AI Formality Adjustment for Machine Translation

What is AI Formality Adjustment? 

Some target languages may distinguish between different levels of formality when addressing the reader or audience:

• Formal register: This means that a formal version of the word “you” is used (e.g., “vous” in French, “Sie” in German, “Lei” in Italian, or “usted” in Spanish).
• Informal register: This means that an informal version of the word “you” is used (e.g., “tu” in French, “du” in German, “tu” in Italian, or “tú” in Spanish).

Alongside the word "you", the entire grammatical structure of sentences addressing the reader typically needs to be adjusted accordingly: verbs need to be conjugated differently, pronouns need to be adjusted, etc. The right choice of register depends on your industry and target audience. 

By default, MT providers use the formal register. As part of Smartling’s AI Translation Toolkit, AI Formality Adjustment can be used to convert formal machine translations to informal. This feature is supported for the following languages: French, German, Italian, Spanish (this includes locale specific variations such as fr-CA, de-AT, it-CH, or es-LA)

How It Works

This feature works by changing the register, meaning a formal subject will be changed to informal. When setting up AI Formality Adjustment, you can choose whether you would like the formality to be adjusted only for machine-translated strings, or also for strings using Translation Memory Match Insertion.

Please note, this feature does not change the tone or vocabulary used in a translation. It works by converting a formal subject to informal. Any pertinent adjectives, verbs, pronouns, etc. will also be modified to account for the new informal register.

This feature is unidirectional: formal → informal. Translations cannot be converted from informal → formal, as MT engines output formal translations by default. 

Example:

Which MT Providers Can It Be Used For

This feature can be used with any Smartling supported MT provider, which does not already allow for formality specification. (Currently, only DeepL and Amazon allow users to specify formality for translation output).

If you use Smartling AutoSelect as an MT provider, the AI Formality Adjustment feature will only run on strings that have not been translated by DeepL or Amazon.

Supported Workflows 

AI Formality Adjustment is available for Machine Translation workflows. It is not available for account-level MT Integrations such site-wide MT for the GDN, MT suggestions or auto-populate options in the CAT Tool, or the Zendesk Support Plugin. 

How to Enable AI Formality Adjustment 

1. AI Formality Adjustment is part of Smartling’s AI Translation Toolkit and cannot be purchased separately. So as a first step, the AI Translation Toolkit needs to be enabled for your account. For more information or to enable the Toolkit, please reach out to your Smartling Customer Success Manager.
2. Once the AI Translation Toolkit has been enabled, review the preferred level of formality in the Style Guide(s) used for the relevant Linguistic Package(s). Under Language Conventions, the subject must be set to informal in order for this feature to work.
   
   ❗Note: In order for your preferred level of formality to be recognized, the Smartling Style Guide Template needs to be used. If you are currently using a custom Style Guide with the WYSIWYG editor, you will need to create a new Style Guide using the Smartling Template, and associate it with the relevant Linguistic Package(s). 

3. Next, AI Formality Adjustment needs to be enabled in the workflow within the MT translation step:

   • Navigate to a Project's Workflow Configuration Project > Settings > Workflows
   • Find the Workflow where you would like to enable this feature
   • Click the downward arrow on the translation step and select Manage Step
   • Switch on the toggle to Enable AI Formality Adjustment 
     
     
   • Select a TM match preference to control whether AI Formality Adjustment should apply to all content, or if it should not be used for TM matches from Translation Memory Match Insertion.
     
   • Click Save to confirm these settings.