My organization is looking to leverage learning materials created in the U.S. for our global sites. I am hoping to collect best practices regarding the following questions.

1.) Are most of your training materials created in U.S. (English version only) and countries handle translations themselves?

2.) If you do support translation from the U.S.:
* what processes do you use?
* what best practices have you witnessed?
* how do you determine preferred languages to focus on?
* what vendors do you use?
* how do you bring ID professionals up to speed on culture issues, graphic & word selection, etc?

Thank you in advance for your willingness to respond. Eileen Dormuth

We do a lot of translation of materials into 36 languages. We handle all of it from the US but outsource to translators in Eastern Europe and Brazil as well as the US. Over the years we've done this we've found that handling everything from one country--in our case, the US--is more effective than trying to piecemeal things together from various countries. Our process is detailed but the broad outline is that we send the English text to the translator and use our own in-house resource to handle all questions on the translation. When the translation is finished we ask a linguist in the language to review the translation and make changes. Some organizations have in-house reviewers but we've found it best to use an independent linguist-reviewer rather than in-house resources as the in-house people are often unskilled at translation. We determine languages to be translated working with the client to assess the size and potential revenue of the audience. As for bringing ID professionals up to speed, I have presented a paper on this at ASTD on cultural sensitivity. It is more detailed than I can explain here. I would be glad to share vendors with you if you write me at kdomenick@traincomm.com.

quote:

1.) Are most of your training materials created in U.S. (English version only) and countries handle translations themselves?

2.) If you do support translation from the U.S.:
* what processes do you use?
* what best practices have you witnessed?
* how do you determine preferred languages to focus on?
* what vendors do you use?
* how do you bring ID professionals up to speed on culture issues, graphic & word selection, etc?

We create our materials in the US and then working with two different translations companies to obtain translations in 17 languages.

Our best practices include having a dedicated team member who can spend time working with the translation vendor (there are always lots of questions, lots of projects!) as well as making sure the in-country reviewers know the product!

Our team of instructional designers has a best practices meeting about 2x / year to go out designing with translations in mind. We are working on creating a style guide. We also have a dedicate team member who does review of all our content to keep text consistent and we use boiler-plates.

I highly recommend Language Intelligence and Foreign Exchange as translations vendors.

Hi Eileen,

We have a technology with which you can automate the entire course creation like, documentation, user & training manuals, simulation, e-learning ect. Which this tool we give you a inbuilt adapter by which you can convert the content into 17 different langauages at a click of a button.

By this you can reduce a lot of cost and time.
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Please feel free to contact me on the below mentioned information, to schedule a free online demonstration of our produce.

Phone : Praveen (408-426-8600)
e-mail : praveen@epiance.com