E-learning has quickly become ubiquitous in our digital world. It can be the most effective way to train your own company or your users, allowing for interactivity and customizations to your needs. You can spend hours and hours developing and fine-tuning your e-learning courses, so they are just right. But what happens if you need that e-learning course in other languages?
Multilingual Training
It is important to support employees or users who speak different languages to increase market share or keep your international team. But now that you’ve developed a complex training course, how do you start to get it localized into other languages? It can certainly seem to be a daunting task.
Authoring Software
A lot depends on the type of e-learning software you’ve chosen. Most of the big names in e-learning (i.e., Articulate, Captivate) have built-in multilingual support, making it much easier to localize your courses. They have accessible export/import features to send your content for translation then pull it back in when it’s done. They also usually have built-in translations for the common labels and buttons.
Other e-learning tools that may be newer or more limited in terms of market share might have similar support, or it might take more effort to do the localization. Then there are those who have made homegrown e-learning courses from scratch. Those can be localized as well but may take more custom processes. Regardless of the tool you choose, there is almost always a way to localize your courses.
Multimedia Usage
The other consideration is your multimedia usage within the course itself. Do you have images with text in them? Screenshots of your software? Videos with onscreen text or voiceovers? You can decide which of these things need to be localized and should stay in English. There are also various options for localizing the videos, ranging from the more expensive (creating timed voiceovers in each language) to the more cost-effective (adding localized subtitles). Whatever your multimedia requirements are, be sure to communicate that upfront to your language solutions provider.
Quality Assurance
One thing that is critical to any e-learning translation is a Linguistic Quality Assurance (LQA) step of the fully localized course. After all, the translated pieces are put together – text, images, videos, button labels, etc. – it’s important that a native speaker review the full course to make sure everything is localized and looks correct in context. It’s this step that can identify any final issues before your end-user sees the course, helping to make sure everything looks perfect.
The Morningside Solution
Morningside is completely capable of taking on all this work for you, offering a turnkey solution to your e-learning localization needs. Please send us your e-learning course, let us know what your multimedia requirements are, and allow us to prepare and deliver a fully localized e-learning course in any language. This will save you the hassle of doing the work yourself, and you can rest easy knowing that language experts are handling all the intricacies of localization for you.
Keep an eye out for the updated version of our Multilingual E-Learning Guide, which will be out soon! And please don’t hesitate to contact us for any translation or localization needs!
Jennifer Schudel, Associate Director, Localization Engineering, Morningside, a Questel Company, a subject matter expert & Localization Engineer, having 12 years of experience in translation and localization for Flare projects, software and websites. She has previously partnered with MadCap Flare associates in webinars and presented at MadWorld.