Forum Discussion
New in Storyline 360: Enhanced Word Translation
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.
- StefanLampert-7Community Member
- ManoelGouveiaCommunity Member
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!!!
- EvaStein-4adc4aCommunity Member
Echoing the above - we have the same need. We'd love to use the new version but need to stick to the legacy version due to the reasons explained by Manoel. Hope to see this updated in the new version soon! Thank you!
- JasonLewis-a42bCommunity Member
I second this!
- JeremyDittmerCommunity Member
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.
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.
- WendyRuano-77d5Community Member
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?
- DerekAlexander-Community Member
Articulate team,
I agree with the Stefan, Manny, and Eva above. Making use of the single box features of the legacy translation with the modern format would be the ideal outcome of this.
I would love to see this in the next update of Storyline. - Dominik1Community Member
Same for us unfortunately. We won't be able to use the new format due to the reasons mentioned above. Maybe there could be two versions in the future, so that we can also make use of the new features.
- AdamAckermanCommunity Member
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.
- JeremyDittmerCommunity Member
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.
- MagdaMarciszCommunity Member
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 - MarianoAran-477Community Member
After countless errors in translation due to segmentation, we had to go back to legacy mode.
Please share with the team that the bulk of translations are done by translations companies that use a translation software. When word files generated with the current engine are uploaded, high level of segmentation makes accurate translation almost impossible.
Segmentation not only makes translation difficult but also renders the use of 'translation memory' useless.I imagine that in the eLearning space, tools like this one for translation, are part of the basic/essential tools. I can't understand how 3 years is an acceptable timeframe to have issues like this opened, while still adding new, 'not so important' or non-basic features to the software.
This is a recurring issue for Articulate products.
I think that a more transparent and visible way of voting (and seeing current votes) for features would be very welcomed by the community.