Auto-Translate offers optional modifiers to change the tone, brevity, and phrasing of its translated content. You can use these options to gain more control over how your translations read and sound, potentially reducing the time and energy your team spends reviewing and editing them.
Brevity and tone controls (also known as ‘register’) can help make the resulting translation more concise or conversational while phrasing control enables closer consideration of the content‘s intent to sound more natural to a fluent speaker.
For more information on what these modifiers do and recommendations for when to use them, see the section titled Modifier overview and recommendations.
Applying modifiers to change Auto-Translate‘s output
You can apply modifiers in any combination as an optional setting when using Auto-Translate to translate a course.
If this is your first time using Auto-Translate, we recommend that you create a course using the default settings before experimenting with modifiers. See Creating a Multi-Language course with Auto-Translate for instructions.
Brevity, tone, and phrasing controls can only be applied to supported languages. If these controls are enabled for an unsupported language, it will be translated using the default Auto-Translate settings. For a full list of supported languages, see Auto-Translate service overview and language support.
Applying natural phrasing
The option to apply natural phrasing is above the language selector drop-down menu.
Enable Prioritize natural phrasing where available before clicking Create Variations to translate supported languages using more natural phrasing.
Applying tone or brevity
Tone and brevity controls are found under the Advanced options accordion.
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Tone
- Select Informal to force informal tone to supported languages
- Choose Formal to force formal tone for supported languages
- If neither is chosen, Auto-Translate will use the context of the text to choose the tone that it determines will fit best
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Brevity
Check Reduce translation length to reduce the character count of translated content for supported languages.
Modifier overview and recommendations
This table shows a short explanation for each modifier along with recommendations on when to use them.
| Modifier | Explanation | Recommendations |
|---|---|---|
| Natural phrasing | When turned on, tone, intent, and sentence structure are prioritized to create phrasing that sounds more natural to a fluent speaker. |
Use when you have more nuanced or creative text with complex sentence structure or where preserving meaning is particularly important. Disable when you have simpler or more technical language in your course or where clarity is important. |
| Tone | You can choose Formal to favour a formal register (for example the formal ‘vous’ would be used instead of ’tu’ in French) or Informal for conversational and familiar grammar and word choice. |
|
| Brevity | When brevity is applied, the resulting Auto-Translated course will favour shorter, more concise vocabulary and sentence structure. |
Use when you need to
|
Auto-Translate results will naturally vary from translation to translation. Other factors like accuracy, tone, and structure of the original source text and the combination of modifiers applied can also introduce variation. Elucidat cannot guarantee that the resulting content will always match your expectations.
You should always have your translated courses reviewed by fluent speakers before launching them to your learners.