Arabic words SCRAMBLE on import

That was the first thing I tried. Importing directly into SL from the Word translation document.

Sent from my iPhone

I have a PowerPoint with some image grabs that illustrate this problem. I would rather not post it publicly but can send if any experts want to see the issues.

I hope this doesn't apply to all Right to Left languages!

Hi Charles,

You are certainly welcome to share privately with our team here if you'd like us to take a look.

Thanks Leslie, I had to open a case to upload the file.

Articulate Case # 01466878

Thanks, Charles. I see you worked with Vevette who confirmed this as a bug and reported it to our team. We'll be in touch here and in your case as soon as we have any additional info to share. 

Hi, I'm also having the same problem with the order of the text when there is a mix of Arabic and English (for company names etc). I also find I have the same problem with numbers. When I use bullet points, they are always on the left even though I have rtl text in the settings. Please help, need this fixed asap. Is there any progress fixing this bug. Thanks

I have pointed out in earlier posts the problems SL360 has when importing translations from Word. To recap, all line and paragraph spacing used in the original Story file is lost. All text strings default to single line and 0 paragraph spacing. I usually customize these settings for style and layout concerns. My client is a luxury education department with programs going out globally. They invested in their LMS and the Articulate software to have a better workflow than they’ve used in the past, replacing HTML and PowerPoint solutions.

I have just completed converting 6 modules with heavy text, triggers, quizzes etc into 18 languages. Because of what I outlined regarding spacing problems, much hand editing was involved. In fact, nearly every text object had to be changed. Each language has required, on average, 14 hours of labor to get the modules looking good. The majority of the languages were “western" but also a few were character-based like Korean, Chinese and Japanese.

That was all bad enough, but then I hit Arabic! Production time climbed to more than 30 hours. Right-to-left text, though supported, has a lot of bugs. What I see in Word is not what imports into Storyline.

As noted, English text (product names etc.) and numbers do not show within the text string as the client intended. Also as Matt pointed out, there seems to be no bullet support. One more quirk is that the same “out of order” phenom happens if any “bold” is in the text string.

My workaround for bullets was to insert a hyphen at the beginning of the line (on the right) although this didn’t always work reliably. I eliminate any bolded words. For the "out of order" words and numbers, I patched in the English as individual text objects within the Arabic text block. Sometimes I could create a blank area and drop the English into the string, but often I actually had to create “paragraphs" line by line. Sometimes a single line had multiple text objects when the English was interrupted by Arabic, then followed by more English.

All the while, working with characters I don’t understand, having to visually compare the Storyline slides to the Word document to be sure I was putting everything in the right order and trying to think right to left, except for the English. A nightmare.

Will these same problems manifest themselves in all right-to-left languages?

My client based their Articulate purchase decision, in part, on it's ease of translation. It was suggested to me that exporting to XLIFF format is more reliable than exporting to Word, but this is a non-starter for my client. The regional people responsible for translating from English are generally not professional translators and software decisions are made on a corporate level.

I think users deserve a realistic timetable for fixing these right to left bugs and the line/paragraph spacing issues as well.

Hoping for some good news...

A follow up -- I made an export from English to XLIFF, opened in Swordfish, copied all the code and words to the translation column, pasted in the Arabic from Word, then saved.

When I imported into Storyline, the words were still scrambled if numbers or English were mixed in the text string.

Conclusion? Even if regional markets who use right to left text translate via a tool that supports XLIFF, the import into Storyline won't be without issues.

Hi Charles and Matthew,

I'm really sorry that words are still scrambled if numbers or English were mixed in the text string, even when using XLIFF for translation. I know this has been frustrating to deal with, to say the least. Our team is looking into this bug, and we'll certainly reach out as soon as we have more details to share on that.

Thanks Alyssa, Just so you know, I looked in detail at Adobe Captivate and it seems like they have exactly the same set of issues. 

Thanks, Charles. Although it doesn't help with your immediate needs, that's good information for our team. I'll let them know and we'll keep you posted here with any updates. 

I'm checking in to see if there has been any progress on this problem.

Thanks, Chuck

Hi Charles, not sure if this will be of any help and I'm sure you have tried numerous different things by now.

I have been doing a lot of English to Arabic conversions over the past few weeks on multiple courses, and although I have run into a couple of bugs, generally the imports have all worked fine. 

This is our process of working:

1. Export English to Word translation file
2. Send the translation file to the client who inputs the translation into the column provided in the Word document
3. Client sends it back.  We go into the Word document and change all the text in the translate column to Simplified Arabic font (we found numerous issues with other fonts in Arabic on iOS devices).  There is also an official font called Dubai if you need a good font to use.
4. Import the document into SL360
5. Do a manual check of all the content (make sure the Modern Font option in SL is turned off before you import, it has caused us so many problems with Arabic)

This works for us I would say 99% of the time.  The times where we have problems is where the client changes the formatting of the text in the translate column in the Word document.  If for example your font is size 18 when output from SL and the client changes it to size 14, then it will re-import at size 14. We had a nightmare with that in the first couple we did until we got the client to agree not to change things.

I don't know how our client is doing the translations but Word knows its right-left Arabic text before we import it, so not sure if that has anything to do with it.

Thanks for the suggestion. I tested on some screens I had from the original project and this worked, but I couldn’t find old screens that were the worst offenders originally. I’ll dig them up to test this approach again.
Chuck

Hi Charles,

For the two issues you'd discussed with Vevette previously, there hasn't been a fix or update for those yet. We'll let you know here and within your Support cases as soon as there is more info to share. 

Hi Charles and David,

Update 28 of Storyline 360 was released yesterday, and as our team was continuing to test the issue where importing Arabic text translation into Storyline, the words are not in the same order as is it in the original Word file, we are no longer able to replicate it.

I wanted to check in with both of you to see if you were able to test out this latest update (Storyline 360, build 3.27.18822.0.) and can still reproduce the issue? If so, please let me know your exact steps (a Peek recording would help!) and I'll get those details to the team. 

Hi Ashley, I'm not sure what you mean in your first paragraph. Are you saying it still doesn't work or are you saying you no longer have the Word/Story files to test with?

Hi Charles! 

Sorry for any confusion! We're no longer able to reproduce this issue using the sample files shared and our own files. Since this one was difficult to pin down, we wanted to have a few customers who ran into the trouble try it on the latest update and let us know what they see.

Can you install the update and let us know how it behaves?

So I actually imported a translation file into a new project the other day (before the software update) and the hyperlinked text didn't happen.  I won't have another one to do for a couple more weeks so can't test any new ones on the new updates.

One thing that did happen this time though is a lot of my text got messed up in Internet Explorer.  I have been using the same font as usual, Simplified Arabic, and never had problem with it before, but for some reason now it is messing up the text, so I have had to change it all to the Dubai font which seems to have rectified the issues.

I will update you the next time I do a translation.

Hi Ashley, I've imported a Word translated doc into a Storyline file.

The problem of placing the words out of order when mixing English names into Arabic text strings seems to have been fixed.

I have found a couple of  issues I can bring to your attention.

Bulleted text strings within a paragraph look mis-aligned though this can be fixed by turning bullets on/off and playing with the indentations.

When there is an English name with a TM at the end, the main words read correctly, left to right within the right to left Arabic text string; but the TM shows at the far left of the English.

In other words, in Word it looks like this "English Product NameTM" but after importing into Storyline it looks like this "TMEnglish Product Name" (tm in superscript).

You can retype it in by hand in the correct position and change to superscript (although it looks really small) but if you try inserting it as a symbol, it pops to the far left of the English as described above.

I may be wrong, but if the entire English phrase is supposed to read left to right within the Arabic paragraph, I would expect the TM to appear to the right of the English word it relates to.

Glad this problem is being worked on!

Thanks, Charles! I saw you were working with Vevette on these issues too - so I'll be sure to sync up with her and our Engineering team on the additional snags you've run into. 

Hello David and Matthew,

We just released another update for Articulate 360, and included a few important fixes that you'll see in the release notes here. 

The item you'll be interested in is:

Right-to-left text could be out of sequence after importing a translation file.

Just launch the Articulate 360 desktop app on your computer and click the Update button for Storyline 360. Details here.

Please let us know if you have any questions, either here or by reaching out to our Support Engineers directly.

Hi Charles!

I'm happy to return to this discussion with an update—we've fixed a bug you experienced where: 

• On HTML5, Arabic title mixed with English text changes order in output.

Be sure to install the latest Storyline 360 update (Build 3.50.24668.0) to take advantage of all the recent features and fixes.

If this happens again, please let us know! Or you can work directly with our support engineers here.