A Sous Chef Agent 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 five settings:
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 Level — how literal or inventive the output should be.
From Manual Settings to a Reusable Agent
Sous Chef's five 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 Configuring Sous Chef Agents in wxrks. 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
Agents cascade from most specific to most general. wxrks always applies the most specific Agent that's actually assigned, falling back a level at a time when nothing is set:
Project — takes priority over everything else once assigned.
Organizational Unit — the default for every project in that unit that doesn't have its own Agent.
Account — the account-wide fallback, used when neither a Project nor an Organizational Unit has an Agent assigned.
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 three 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.
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.