Import translations - Highlighted text as if hyperlink

Jan 17, 2019

Janine Carbone
By Janine Carbone

When we import a translations document into Storyline (currently 360), some text boxes are behaving as hyperlinks, especially languages with strange symbols, such as Turkish, Russian, or the Asian scripts. In this latest case, it's driving me nuts, and I'm looking for a better solution, especially since we're now translating many courses into 10+ languages. Here's what I've done so far, and am looking for suggestions:

1. Imported Turkish

2. Everything was fine, no highlights. Exported final product. Noticed that the closed captions font (Lato) was not exporting symbols correctly. Went into the player and changed the CC font to Arial to get the symbols working properly. CC was fine, but after switching to Arial, all text boxes now highlight, which they didn't before.

3. Test slide number one: A simple text list with bullets. No hyperlink. No hover state. Nothing to remove. Added a hyperlink. Converted text to color and underline link. Removed hyperlink, text back to normal formatting. Previewed slide. Text no longer highlights. Success.

Great, I have a solution. However, now I have to go through the entire course, convert all text boxes to a hyperlink, and then remove the hyperlink, all to remove a hyperlink highlight that is appearing on non-hyperlink text boxes. This is an unreasonable amount of wasted time to remove something that shouldn't be there. 

Is there a better solution, and is Articulate finding and fixing the glitch that is causing this? 

13 Replies
Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard
over 5 years ago01/18/19 at 2:01 pm (UTC)

Hi Janine,

It sounds like you're seeing this highlight/hyperlink issue in the player with closed captions and on the slide itself?

I've seen highlighting like that occur on slides when the text is copied in from somewhere else and includes extra or hidden formatting. Since you're importing in a translation document, there could also be hidden formatting in there causing the issue. 

With your permission, I'd like to have our Support team take a look at your project file to investigate what's happening. You can share it by sending along to our Support Team here and they'll delete it when done troubleshooting. 

Janine Carbone
5 years ago01/18/19 at 2:42 pm (UTC)

Thanks. I'm not sure about the formatting... I feel like if it was hidden formatting, it would have done the highlighting as soon as I imported it, not days later when changing the CC font. But I will send the file to the support team. This has been an ongoing issue for translated storyline files for years, even in Storyline 2, so I hope they can find the root cause. 

Crystal Horn
5 years ago01/22/19 at 2:18 pm (UTC)

Just a quick update:  It looks like we've identified this behavior as a bug:  Text translated from English to Turkish language (and sometimes others) becomes clickable (like a hover state) after editing the translated text.

We'll post an update here if we release a fix for this.  The only current workaround is to select the text, apply a hyperlink, and then remove the hyperlink.

Janine Carbone
5 years ago02/11/19 at 4:59 pm (UTC)

Hi Michael, 

If you want a quick fix for this while we're waiting for the bug to be resolved, you can add a "Click Blocker" (as I like to call it) to each slide that doesn't have any buttons or interactivity. Essentially it's a full size box shape that covers the whole slide, with no line, and a fill of 100% transparency; you can't see it but it prevents people from clicking or interacting with anything underneath it. You can copy-paste it onto every slide. Of course, if you have buttons or games, you'd need to check those for the hyperlinks because the Blocker won't be of help. This is what my team and I are currently doing for all our courses. 

Best,

Janine

Alex M
5 years ago02/26/19 at 10:51 am (UTC)

Hi Alyssa, can you provide an update on this issue?

My team have been experiencing this for a long time, and it takes a lot of time to fix. 

"if we release a fix" isn't exactly the greatest thing to hear from customer support. Surely the team should be working out how and when to release a fix, not 'if' you're going to do it or not. 

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard
almost 5 years ago05/28/19 at 6:52 pm (UTC)

Hi All, 

A quick update to let you know we've released a fix for this issue where text appeared to be hyperlinked after importing a translation file. You'll find that fix available in the latest update Storyline 360, build 3.28.18944.0. 

To install the update, launch the Articulate 360 desktop app on your computer and click the Update button for Storyline - you'll find more details here.

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

Ren Gomez
over 4 years ago09/03/19 at 9:52 pm (UTC)

Hi Marcin,

Our team is working through the final preparation of Storyline 3 Update 7, and that will include fixes you've seen released to Storyline 360 as of Update 30.

We're careful about testing new updates to make sure we don't put other elements at risk, so we'll be locking this down soon and targetting a release date next week. The team will post here once it's live, ready to download and install. We'll also post an updated copy of the Storyline 3 release notes, which will list fixed issues.

Please let me know if you have other questions.

Leslie McKerchie
over 4 years ago09/10/19 at 4:12 pm (UTC)

Hello again, Marcin.

I wanted to pop in to let you know we've released a fix for this issue in Storyline 3 where text appeared to be hyperlinked after importing a translation file. You'll find that fix available in the latest update to Storyline 3, which is Build 3.7.20003.0.

To install the latest update to Storyline 3, download it here.

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

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