Welcome to the Crowdin Power Up series. Your guides for this journey are Stefan Huyghe and Dorota Pawlak, an AI for localization consultant. They’re here to help translators and PMs use Crowdin’s most recent AI features.
Get ready for a practical tour of Crowdin’s AI. We’ll show you how Agentic AI improves your localization workflows. You’ll learn how to manage context, control tone, handle text lengths, and set up your own rules.
For a deeper dive, you can watch the full video on YouTube, and we’ve included some key highlights within this article.
Understanding Crowdin’s Evolving AI Landscape
AI in localization isn’t static, and neither is Crowdin’s approach. In the first episode, Dorota walks us through the evolution of Crowdin’s AI tools. She shows how they’ve progressed to meet the demands of modern localization workflows.
From Basic to Agentic: 3 Phases of AI Evolution
Crowdin’s journey with AI can be understood in three distinct phases:
- Basic Plugin Integration. Initially, Crowdin offered a fundamental integration with tools like a basic ChatGPT plugin. This allowed users to perform simple tasks within the AI editor, such as talking to an assistant to rephrase a translation or make it shorter.
- Native Large Language Model Integration. The second phase brought native large language model (LLM) integration directly into Crowdin. This offered users the flexibility to choose from different LLM providers. It enabled more control, allowing users to write or customize prompts for specific AI functionalities like AI pre-translation, AI proofreading, or AI-based QA.
- Agentic AI. We are now in the third and most advanced phase: Agentic AI. This evolution is likely the closest we’ll get to how future professionals in the translation field will operate.
Let’s see how it differs from previous versions.
The Key Differences of Agentic AI
- Content Adjustment and Validation: Agentic AI can adjust and validate your content, not just translate it.
- Cross-Segment Work Unlike tools that might operate on a single string or sentence, Agentic AI can work across all segments, encompassing a whole file or even an entire project.
- Contextual Decisions: The AI can make intelligent decisions to achieve better translation quality.
- Dynamic Workflows and Real-Time Adjustments: You can provide information about your target audience, preferred style, or tone directly in the chatbox.
- Conversational Advantage / Working in Layers: Agentic AI introduces a flexible “layered” workflow where you can improve translations step-by-step and add context anytime, turning a strict process into an ongoing chat.
- Guiding AI with User Rules: User Rules allow you to set up the AI’s preferences, ensuring it always uses your preferred approach across all your work. Now there’s no need to tell it what to do every single time.
- Mastering Text Lengths: Agentic AI, guided by your User Rules, makes fitting translated text into strict length limits efficient and accurate.
- Enhanced QA Checks: Agentic AI helps ensure translations are accurate, on-style, and error-free.
This means that translators are no longer getting a tool to do a task, but an assistant capable of intelligent support.
Agentic AI in Action: Dynamic Workflows and Real-Time Adjustments
Agentic AI changes how Crowdin handles context. Now you can give important information directly in the AI chat.
Adding Context with Agentic AI: The Interactive Approach
Imagine needing to adjust a translation based on a new style guide or ensuring consistency with visuals. Agentic AI makes this easy:
- Real-time Context Provision: You can provide information about your target audience, preferred style, or tone directly in the chatbox, immediately guiding the AI’s decision-making.
- Referencing External Files and Screenshots: Upload screenshots or reference external files directly into the Agentic AI interface to ensure consistency with existing visuals.
This interactive, chat-based approach provides all necessary context directly to Agentic AI. This makes translations more accurate, consistent, and fast. As Dorota explains, this feature is like having a chat with your own AI assistant. It boosts productivity, especially for large texts and tight deadlines. It also ensures your brand’s voice is perfectly matched.
Changing Translation Tone with Agentic AI
For marketing, getting the right tone in translation is often a big challenge. A translation might be accurate, but it feels too formal for your target audience. Crowdin’s Agentic AI makes adjusting the tone across an entire project remarkably simple and fast.
The Challenge: Imagine you have a marketing website that has been translated, but the tone is too formal. Manually changing every instance to an informal tone is a tedious process, as it involves more than just replacing pronouns. It requires rewriting text, using different verb forms, and adapting phrases.
The Agentic AI Solution: Instead of manual rework, you can simply call upon Agentic AI.
- Step: You provide a direct, natural language prompt to the AI, such as: “Can you please change the style the tone in all strings from formal to informal?”. No coding is involved; it’s like having a conversation.
- Process: The agent then analyzes all segments, considering translation memory matches, and formulates suggestions.
- Outcome: After reviewing the AI’s suggestions to ensure they align with your needs, you can run the tool. Crowdin will update all strings in the editor to reflect the new, informal tone.
Linguists can use this feature to quickly adapt content to fit specific styles and brand voices. Agentic AI greatly reduces the manual effort for these tasks.
Making Text Gender Neutral with Agentic AI
Making a whole text gender-neutral takes a lot of work. Agentic AI simplifies this process, allowing you to maintain a consistent, gender-neutral tone.
The Challenge: After initial translation, you might realize your text needs to be gender-neutral. Manually reviewing and rewriting phrases for gender neutrality, especially in languages with grammatical gender, can be time-consuming.
The Agentic AI Solution: Agentic AI can be instructed to modify your translations for gender neutrality with a straightforward prompt.
- Step: You can ask the AI to “rewrite the translations and make sure it’s gender neutral”. The AI will analyze the text, string by string.
- Process: The AI provides suggestions for changes. After verifying the suggestions, you can implement them across the entire text.
- Outcome: Crowdin updates the translations in the editor to reflect the gender-neutral language. The AI provides a summary of the changes it implemented, explaining its reasoning.
Performing QA Checks with Agentic AI
Quality Assurance is an important phase in localization. Agentic AI helps your translations be accurate, on style, and error-free. It’s a powerful first defense to catch issues right away.
The Challenge: Traditional QA methods can be time-consuming. Simply asking an AI to “check for QA issues” might provide generic results. To get valuable feedback, the AI needs clear instructions.
The Agentic AI Solution: With Agentic AI, you can tell it exactly what QA problems to look for. This provides you with useful and focused insights.
- Step: Instead of a generic request, you can tell the AI in detail what to look for. For example, you might ask it to “verify if the existing translation is free from QA issues”, specifically requesting it to find “mistranslations or incorrect use of tone and style”.
- Process: The AI reviews string-by-string, looking into translation memory matches and verifying against your specified criteria. It can identify problems such as mistranslations (e.g., “above” translated as “below”), punctuation errors (e.g., a missing period), or a mix of formal and informal language within the same text.
- Outcome: The AI provides suggested corrections and a summary table for easy review. It then asks for your permission to update all translations with its suggestions.
Adding Context During QA: Tailoring to Your Audience
Agentic AI also allows for dynamic context injection during the QA process. This is particularly useful if you didn’t initially provide context about your target audience.
- Step: You can ask the agent to “verify if these sentences match my target audience” and then describe your target audience directly in the chat. For example, you might explain that you want user-friendly, informal language.
- Outcome: With Agentic AI, you can tell it exactly what QA issues to look for. This gives you useful, focused insights. It provides suggestions on how to make the translation more suitable for your audience. It can even update the entire translation to reflect these preferences.
Guiding AI with User Rules
Crowdin’s Agentic AI offers a way to keep translations standardized over time. User Rules let you set up the AI’s preferences, ensuring it always uses your preferred style and approach across all your work.
Teach Agentic AI Your Style
User Rules apply to everything you do, while Project Rules are for specific projects. This means you can guide the AI without telling it what to do every single time.
Before User Rules: First, a German mobile app text is translated by AI without any special rules. The AI picks a default, which is often formal. Even if it’s correct, it might not sound right for a friendly app.
With User Rules: To get an informal tone for the app, you can set up a new User Rule.
- Step: Go to Agentic AI settings, add a rule called “informal tone”. This tells the AI to “always translate mobile apps with an informal tone”.
- Outcome: After clearing old translations, the AI translates the text again. This time, it uses the new rule, giving you informal translations right away. The AI confirms it used the informal tone and even spots minor issues.
Changing Text Lengths with Agentic AI & User Rules
Fitting translated text into strict length limits, like for app buttons or headlines, is a common challenge. Manual adjustments are time-consuming. Thankfully, Crowdin’s Agentic AI, guided by your User Rules, makes this process efficient and accurate.
You can easily set User Rules to control text length. For example, you can tell the AI: “Ensure translations for mobile app UI are concise, within 10% of source length”.
In this video segment, we demonstrate exactly how this works:
The Challenge See a German app translation that’s too long for its UI.
- Step: Watch as we quickly create a new User Rule instructing the AI to prioritize conciseness for UI elements.
- Outcome: Observe the AI reprocess the text. It intelligently rephrases and condenses the translation, making it fit perfectly, all while maintaining quality. The AI even confirms its adherence to the length rule.
Master Crowdin AI for Great Results
You’ve learned how Crowdin’s Agentic AI helps with context, tone, and text length, all guided by your rules. Now, let’s see how these features work together to make your localization truly powerful.
All Features Working Together
Think of Crowdin AI features as a team. Your user rules direct this team. When they work in sync, you get perfect translations every time. For example, AI can make text informal and ensure it fits a small button, all at once. This teamwork makes your localization consistent and exactly how you want it.
Your AI, Your Way
You are the conductor. You tell the AI what to do using your rules and guidance. This means Crowdin AI doesn’t just automate; it works your way, ensuring high quality and adherence to your brand’s unique voice.
Big Benefits for You
- Faster Work: Spend much less time on manual edits and checks.
- Better Quality: Get consistent, error-free, and on-brand translations from the start.
- Quicker Delivery: Launch your content faster than ever before.
- Empowered Team: Your linguists can focus on creative work, not repetitive tasks.
The Human Touch Remains Key
Remember, Agentic AI is your intelligent assistant, not a replacement. Your expertise is important for setting rules, reviewing output, and continuously refining the AI. It’s a true partnership where human smarts guide AI power.
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