Disabling auto-dubbing and translated titles on YouTube (with extensions)

2 points

9 months ago

As a fellow bilingual going for a third language, it has become very infuriating reading poorly English-translated titles in video recommendations from the select few brazilian portuguese channels I care (LN), or for learning exposure (L3). And then there's the robotic, uncanny AI voice with the weird phase difference on its stereo audio (which should've been mono) for a few seconds in non-english videos until I pause and switch.

Turns out two widely known extensions contains options to fix/mitigate both of these issues. Mainly posting this as I've rarely seen a direct but never combined mentions in the wild:

- The ImprovedTube [1] extension has a "Disable auto-dubbing" option in the Player menu. Note that it doesn't block videos from getting recommended, but rather always sets the default/original audio track on playback. There's other useful options in the General menu too, like removing AI Summaries, Shorts, Related Search, Members videos, etc. (Opinions might vary)

- The DeArrow [2] extension has a "Don't show youtube's translated titles" option in the Behavior tab apart from the anti-clickbait things etc., which makes it much easier to tell content languages and not be fooled into clicking auto-dubbed recommendations outside what one wants/speaks.

Anyhow, while this mostly reverts to how things were before the low-background steel, the monolingual defaultism, lack of built-in options, and the indifference in no matter how many times one presses "not interested" everything still showing up, and up, and up are undoubtfully annoying to say the least.

Which is something good tbh, it's making me allergic to the website so I spend my precious time on many other productive, wholesome and important things otherwise.

[1]: https://github.com/code-charity/youtube

[2]: https://dearrow.ajay.app/