A Sous Chef Agent (shown in wxrks as a Sous Chef Profile) is a saved set of AI translation preferences — audience, tone, formality, and creativity — that wxrks applies automatically wherever it's assigned, so AI-assisted suggestions sound like they were written for your brand and your reader instead of a generic machine translation.
💡 Who is this for? This guide is for Account Admins and Project Managers who need to understand what a Sous Chef Agent is and when to assign one to shape wxrks' AI-assisted translations within the wxrks platform.
What Is Sous Chef?
Sous Chef is wxrks' feature for controlling how AI-assisted translation sounds, not just what it says. Instead of accepting one fixed, literal suggestion, you tell wxrks who the content is for and how it should read, and every AI translation, pre-translation, and in-context review adapts to that.
Sous Chef is one of several AI features grouped under Augmented Translation Actions — alongside Context Sensitive Translate, Alternative Suggestion, Proofread, and others. See wxrks Augmented Actions for how that whole feature family is enabled at the Account, Organizational Unit, and Editor level — this article assumes Augmented Translation Actions is already on, and focuses on what Sous Chef adds once it is.
Sous Chef has nothing to do with wxrks Pipelines, even though both live in this section and both use the word "Agent" loosely. Pipelines automate workflow steps like status changes; Sous Chef shapes the wording of AI-assisted translations.
A Sous Chef Agent is built from six settings:
Domain — the subject area of the content (e.g., contracts and regulatory filings).
Audience — who the translation is for (e.g., medical professionals, executives, general public).
Instructions — your own brief: brand voice, terminology rules, or examples to follow.
Formality — Informal, Neutral, or Formal.
Tone — Professional, Conversational, Persuasive, Technical, Witty, and more.
Creativity — how literal or inventive the output should be.
From Manual Settings to a Reusable Agent
Sous Chef's six settings used to be something a translator adjusted by hand, one session or one segment at a time — useful, but not something an Account Admin could standardize across a team. An Agent solves that: it's a saved Sous Chef configuration you create once and assign wherever it should apply, so everyone working in that scope gets the same tone and instructions automatically, with nothing to set up per session.
For the exact steps to create and assign an Agent at the Account, Organizational Unit, or Project level, see How to set up Sous Chef Profiles for your account, Organizational Units, and projects. This article stays on the concept — what an Agent is, and why the level you assign it at matters.
How wxrks Decides Which Agent Applies
An Agent can be set at four levels, and on two of them it can also be tied to one language pair. For each document, wxrks checks the levels from the most specific to the most general and uses the first Agent it finds. Within each level, an Agent mapped to the document's exact language pair beats that level's default:
Work unit: an Agent picked for one document, from the Sous Chef Profile tab in the editor. It applies to that document only.
Project: the Agent chosen on the project's Translation Settings tab.
Organizational Unit: an Agent mapped to the document's language pair for this Organizational Unit, then the Organizational Unit's default. The default is the template for every project in it.
Account: an Agent mapped to the document's language pair for the whole account, then the account default.
The Sous Chef Profiles page states the same rule in one line, "Most specific scope wins; within a scope, a mapped pair beats the default.", and shows the full order when you hover the info icon next to it.
ℹ️ Note: The tooltip also lists a language pair step for projects. Today you can create language pair mappings only for the whole account or for one Organizational Unit, so a project's own Agent always comes from its Translation Settings tab.
Two consequences catch people out:
An account mapping doesn't reach an Organizational Unit that has its own default. The Organizational Unit's default is checked first. If the account maps English (United States) → Japanese to a games Agent, an Organizational Unit with its own default still uses that default for Japanese, unless you map the pair for that Organizational Unit too.
Mappings match exact locales. An English (United States) → Portuguese (Brazil) mapping doesn't apply to Portuguese (Portugal) or to English (United Kingdom) sources.
For the steps to set defaults and map language pairs, plus a worked example of how the levels combine, see How to set up Sous Chef Profiles for your account, Organizational Units, and projects.
Nothing needs to be assigned for AI-assisted translation to work at all — wxrks still runs on its own baseline behavior with no Agent in place anywhere. Assigning an Agent is how you start shaping that output, not a requirement for turning AI translation on in the first place; that's the separate Enable Augmented Translation Actions toggle covered in wxrks Augmented Actions.
Good to know: when a segment's source and target locale are the same language — for example, localizing US English content into UK English — wxrks automatically applies the Agent in a proofreading role instead of a translation role. This switch happens on its own based on the segment's languages; the same Audience, Tone, and Formality settings still apply either way.
What a Sous Chef Agent Actually Changes
Once an Agent applies to a project, it shapes AI output in four places:
Context Sensitive (CS) suggestions — the AI translation wxrks generates by blending Translation Memory, Machine Translation, and Glossary matches. The Agent's tone and instructions influence that suggestion every time, not only when you explicitly ask for a rewrite.
Pre-Translation — when a batch of segments is auto-translated, the assigned Agent's settings apply to that batch too, so bulk output matches the same voice as interactive suggestions.
Persona-tuned rewording — because an Agent already knows the intended audience, formality, and tone, wxrks can offer more than one stylistic variant of a segment for different audiences, instead of a single fixed suggestion.
Smells (in-Editor) — the Instructions are used as context, so wording that simply reflects them is not flagged. See Translation Smells.
Sous Chef Agents Outside the Editor
The Portal
A request submitted through the customer-facing wxrks Translation Portal doesn't go through a translator's own Editor settings — it's processed using the Organizational Unit tied to that Portal request, including that unit's Agent, Translation Memory, and Price List. The same Project → Organizational Unit → Account cascade still applies; it's just the Portal's Organizational Unit driving it instead of a project you opened directly. See wxrks Translation Portal for how a Portal user's own default translation preferences get configured.
Paid Review
When a Portal user submits a Paid Review request, wxrks automatically creates a dedicated Agent for that project, using the audience, tone, and instructions submitted with the request. This new Agent is a snapshot, not a live copy of the Organizational Unit's Agent — later changes to the Organizational Unit's own Agent won't retroactively change a review that's already in progress, so a reviewer always has a stable baseline to work from.