Setting formality in Amazon Translate

You can optionally specify the desired level of formality for translations to supported target languages. The formality setting controls the level of formal language usage (also known as honorifics or register) in the translation output. The formality setting is available for real-time translation and asynchronous batch processing.

Formality supports the following values:

• Informal – All sentences in the translated text use language constructs associated with informal communication. For example, translated text uses the familiar form of second person pronouns and their verb agreement (or Kudaketa form for Japanese).

• Formal – All sentences in the translated text use language constructs associated with formal, polite communication. For example, translated text uses the formal form of second person pronouns and their verb agreement (or Teineigo form for Japanese).

For example, the sentence ‘Are you sure?’ can have two correct translations in German: ‘Sind Sie sicher?’ for the formal register and ‘Bist du sicher?’ for the informal one.

If Amazon Translate doesn’t support formality level for the target language, or you don't specify the formality parameter, the translation job ignores the formality setting.

Using the formality setting

To set formality in a real-time translation request, do one of the following:

• On the Real-time translation page in the Amazon Translate console, under Additional settings, enable the Formality setting and select one of the values.

• Use the Settings parameter in the TranslateText operation in the Amazon Translate API.

• For the translate-text command in the AWS CLI, set the --settings parameter to Formality=FORMAL or Formality=INFORMAL. For more information, see translate-text in the AWS CLI Command Reference.

To set formality in a batch translation request, set the Formality parameter when you start the translation job. For details and examples, see Running a batch translation job.

For CLI or API requests, the AppliedSettings field in the response includes the formality setting (if any) from the request. If the target language doesn't support formality, the AppliedSettings value in the response is NULL.

Supported languages

Amazon Translate supports the formality setting for translation from any source language to the following target languages.

Language	Language code
Dutch	nl
French	fr
French (Canada)	fr-CA
German	de
Hindi	hi
Italian	it
Japanese	ja
Korean	ko
Portuguese (Portugal)	pt-PT
Spanish	es
Spanish (Mexico)	es-MX

For all the languages that Amazon Translate supports, see Supported languages and language codes.