New in Storyline 360: Enhanced Word Translation

Feb 23, 2021

Mike Olivieri
By Mike Olivieri

Translating courses with Storyline 360 has always been easy. In just a few clicks you can export all the text in your project for translation. And now you’re able to take advantage of changes we’ve made to Storyline’s Microsoft Word translation export. These enhancements make translating your courses easier than ever. Here’s a quick look at the changes:

  • Easier access to key information: Now you’re able to view important details about your project—number of scenes, slides, slide layers, strings (text objects), words, and characters—in an easy-to-read table.
  • More context clues: You’re also able to choose to include a screenshot of each slide before the slide’s associated text to give translators more context about where the text will appear.
  • Improved formatting preservation: Text formatting is now preserved when you use the Word export feature for translation—even when you use things like lists and paragraph spacing. This saves you time and effort after the translated text is imported. 
  • Compatible with Word, Google Docs, and Open Office: In addition to using Microsoft Word to translate your courses, you can now use Google Docs and Open Office, giving you even more flexibility with your translation process.

With these helpful enhancements to the Word translation feature in Storyline 360, translating courses is faster and easier than ever. We hope you’re as excited about this new productivity boost as we are. If you don’t have an Articulate 360 subscription, sign up for a free 60-day trial to give it a whirl.

For more details about enhanced Word translation in Storyline 360, take a look at these helpful resources: 

And to keep tabs on Storyline 360 features in the works, check out our What’s New, What’s Next page.

32 Replies
Stefan Lampert
3 years ago03/19/21 at 4:12 pm (UTC)

Mike, we use the "Export as Single Table" option. When the text contains formattings, the text is split into speparate cells, but only in the Translation column (see attachment). It should be in one cell like in the Source text column. Could you change this? Thank you!

Manoel Gouveia
3 years ago03/19/21 at 5:20 pm (UTC)

I agree with Stefan above. We want to move to the modern format. It's much much faster, easier to use, more compatible, and has solved some issues we've had with complex SL files.

However, we provide content to be translated into dozens of languages and no agencies/language translators want to use the new format and have all requested we go back to legacy because sentences are split up into separate cells. This makes it impossible to translate as every language has to translate the section in different order/way. You can't just do a word-by-word translation... it won't make sense.

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE... put the translation column in the same cell for each section as in the previous legacy version and as the source text. Until this is updated we'll have to keep using legacy and miss out on all the benefits above.

Thank you for your help!!!

Jeremy Dittmer
3 years ago03/26/21 at 9:50 am (UTC)

I have just tried submitting a document in the new format to our translation house and they have replied that it is totally unusable.  And for exactly the reasons given above - splitting formatted text into individual chunks makes no linguistic sense.  It's as if the Articulate developers have bizarrely assumed that all non-English languages are just simple word-for-word substitutions for English.  We too will be sticking with the legacy format until this is corrected.

Bret Jorgensen
3 years ago04/02/21 at 1:00 pm (UTC)

Hi Everyone,

Here’s a bit of insight into why we did this. While developing this feature, we chose to break up the strings in response to customer issues importing text formats consistently. Part of our reasoning was that things formatted that same way were likely semantically ‘complete.’ 

However, we realize we’ve missed the mark here. We are investigating whether we can handle breaking up strings in a different way without compromising the formatting. To that end, we would like to gather information from the community to design a feature that will help solve some of the concerns you’ve raised.

Please be on the lookout for an email from us requesting sample .story files to use in this investigation. 

Adam Ackerman
3 years ago04/09/21 at 7:41 pm (UTC)

Experiencing the same, but wanted to say that I really like the info. summary that appears at the top of the Output. It has made it much easier to get an idea of the scope of a .STORY Project, and would be useful as a standalone feature as well. I hope this part remains present in your solution to the segmentation issue.

Wendy Ruano
almost 3 years ago04/21/21 at 9:33 pm (UTC)

As a translation services provider who has worked with Storyline for years, this is a huge problem for us and our clients. It is going to lead to inconsistent translations and lower quality all around. One current project has sentences broken up into single word segments, which is unacceptable. Any updates on the fixes?

David Gaw
almost 3 years ago05/26/21 at 4:56 pm (UTC)

Just spoke with our translation partner, and they too report the new format as unusable. We've had to fall back to XLIFF for our current project, which they can fortunately support. I suggest it would be better for Articulate to scrap the new layout completely and restore the previous functionality while working on fixing the new design.

Leslie McKerchie
almost 3 years ago06/29/21 at 3:25 pm (UTC)

Hello everyone,

Great news!  We just released another update for Articulate 360 and you can see all the details in the release notes.

The item you'll be interested in is:

Enhanced: Thanks to your feedback, Word translation no longer splits text strings with basic font formatting, such as bold and italics, into multiple rows in the exported doc. And Storyline 360 preserves basic font formatting that you add to translated text in the Word doc when you import it back into your project file. Learn more.

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.

Jeremy Dittmer
almost 3 years ago07/01/21 at 7:44 am (UTC)

Whilst this is clearly an improvement on the crazy 'split everything up' approach I'm afraid it will still be completely unusable for us because it continues to split based on what you have judged to be 'non basic' formatting.

For example - why are you persisting in splitting the text on colour? It makes zero sense.

Here are three good reasons why designers use colour rather than bold or italics to highlight and emphasise text:

[1] It conforms to the client's house style & brand guidelines;

[2] Text fields are already using a heavy-weight typeface and so bolding is not an option;

and most importantly:

[3] The content will be translated into languages that use non-Western characters such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Arabic, Hindi &c &c. For most, if not all of these, 'bold' and 'italic' variants of the typefaces either make no typographic sense (Chinese) or are simply unavailable. Using colour for emphasis is therefore essential.

And as if that wasn't bad enough, you are also continuing to split on hyperlinks. Are you serious?! So for example:

Click here to visit our website and here to start your free trial.

becomes:

Click
here
to visit our website and
here
to start your free trial.

This is obviously idiotic.

So whilst I'm relieved that you have at least begun to address the issue I'm disappointed that this has clearly not yet been properly thought through with regards how e-learning design and translation work in actual real world commercial development.

Please can you think again about the practical consequences of this breaking up of text?

I would also appreciate a cast-iron reassurance that the 'legacy' translation export (i.e. the method that actually works) will remain in place for the foreseeable future and/or until you have managed to make this new approach work correctly and use-ably.

Stefan @ smartspokes
almost 3 years ago07/01/21 at 4:38 pm (UTC)

Hello Leslie,

Thanks to your team for your efforts to improve the Word export.

This is really important for professional translation of Storyline courses.

As Jeremy said, it is still not usable :-(

Splitting up segments after every formatting tag makes the use of translation tools a nightmare and would "spoil" our customer's translation memories.

Hope you will continue to work on this. I will be happy to assist your development team with detailed input.

Kind regards
Stefan

Reinet Herbst
over 2 years ago09/27/21 at 10:57 am (UTC)

Hello,

We are currently experiencing the same issue with regard to the sentence and word string structure in both the Word and .xlf format documents.

Our translation partner is having a lot of difficulty - for the exact reasons Stefan has mentioned above. The manual "fixing" of sentence structure is affecting the translation memories they have for our content.

Is there any feedback on improvements or solutions to this issue yet, or should we continue using the legacy format?

Thank you

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