eLearning courses are one of the marvels of our digital world. No longer is learning confined to classrooms and auditoriums; people worldwide can tune in to experts in every field to access eLearning materials with a click of a button. But to reach an international audience, your eLearning courses must be translated. By including eLearning translation services, educational institutions, corporations, and content creators can tap into a global audience ready for more knowledge.
Multilingual eLearning is democratizing access to education, making it accessible to individuals with language obstacles. eLearning translation services and internet access supply students in different countries and professionals seeking better skills with the gateway for improvement and advancement.
Creating eLearning content requires knowledge and a clear strategy. In addition, another set of considerations and understanding is required when thinking about embarking on translation services for your learning courses.
The Benefits of eLearning and Translation
There is an application for eLearning content in nearly every industry. You can use it for onboarding new employees taking them through company policies, role expectations, and essential HR information. eLearning can be used to roll out new software, provide customer service, share instructions, and much more. Maybe you want to launch an education series for your customers to use a new product, or you need to create a series of Human Resources videos to use during sexual harassment training – the possibilities are endless.
The eLearning market is projected to be worth $325 billion by 2025 – so if this isn’t something you had your eye on before, it certainly should be. This growth is partly due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which significantly increased the adoption of eLearning courses across every industry and is a worldwide practice now.
Still not convinced your organization might benefit from eLearning tools? Consider this: a survey of 2,500 companies found those who used a “comprehensive training program” had 24% higher profit margins and a staggering 218% higher revenue per employee. Having an e-learning course has increased income for 42% of U.S. organizations.
Providing eLearning content can also increase information retention in your team, increase policy compliance, and furnish an inclusive way to access information.
Breaking the Linguistic Blocks
Language is a vessel for knowledge and can also be a barrier stopping the seamless transfer of information across cultures. English is a global lingua franca and the lingua franca in the digital world. However, despite English dominance, it is a reality that learners across the globe come from diverse places and have different linguistic backgrounds. Some students can feel more comfortable acquiring information in their native language or may have limited English proficiency.
eLearning translation services solve the language barrier by rendering educational content in a language that resonates with students, enhancing their comprehension and engagement with the training materials.
Types of eLearning content
- Corporate Training. Employee training materials, including onboarding, human resource training, software training, and development of new skills.
- Customer Focus Material. Customer training materials, including instructional videos for new products and processes.
- Educational Content. Student learning, including higher academic courses, niche classes, summer school, vocational training, online courses, and more.
- Compliance Training Modules. Including rules, regulations, policies, and procedures. Quality assurance and training for special certifications
Best Practices to Create eLearning Content that Will Need Translation Services
If you know from the get-go that your Elearning course is going to need translation, you should design it with the translation process in mind and consider the best practices that we are presenting below:
Start your Project with a Multilingual Audience in Mind
If you know your eLearning course will be multilingual or might need translation into another language, that should be considered in the design stage to follow best practices. Challenges arise whenever content translation is an afterthought. Planning for translation in advance helps you design how to write your content, examples, images, videos, and text placement in your videos.
Examples of things to look into if you need to translate your learning course:
1) eLearning Tools, Authoring tools, and LMS Platforms
What authoring tools are going to be used? Are you going to use a Learning Management System (LMS platform)? What other content creation tools are you going to use? You need to work with a translation company to help ease the intricacy of managing eLearning content across different LMS platforms, authoring, and content creation tools.
Your team must also determine each tool’s workflow and capabilities to extract the original language and import translated content in the new languages.
2) Prepare for Content Expansion
In translation services projects, text expansion is expected (as it is the contraction of the space occupied by the content). In languages like German and Spanish, translation produces growth in the space occupied by the words. German translation services can have up to a 50% text expansion over English. On the contrary, other languages, like Chinese and Japanese, might take less space. Both expansion and contraction affect the display of your courses on the screen, so a review process to validate how the new content shows has to be added to the workflow. Also, content variations must be considered during the course design for easy adaptation.
3) Considerations for Video Production
Videos are heavily used in eLearning. Maintaining the inventory of assets to translate and source elements like the final script will make the project move faster. Prepare to edit the English video with enough transition time to leave room for the translation expansion.
If your videos are long and your speakers go fast, that might be a problem with the expansion of the text during translation. You may have to return to the editing drawing board, wasting valuable time and resources.
Planning ahead for eLearning translation also helps you plan the audio for your videos. Your audio should be specific to the subject you’re talking about, without using cultural idioms, humor, or niche references, as these don’t translate well and will need to be localized for each audience. If they have localization in mind, your team will produce a video and audio that is easier to internationalize for different languages, so you don’t need a separate script for each translated version. The more audio tracts you have, the more budget you need for translation services.
The presence of on-screen text on videos adds to the videos’ comprehension but adds complexity to the video localization. So, plan to have the source files of your videos to update the on-screen text on those with the language version.
In a nutshell, plan your videos so they can be easily localized.
4) Image Localization
Appropriate images help the learning experience. For each language and culture, you might need different illustrations. You must review the images present in the Elearning content to decide if they stay the same, need modifications, or have to change them for new ones.
You should assess whether you’re showing specific locations, timestamps, signs, or screengrabs in a specific language or any other images that are obviously from a particular place or culture different than the new market. It is essential to do an inventory and indicate whether these can stay with the original content or need to be localized along with the copy will need to be considered.
Images with embedded text can’t be extracted during the eLearning translation process. So avoid them.
Planning ahead for your eLearning localization gives a clean base rather than a version that needs to be heavily edited for each market and language. This facilitates your translation company’s job to work its magic in creating an engaging, informative, and culturally relevant course for each target audience.
Important Tasks for the Elearning Translation and Localization Process
Once the Elearning course and all its content and modules are completed, the project reaches the ideal time to start producing multilingual content. In the perfect world, best practices for translation services were considered during creation. But at this stage, the content will be scrutinized to see the challenges and best workflow to produce translated versions of the Elearning content successfully and under budget control.
Your team needs to do an inventory of assets and get organized to plan for the eLearning Translation by considering the topics described below.
Some tasks must be done before starting the eLearning localization, and others must be completed at the end of the project before the multilingual version goes live.
The Tasks to Complete Before Starting the Elearning Localization.
Style Guide for the Translation
If there is a style guide for the original English content, a style guide should be created for each language to indicate the style preferences to maintain in the translation process.
A style guide provides a set of rules to establish a standard for document design, formatting, and writing. This improves communication and ensures consistency across multiple documents for a particular organization or publication. In our case, for all the prices of the learning courses.
A style guide could be extensive, including punctuation, capitalization rules, and the formatting of dates, numbers, and tables.
In translation services, a style guide may cover grammar choices, formal and informal tones, punctuation rules, how to manage acronyms, and the localization rules to write the currency, units of measurement, and other elements that change from language to language and are particular to the language pair of the translation process.
Example of 3 rules for a Style guide for English to Spanish Translation Services:
Understand the Multilingual options of the eLearning platform
Many of the most used eLearning authoring tools are no strangers to the necessity of translation services and often have built-in multi-lingual support. If you’re creating an eLearning course from scratch, vet your platforms carefully to make the translation process more manageable. Knowing the capabilities of your platform will help define the most efficient translation workflow and the different file types needed in the process.
You must test and ensure your platform is supported on multiple device types. More than half of all internet traffic comes from smartphones, so it does you no good to have a hosting platform that only works well on desktops. Plan to check on tablets and different browsers and use native speakers to check the display of special characters.
Translation Services for RTL Languages
If your multilingual plan includes right-to-left languages (RTL Languages), research and test the eLearning platform to validate that it can adapt well to display content translated into those languages. Examples of right-to-left languages are Arabic, Hebrew, Urdu, and Persian.
The Localization process for RTL languages should be planned for in the early stages of product design. Design adaptations are necessary when localizing for right-to-left languages (including Logo locations, forms, navigation, visuals, general layout, numbers, etc.).
Enabling the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm ( link to (or bidirectional script support) should be on your to-do list from the beginning of the product development process.
Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm describes the set of rules that the browser applies to produce the correct order at the time of display.
Reach of RTL languages
Even though there are fewer right-to-left languages, some of those languages have significant numbers:
Arabic Translations – will reach 360 million native speakers.
Urdu Translations – will reach 70 million native speakers and 170 million as a second language.
Understand Your Audience and Target Market
While this may seem like surface-level market advice, it’s crucial that you know who your audience is and what languages they speak. Translating your content is an investment you want to pay off in dividends. But it won’t if you don’t use the correct target language. If you’re guessing at your audience demographics, you could waste money on an eLearning translation your audience doesn’t engage with.
Understanding your audience also means understanding how they interact with the content, cultural preferences, and learning styles. Students will interact differently than remote team members doing corporate training or frustrated customers. It’s helpful to understand different learning styles so you can incorporate them from the start of the process. Some people are visual learners, while others do best with auditory information delivery. Ensure your course has multiple ways of delivering information.
Prioritize the Content for Translation
Not all of your content needs to be translated for your new audiences. If you have a large amount of eLearning content, start with the most important parts. No matter how important you believe your eLearning content is, some are always more important than others. Start with the crucial pieces and work your way down.
Use a Glossary of Terms
Every industry has its jargon, a specific set of terms that people within the industry understand but may be confusing to people outside the industry. Organizations may also have product and program names and unique acronyms a translator needs to understand and manage correctly. Terms that will not be translated or specific translations that are required. All the terms, examples, and usage rules are stored in a multilingual glossary. A glossary also ought to be maintained.
Utilizing a glossary of terms reduces the back-and-forth time for your translator to understand specific terms, reduces revisions, keeps consistency through your content, and keeps the process moving smoothly. A little time invested upfront into the glossary can pay dividends in the long run.
Don’t Skip Linguistic Quality Assurance
After everything is said and done, but before the translated version of your course launches, you need a quality assurance check. This is performed by a native speaker of the target language who plays around with the translated content to ensure everything looks good. This translator checks the copy, images, buttons, videos, screengrabs, and all the other little details that come together to make (or break) a course. The person performing the quality assurance check will usually be a different translator than the one who put everything together.
But conversely, the quality assurance check shouldn’t be the first testing your course undergoes. You need review points at predefined stages to ensure the translated text contains critical information and conveys your company’s messaging and branding.
The course should be robustly tested against various internet browsers, hosting platforms, and internet speeds. In short, someone should try to break the course at every stage of the translation process, to ensure the end user can’t.
The translation process and quality assurance often involve back-and-forth communication with the team of translators and the course developer to clarify nuances and guarantee the outcome has the appropriate quality.
The final goal is to maintain the integrity and accuracy of the translated course.
Don’t Forget the Multilingual Subtitles
Having suitable audio tracts is essential, whether it’s the proper music for transitions or using different narrators for different audiences. But don’t skip the subtitles, either. Subtitles are a written script for the audio track playing in your course. For visual learners, having subtitles can make retaining verbal information easier. Subtitles also make your eLearning content more accessible for deaf and hard-of-hearing people.
If you have a script for the video’s audio, adding and translating subtitles are simple and significantly increase the reach of your content.
Tasks to Execute to Test the Localized Elearning Course
Final Technical Adaptation Review
eLearning content usually includes multimedia elements, interactive modules, and graphics. These components must be adapted to the target language(s), culture, and demographic. The translation company will work closely with the development team, instructional designers, and multimedia experts to guarantee the translated content retains its interactive and engaging qualities. This review might implicate re-recording audio, recreating graphics, and adapting interactive exercises.
User Testing by Native Speaker of the New Language
Before launching the translated eLearning content, user testing is conducted to validate its effectiveness. Following an organized strategy, learners from the target audience interact with the course, providing feedback on comprehension, engagement, and cultural relevance. This feedback circle is critical in fine-tuning the translated content and managing any adjustments and changes found for a better learning experience.
The user testing phase is a critical final phase. Rushing it can complicate the fine-tuning of the translated course.
Maintenance Phase and Updates
eLearning translation isn’t a one-time endeavor. As the source content evolves or new modules are added, all the translated versions must be updated accordingly.
Updates of the software used for the course may also push revisions. New technologies might be incorporated, and the platform might improve their multilingual capabilities, so workflow and process for translation will require adaptations.
Maintenance involves updating the translated text and ensuring that all the multimedia elements and interactive components remain accurate and effective in the target language and sync with the original course.
The Essence of eLearning Localization Services
You already know a word-for-word translation isn’t sufficient for your eLearning courses – you need the material translated to retain the key pieces of information while creating an engaging voice. One of the critical factors in doing this is localizing your translation. Every language has its dialects and small (or large) linguistic changes as a language spreads across a country or continent. E-learning localization is a critical component of success.
For example, your audience may speak Spanish. But are they located in Spain, Puerto Rico, or Mexico? Dominican Spanish is different than Mexican Spanish in the same way that American and British English are different. You wouldn’t use Australian English for a Canadian audience.
Localization solutions also take into account the cultural norms of your audience. Referring back to an earlier example, Australians are pretty comfortable with a cheeky “c” word that makes most Americans blush. Knowing your audience is crucial to connecting and creating content for them.
E-learning localization services aren’t just about linguistics. It’s also about the terms of measurement, images, numbers, and colors used in the video. What red, white, and black imply to your audience varies by culture, and it’s essential to keep these implications and how they interfere with the user’s ability to learn in mind. Planning your content with a multi-lingual audience in mind helps you have less work on the back end, changing colors or images that may be offensive.
Work with the Right Language Service Provider
The best way to ensure a smooth translation process for your eLearning courses is by working with the right professional translation service company. With a team of experts in your corner, they’ll assist you every step of the way so you’re never confused about what you need to do next to ensure the success of your course.
The right eLearning translation company can help you navigate the complexities of localization and testing your courses. You’ll work with translators whose native language is your target language, who have subject matter expertise in your industry, and who understand the nuances of your daily business.
The right team will work with you to understand not just the purpose of this course in the short term, but how it supports your long-term goals, any pain points you have, and how this course supports strategic initiatives.
Ready to expand the reach of your existing courses with eLearning translation services? It’s easy when you work with an experienced language translation company, with the software and a professional team to support the successful translation of any and all eLearning translation projects. At JR Language Translation Services, we go the extra mile to exceed your expectations at affordable prices with workable turnaround times. Contact us to discuss your multilingual eLearning course— we’d love to hear from you.
