eLearning Translation Services Have Evolved to be One-Stop Offerings
If you’re working with any of the primary platforms to create your training content, translation can be done with relatively little effort on your part. Platforms like Articulate 360 and Rise 360 have built-in functionality for translation, and a skilled eLearning translation service will be able to work directly with your .Story files. Once you provide your .Story files your translation vendor will be able to:
Analyze your content to let you know if there are any potential linguistic or cultural concerns for any of the languages/countries you’re targeting.
Extract the words to provide you with an accurate word count for translation (that’s how translation cost is determined). This saves you the step of having to roundtrip the text out of, and back into, your Storyline files.
Determine the amount of time required to handle any engineering services – this is the time needed to recreate the foreign language layouts to match the English. This may involve adding and synchronizing audio, recreating animations, QA of advanced functionality (quizzes and tests), or even recreating images that have text in them. The goal is to make the foreign language versions look and feel as polished as the original English.
Provide a timeline for your translation project. If you have a specific timeline requirement, it’s important to communicate that to your eLearning translation service provider during the quoting stage. This will allow them to align resources and confirm they can hit your target date. Again, reviewing the Storyline 360 .Story files is the best way for them to determine an accurate turnaround time.
The difference in the translation process between Storyline 360 and Rise 360
Both applications allow your eLearning translation service to build an efficient translation workflow, but there is a very important difference between them. The constraints that Rise 360 places on design and functionality in order to achieve simplicity, efficiency, and responsiveness, also have a significant positive impact on the translation process. Instead of sending a full .Story file from Rise 360, you simply export an XLIFF file for translation. XLIFF is a standardized text file for translation. Depending on how you’ve designed your training, and if you’ve followed some basic best practices for internationalization, you will then be able to simply re-import the translation XLIFF file when you receive it back from your vendor and there won’t be any additional engineering required on the back end.
The choice to use Storyline 360 over Rise 360 for most content creators is to leverage the advanced capabilities of Storyline. The challenge that introduces in translation is that all of that advanced functionality needs to be recreated in the foreign language versions potentially adding a significant amount of engineering time. I’ll plan to write a separate post about this in the future, if you want to learn more about these different workflows now, please feel free to contact me.
How to get started
If you’re considering translation of Storyline 360 or Rise 360 content the easiest way to start is to contact a skilled eLearning translation service and provide them with your content. Any eLearning translation service will be willing to engage you and answer any questions you might have, and work toward providing you with a ballpark time and cost estimate. It may seem a little daunting at first because they will likely come back to you with lots of different questions, but trust me, this information is all necessary to make sure you get an accurate quote, and build a translation process that makes sense and is efficient.
The good news is that once the setup work is complete and the process is built, future translation project work will be progressively less challenging and your touchpoints will be minimized. Evolving this process is the key to unlocking the highest long-term productivity gains and cost savings.
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