You can configure your preferred languages in YT settings, so it doesn’t do that. The setting is obscure, but it’s there

The problem is that it doesn't even respect this choice. My native language is not English and most of the videos in this languages will be auto transcript to English. Even the last time I changed both the language and country and YouTube still managed to auto transcript to English.

The solution is a simple toggle to turn it off, not pushing it to our throat.

That just tells it which languages to serve if the video has multiple tracks, including Ai-generated ones. "Keep original language" should be the default, or at least an opt-in.

And what about the atrocious title auto-translations? I'm in France, my browser is set to accept EN-us and FR-fr as languages, and my Youtube is in EN. And yet it keeps auto-translating the titles of some French videos. And the translation is so awful, it mistranslates many things and translates literally some obvious puns, that I can't believe they're using Gemini for this. They must have repurposed a 5-year old version of Google Translate. It is not consistent either, the titles are translated in the home page, but not in the channel's page.

I don’t know that Settings -> languages is obscure