Translation of published SCORM package?
Jan 07, 2022
Hi,
We have a new potential job for a client which they want to give their country leads the ability to translate themselves the elearning content we produce for their LMS as easily as possible.
The translations would be done some point later, after the course has been published and approved.
They don't want to go back and forth with us and keep exporting different language versions of the SCORM package.
Has anyone had any experience in getting a fully published SCORM package translated? I've looked into a few self translation services, like Lokalise but none of them seem to provide a service which would take the HTML + JS SCORM output of Storyline and provide easy self translation.
We're even looking at creating a bespoke web app to provide this service to our clients.
Any suggestions or service recommendations are welcome.
2 Replies
I've experimented a little in this direction. I applied version control to a folder and then published a scorm file to it. I then committed that version to track changes. I then edited the title of one slide and republished to the folder. I then was able to use version control and see all the files that had been updated. There were quite a few as storyline uses many IDs and references for the various slides. The trouble with translation is that you can't predict what the length of the new language and any complex post-loading of a second language might not adjust the already rendered textboxes and many languages end up much longer than English for the same text.
In other web development projects that I've done with multilingual support, I store all the text and content in JSON files (javascript object files) and load them into the page as needed. This lets me create a dropdown button at the top that can switch to the next JSON file for another language. With this then only the single JSON file has to be changed. However, these haven't had SCORM support, they are just web pages and haven't been in the storyline environment.
If I were tackling your project and you could get by with a basic slideshow that is HTML-based and doesn't need complex interactions then you could try RevealJS - it's an HTML page but it appears as slides and can generate itself programmatically from JSON or a database. I like VueJS to connect it all together. You could even make all that and perhaps embed it in storyline.
I used RevealJS while presenting at a conference a few years back so I could easily post my slideshow. The arrows at the bottom-right advance the slides. https://www.thejoshdean.com/d2lfusion/
Here is the full demo with all the features of revealJS https://revealjs.com/?demo#/1
Hey Josh, sorry for totally missing your post!
Great idea about setting up version control for the publish folder, hadn't thought of that. I do realise that even then it's fairly pointless exercise, as you say, it's not just one file here or there which gets changed, but a lot of rendering into svg etc..
And thanks for the tip about RevealJS and sharing your presentations, I might look at that as an alternative.
Storyline would definitely benefit from a json-based text source format..