Multiple languages within single course?

May 08, 2015

Kevin Clemence
By Kevin Clemence

Is it possible in Storyline 2 for slides to contain multiple text layers (each layer a different lanuage) and for the project to display the correct language on each slide based on a language variable that the learner sets on the first slide (Drop Down Menu)?

Our team is brand new to Storyline, and thought it could be very beneficial to maintain a single course with 14 language text layers per slide vs. maintaining 14 individual Storyline projects. This way if we need to change background images or make other modifications we are updating a single file. 

I am just learning about states, layers, and triggers, and it seems that this approach would be feasible. Before attempting a prototype I figured I would check here to see if someone could recommend best practices for this approach. 

Does this seem reasonable given the volume of languages we are working with? 

Thanks in advance

3 Replies
Gary Collins
almost 9 years ago05/08/15 at 2:29 am (UTC)

Interested to hear responses on this as well.

Initial thoughts:

1. I think this could be done as you said with variables, triggers and layers. Initial work might be allot but for updates it would be easier as you said cause it is only one file.

2. Different languages will use up more space thus affecting image placement and button sizes, so you may find you will have to have duplicate images on the layers to accommodate this.

3. This will make your project size larger taking longer to load, if it is only text then it might not take increase much though.

Now that I think about it, maybe it would be easier to create different projects, lol.

Brett Rockwood
almost 9 years ago05/08/15 at 4:50 pm (UTC)

Kevin, what you are describing with triggers, variables and a layer for each language is certainly doable but you'd need to keep your interactions and general content pretty basic as layers are commonly used to show interactive content, e.g., mouseovers, and other user selectable items. If you can get all of your content for a language on one layer then it will work. And you can get a lot of milage out of custom states so your single layer content doesn't have to be entirely static. It's just something to consider.

Another way is to have different scenes for each language. This is a lot more difficult to maintain and your file size could potentially be larger as you wouldn't be sharing images (though not necessarily hugely larger due to the way SL reuses image data). Using scenes allow you to have the full flexibility of layers, states, triggers, etc., for each language.

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