A strange accent indeed

I just opened youtube to waste a few minutes, as one does when their coding agents are hard at work, and a video caught my eye: "Buenos Aires accent in the 1990's". I don't speak Spanish, but I do speak Portuguese and I know that the Porteño accent is considered very particular in Argentina, so out of curiosity I clicked on the thumbnail. To my surprise the two women being interviewed on the video, and the interviewer, were speaking English.

It was YouTube's auto-dubbing functionality, helpfully breaking down communication barriers between content creators and their fans around the world. But old people like me (34) sometimes enjoy listening to different, foreign languages, even if they don't fully understand them. So I tried finding the button to turn it off globally, to spare me the annoyance of manually selecting the original audio every time this happens. I'm pretty sure I did this a year ago or so, but maybe it was a different helpful and well-intentioned app. To my surprise I can't find the setting under "Playback and performance > Language" menu.

Actually, the only thing I can edit there is "Add or edit languages", meaning "Languages you want to watch your videos in". Curiously my system language (US English) was not selected, so I think this option means "languages that you deem acceptable to listen to", and they'll be whitelisted. I'm turning them all on (manually, each and every one, because "All" isn't an option) and will see if this works. Despite the inconvenience I'm grateful that Google takes all the appropriate precautions to ensure their users aren't unduly exposed to raw foreign cultures and languages.

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