. "LIDL IS WORTH IT! JA!"
the wild thing is you _know_ there are so many people at YouTube who speak multiple languages and have issues with this. What engineering team is only filled with single-language-speaking people, especially at a prestige-y place like Google?
It happened to me in French also, one day I was looking at a video that was trendy, podcast like, and the voices were more than shitty, like a badly translated movie.
I looked at comments and everyone was praising this video, so it did not make any sense to me.
Until I discovered that Youtube somehow decided to auto enable this feature that I never asked for.
Now imagine you are like me, someone who travels the world for work. I get everything in Dutch, German, Swedish, Finnish, Arabic and of course Schweizerdeutsch. And some other languages.
There used to be an “international English” setting.
Everyone whose native language is not English knows. Seriously, people with this attitude should be forced to run their browser and mail client with a plugin to run everything through a couple of machine translation roundtrips. Give it two months, and I guarantee you'll understand.