The Title Confusion
Google Chrome’s built-in Google Translate integration is incredibly aggressive, especially on platforms owned by Google, like YouTube. If you navigate to a foreign-language YouTube video, Chrome will often automatically translate the entire page into your native language. This includes forcefully translating the actual title of the video. While this seems helpful, machine translation often butchers slang, idioms, or proper nouns used in video titles. It makes it incredibly difficult to search for the video later using its original name, or to understand the creator’s intended pun, leaving you staring at a nonsensical, poorly translated title.
Reverting YouTube Titles to Original Text
To ensure you see the exact title the creator uploaded and stop Google Chrome from automatically translating YouTube video titles into your native language, you must disable the page-level translation for YouTube.
When you are on a YouTube video page and you notice the title has been translated into English (or your default language), look at the right side of Chrome’s address bar. You should see a small black and white Google Translate icon (it looks like a ‘G’ and a Chinese character). Click this icon. A small popup will appear showing that it is currently translating from “Unknown” (or the specific language) to your language. Click the three vertical dots (Options) in this popup. From the dropdown menu, select Never translate this site. Chrome will immediately refresh the page and display the original, untranslated video title. It will also remember this preference and never attempt to auto-translate any YouTube page again.