When I began browsing to find a monitor, there was one unescapable trends amongst the YouTube-based reviewers. Most of them have enabled AI-based translations on their videos, and some went so far to enable AI-dub their videos. Before anybody embraced by AI-grace would shout at me otherwise, AI powered translations are not perfect; in fact, I often find them to be either misleading or flat out wrong. The only element AI has gotten it right, for the lack of better words, is the mimicry of the original speaker’s voice in target language.

YouTube No Translation is a free, open source extension available for Firefox and Chrome. Safari version is also available on the GitHub page, but it is still in build it yourself stage. The extension works not just on the dubbed audio, but also on subtitle (closed captions), title, and descriptions. As far as I know, YouTube currently does not have an option for title and descriptions. And the native player does have options to select audios and captions, except that it has to be selected every time. This extension solves all the problem.

I understand the desire of content creators to reach more audience. Mass translating their contents with no quality control and overriding their existing audience’s experience with it are not the way to go. In fact, one of the main reasons why I find AI technology for translation to be more hype is its lack of accountability — how will you trust an AI’s work, if you cannot vet the process nor the result? With real translators, you can at least vet the people.

The other thing that I do want to mention is AI’s bias when translating certain foreign languages. For example, on my computer, which its system language is set to English, some of the Korean channels are played with AI-dubbed English. And the dub was not representative of what I was hearing in Korean at all. I’m not talking about inaccuracies in translated text; I’m talking about the tone. The YouTuber in question was speaking perfect standard Korean, albeit not in professional accents like they do on news channels, but the AI decided he was speaking in stereotypical Asian accents. Just because someone is of that ethnicity doesn’t mean they should speak in accents. Imagine the AI dubbed posh transatlantic English speaker into someone who speaks rustic Korean with heavy dialect. It’s a mismatch.

That being said, I don’t want developers or creators shying away from multi-language support. It is an area that needs attention. For the most part, I think the safe bet as it stands now is to see for it yourself or listen to your audience before launching a channel-wide ‘feature’. If you cannot assure the quality of the AI works, then I would simply advise against it.