YouTube's auto translation dictation

I think there’s a narrow path between improving UX to help users and over-improving UX which results in frustrated users. I think this is what happened with YouTube’s automatic translation of video titles and descriptions feature.

This feature already exists for at least 1-2 years, however, it still frustrates me. Video titles and their descriptions get translated with quite bad translations (in my case from English to German) without providing any benefit. There’s no way to disable this feature (for specific languages) or to toggle the original title / description like many websites are doing it nowadays¹.

I primarily watch English and German videos. I speak both of those languages and I even prefer English videos over german ones. There’s no benefit for me to get a video title translated into German. It makes the title and description incomprehensible.

I tried to understand the underlying reason for this feature, but I can’t find any. Even if a Spanish video title was translated to German I wouldn’t gain anything from it: I still do not speak Spanish and as long as the video itself is not (properly) dubbed², I won’t watch it.

I hate this feature and I wished YouTube would get rid of it or provide a way to disable it. This is the kind of dictation that reduces the overall user experience.