On Youtube, if a video is in English, and you speak a language other than English, it will automatically translate the title to your local language, but the video is still in English, which means when you click on the thumbnail what you're going to watch is a video in a completely different language than you expected!
The Problem
It's hard for me to understand what is the goal of this feature. As a user who speaks multiple languages, when I see a title in my own language I expect it to be someone from my country. I even have "English" set as my preferred language on my Google Account. What is the point of having this preference if it will be ignored? If this is based geographically, why is the Youtuber not even from my country, nor the video taken anywhere nearby? It just doesn't make any sense.
How to Disable It
To disable this feature, you need to change Youtube's language to English. Click on your avatar on the top-right corner in the website, then click on the item that says "Language: <your language here>" and choose English (US).
In other words, the titles are always translated to the language of Youtube's user interface, ignoring other preferences on the account.
Another method to solve this issue is to use a web browser extension, and believe it or not it exists: [YouTube Anti Translate] (accessed 2025-05-14).
A Dark Pattern to Increase Clicks?
You may be thinking that this is a ploy by Youtube to increase engagement metrics by creating some form of clickbait: you think someone from your country created a video on a niche subject that is usually only talked in English, so you click on the video, but it turns out it was all a lie and the video is actually in English. However, it's hard to imagine that would be the case. Youtube's engagement-oriented algorithms are optimized for watch time, not CTR (click-through rate): if a thumbnails is clicked, but the user doesn't watch the video for long enough, Youtube assumes that the thumbnail or title were misleading. It prefers videos that aren't clickbait, or, at least, are the sort of clickbait that has keeps people watching for a few seconds. Having a thumbnail that makes users instantly abandon the video would go against this goal.
Does it Affect Youtubers?
It's unlikely that the number of people displeased with this feature is enough to contribute statistically to anything. For example, if you are a Youtuber making English videos that has translated titles for some reason, there will be some people like me who will click on the thumbnail and go away, but we are extremely few. After all, a video that is in English won't be recommended at all to a user who doesn't speak English. Or will it?
Possible Benefits
It's possible that if a video has subtitles it will be recommended to users who speak the subtitled language, in which case the translation of the titles makes sense. The video is still in English, but a user who doesn't speak English can still understand it through the subtitles.
HOWEVER, this isn't what's happening here! When I tried clicking on a thumbnail with a translated title, there weren't even captions in English, let alone my native language, Brazilian Portuguese. So it just translates the title without any evidence that the user will be able to enjoy the video at all.
Is it Auto-Translated?
At first I assumed that the titles were automatically translated by Youtube, however, considering that only some of the videos have translated titles, and most do not, it's far more plausible that the uploader themselves is adding translated titles and descriptions to the video, which is what is being shown to users.
By the way, the reason why the thumbnail isn't translated is that Youtube doesn't support uploading a different thumbnail for each language, which is kind of disappointing considering that everyone puts text in the thumbnail these days so if your video and channel were truly multi-lingual, you wouldn't be able to actually support a multi-language audience because you can only provide thumbnails for one language.
So I don't think it's fair to say that Youtube is auto-translating the titles and descriptions.
On other hand, it's very likely those titles and descriptions are still being auto-translated, or rather, machine translated, or translated by AI as they call it these days. That's because the titles sound very awkward in general.
An obvious example is that "vibe coding," a recently coined term in English that refers to programming by simply telling an AI chatbot to generate the code without much concern for the structure in long-term, is translated literally as "programação de vibração," which means, literally "vibration programming." That sounds weird. That's totally messing with my vibes.
When I tried searching for this translation on Google, I found many threads on Reddit in the search results. You may be thinking that means the term is actually used in Brazilian Portuguese, right? Wrong. Reddit uses a SEO spam technique common in WordPress websites of machine translating everything to every language so it shows on Google in every language. All these threads come from English-only subreddits like /r/ChatGPTCoding and /r/technicalminecraft. Not only were none of these threads originally written in Portuguese, there isn't even any evidence anyone that speaks Portuguese has participated in them at all! It's all artificial and fake. Dishonest. It's poisoning the infosphere.
When English works get auto-translated like this, it takes real state on webpages that could go to be more appropriate authors. If someone who spoke Portuguese made a video on vibe coding, it wouldn't show on my recommendations because that spot was taken by a video in English with a translated title. Similarly, any articles or forum threads in Portuguese lost their spot to a Reddit thread that was machined translated.
On the other hand, if users need access to English content, they can use a translator themselves. If the user can't figure out how to translate a webpage, they won't be able to figure out that they're talking to users who only speak English. It's as if the software was engineered to mislead you into thinking there are more users that speak your language on a service than there really are.