Hi Everyone,

I have a question about your experiences with e-learning design tools which claim to have "multilingual" capabilities.

Supposing you have your content already created (a full 1hr software training course in English, with hotspots, and screencapture interactions, callouts etc...)

Suppose also you already have the translations (into Spanish) of all possible texts and you are about to re-import them on top of the old English texts.

What is a reasonable amount/ratio of person hours you should spend on fine-tuning the appearance of the translated version of the same course after you have "clicked" the import all texts (translated) button?

I was led to believe that with multilingual functionality you had to click a button and hey presto all your problems were solved - you had the same course again, but in a new language (providing you have the translated texts already)

My experience, however, shows how we were mis-sold that particular feature. I have found that I have had to manually, and painstakingly go into every single solitary page and:

- examine if there are formatting changes/corruptions during import of translated texts

- re-add any bold/underline words which the translator forgot to format in their translated version (and call them back to ask which word in the translated sentence corresponded to the original bolded word in English, so I can make the change myself)

- examine all of the hotspots to see if they are still positioned exactly on top of the text (some texts & windows increase/decrease in size depending on the length of the words when they are translated into another language, so the hotspot no longer lies directly on top of the text/box e.g. German lanuage has very long words and you need double the amount of space)

- Reimport the Glossary (now also translated into another language)

- Individually manipulate the size and page coordinate positioning of each callout box (containing translated callout texts) as it is overlaid on screen captures / demonstrations of software demonstrations / button clicks / menu pulls etc...

It has taken me 2 days worth of person hours "fiddling" with parameters just to get the translated version to meet the same quality as the original English version and actually "work" exactly as it should do in the published version. And all this for a mere 1 hour of actual E-learning participation time...

Will switching to a different e-learning creation software with "multilingual" make any difference? Does anyone have any experience with multingual course conversion?

This posting is a bit old, so I would be interested in knowing how you worked out your issues. Here's my 2-cents for posterity.

I am rather new to e-Learning, but not to course translation. My limited experience on e-Learning tells me that it depends on the program. We have had a doosy of a time translating one of our Flash-based courses, even though the text is imported through XML files. It took hours to upload the content in Cantonese to XML.

However, I just started playing around with Captivate recently, and found that the captions are relatively painless to translate, since you can export them to a table in Word, have them translated in their own column, and upload all of the translated text into the CA files at one time. I was honestly psyched when I discovered that!

Some of our translators are pretty bad at reformatting the translated text (bold, etc)as the original, while others are pretty careful and technically savvy. This can add time to the uploading process.

Finally, I think that the time depends on the language. Spanish words are often pretty easy to recognize, if you need to edit the content, at least relative to a language like Russian, so it shouldn't take as long as a less-related language.

I hope that this message gives yous some guidance for future projects. Please let me know how your project went.

Hi,

Thanks so much for replying - it's nice to know I'm not the only one out there. I think I learned a lesson here:

Namely, to take with a pinch of salt anything the LCMS/Authoring Tool vendors claim is a time-saving feature of their product.

Vendors of E-Learning software always sell the time saving aspect, but it seems the time & money saving applies only to the participants (who don't need to spend time travelling to training rooms / time off work) which cleverly makes you assume E-Learning creation time is saved too.

To be honest it takes me just as long to go back into each re-imported multilingual object (in a tool with multilingual capability) to manually verify position and text bolding of the new translations ... than it would be to create new text boxes manually at each position (from scratch) copy/pasting from an MS word language translation.

But I'm still scouting for more products all the same, and captivate is next on my demo/trial list.

Generally speaking, the person to upload the translated text will either be you, or the translator. And generally speaking, if it's not in Word, or in PowerPoint (in the middle of the screen, not the slide master), then the person to do it will be you. And you'll still QC the work, regardless.

In my experience, translators aren't used to working with LCMS's or authoring tools. Keep that in mind, and when evaluating a product, ask yourself how you'll get text re-uploaded in a foreign language if the translator can only work in PPT or Word.

I know that one e-Learning company out there that develops in Flash actually has all text pull in from XML files. They create the XML files from Excel spreadsheets using a macro, so they can just plug in the text into a spreadsheet, run the macro, and they're good to go. And I'm sure that most translators can work with Excel.

They didn't give me a copy of that macro, though.

I think it also is affected by the original design of the materials. If the material is designed for English only, tight graphics may be fine. However, If multi-lingual design is considered, allowing space in the design for a subsequent translation of different text length can reduce subsequent problems.