Translation Best Practices- One course or two?

Feb 11, 2013

Anyone doing translation for their courses care to offer your best practices? I need to develop a large number of US English courses and a Universal Spanish version for each. If i use Storyline's inport/export feature will I be able to create a single course with a language option on the first screen? The LMS (corp policy) can only have a single course being launched. I can't do the English version make a copy and then import the Spanish version because I believe it then becomes two distinct courses. Am i correct in this understanding? What options do I have? Thanks.

7 Replies
Alexandros Anoyatis

There is a way around this (or two).

1) Complete the ENG course first (language selection slide included).
2) Export to .doc or .xliff.
3) Import the translated doc and save as a different story file.

4) Open the original storyfile as well (now you will have two versions each on its own language).
5) Copy/Paste the entirety of the 2nd story to the first, and slightly edit slides as required (e.g. take out the language selection slide from the 2nd story).
6) Modify the necessary triggers to reflect the unified story (e.g. branching at language selection screen) .

It may be prudent to allow for 20-30% extra space on buttons & text for translation (translations for some languages require a greater number of characters).

Hope this helps,
Alex

Phil Mayor

Alexandros Anoyatis said:

There is a way around this (or two).

1) Complete the ENG course first (language selection slide included).
2) Export to .doc or .xliff.
3) Import the translated doc and save as a different story file.

4) Open the original storyfile as well (now you will have two versions each on its own language).
5) Copy/Paste the entirety of the 2nd story to the first, and slightly edit slides as required (e.g. take out the language selection slide from the 2nd story).
6) Modify the necessary triggers to reflect the unified story (e.g. branching at language selection screen) .

It may be prudent to allow for 20-30% extra space on buttons & text for translation (translations for some languages require a greater number of characters).

Hope this helps,
Alex


Really nice solution

Michael Hinze

One additional suggestion: If you have a lot of text on your slides, I suggest to put the text boxes into scrolling panels. As Alexandros mentioned, some languages require more space and with scrolling panels, the text automatically extends vertically if more space is needed. I just used this approach for English/French courses and it saved a bunch of time.

Dave Goodman

Thanks to everyone. Do you know of any resources that address translatede courses and the best practices? Also, I may not fully understand the LMS side, but how does the LMS track information is it launches a single course with two languages? If I take only the French course starting on slide 40, aren't any of the triggers from the first 40 screens (time to start, bookmarking assessment scores, timing in course, etc) listed as "incomplete" or inactive or "false"? Will the LMS correctly score the course and close out as "completed"?

Jan Morris

Hi.  I know this is an old post, but I'm wondering if when pasting the translated version into the English version, you mean put it in as a new scene.  I'm not understanding how the learner is going to get the option to take the translated version.  For LMS reasons, I need one course in English, but within that course, I want them to be able to open the Spanish version.  Any help would be appreciated.  This is for Storyline 3.  Thanks.

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