Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2023 December 11

= December 11 =

Keeping auto-translate turned off in YouTube
When I am watching a French-language video on YouTube (via a web browser, not on the app) and turn on CC, I get auto-translated subtitles in German. When I am watching a German-language video on YouTube and turn on CC, I get auto-translated subtitles in French. I almost always just want to see subtitles in the original languages. I can do this by going to Settings > Subtitles/CC and clicking the original language in the menu, but I have to do this all the time. Is there a way to make the the default CC language to be the original language (whichever it is)? --Lambiam 20:58, 11 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Youtube will initially check your language setting in your Google account. If you are not signed into Google or you have not set that, it will use your apparent location. If you are using a VPN proxy, it will be the location of the proxy. So, to override the proxy location, you have to sign into a Google account and then make sure you have the language set, which is under Personal Info - General Preferences for the Web. Even then, computers are a complicated mess and it will still use cookies you may not realize you have set to override the settings you have purposely set. 12.116.29.106 (talk) 12:44, 12 December 2023 (UTC)
 * That means I have to reset "My language" each time I watch a video in another language than the last one, which requires more fumbling than the three-click process Settings—Subtitles/CC—original language. I just want the default CC language for a video to be the language of that video, regardless of what I watched before. Until fairly recently that used to be the default, but something appears to have changed in the past two weeks or so. --Lambiam 13:48, 12 December 2023 (UTC)
 * It's definitely older than three weeks--I noticed it instantly when I started seeing it a month or two ago, because at the time I was switching between watching videos with English CC files (my native language) and Japanese-language videos with no English CC file available, where I usually prefer to watch with the file of the video's language (Japanese). I don't mind getting manually translated English tracks, and my account is set to English (with CC on by default, but auto-captions off by default). Unfortunately, I'm not sure there's any way to deal with it other than leaving disgruntled feedback to Google about it so they know you don't want it, in the probably futile hope they'll change it. There's definitely no switch I've found. - Purplewowies (talk) 07:57, 16 December 2023 (UTC)