In this article, you will learn about the various ways you can vary your learning content in terms of formal and informal address.

Understanding informal language variants in Knowledgeworker Create

In many languages, a distinction is made between formal and informal address in everyday life. The corporate culture can also be set to a specific form. To enable a learning experience as close to everyday life as possible, Knowledgeworker Create supports both formal and informal language variants – depending on what you need.

Formal and informal language variants appear in two ways within the course: first, in the course content, which you formulate accordingly; and second, in automatically generated text within the courses—such as instructional texts— which you cannot influence directly. These automatically generated texts are displayed using the appropriate form of address based on the selected content language.
The informal language variant is marked with the suffix “Informal,” e.g., German (Germany) Informal. The formal variant has no suffix, e.g., German (Germany).

Creating a course with informal address

When creating a course, select the desired content language in the appropriate language variant, e.g., German (Germany) for formal address or German (Germany) Informal for informal address.

If you have any questions about using informal language variants, please contact Support.

Display of the language variant within the course

  • For learners: In the language selection in the course or during the export, the labels “Formal” and ‘Informal’ are hidden. For learners, both variants are labeled, for example, “German (Germany).”
  • For authors: While editing the course, the labels are displayed to make it clear which variant is currently being edited.

Translations into formal and informal language variants

For languages that distinguish between formal and informal address, you can specify which variant you want to use for the target language when using the automatic translation. This allows your content, for example, to be translated from “English (USA)” to “German (Germany) – Informal,” so that the texts automatically appear using the informal form.

Please note the following:

Localizations and country-specific variants of a language, e.g., German (Germany), German (Austria), and German (Switzerland), are not considered language variants but are treated as separate languages.