Translation of Course into multiple languages

Dec 05, 2019

Hi everyone,

I am currently working on the project where I have to convert the course in English in two different languages- Spanish and Russian. I have build the course in articulate Storyline(using triggers and layers). 

Can anyone help me give a direction on how can i carry through the project efficiently and effectively.

How can i sycn the animation with the language (audio) which is totally foreign to me?

 

Thanks in Advance.

 

 

2 Replies
Judy Nollet

So the course's audio will be translated and re-recorded in Spanish and Russian? That is a challenge.

If I had to build such a course, I'd use multiple, short audio clips (instead of having one long audio file for each slide).  Then each animation could be timed to start along with a specific audio clip. Caveats:

  • The writing would have to be done carefully to ensure that each audio clip could be independently translated and recorded. In other words, you can't divide a single sentence between two audio clips, because other languages follow different grammatical rules.
  • You'd need to establish a good naming structure for the translated audio clips, to ensure you replace the English clip with the corresponding translated clip. Even with that, I'd plan for a special review to ensure accuracy.
  • It's likely that the translated audio clips won't be the same length as the English ones. So you'll still need to adjust the timeline accordingly.

Yeah, it's not easy, especially if you've already built the course. This is why many translated courses just translate the captions instead of the audio, or avoid audio altogether. (Those options also cost less, since you don't have to pay to record translated audio, and there's less programming to do.)

Allison LaMotte

Hi Devolina,

I totally agree with Judy, if you haven't sent your course off to be translated yet, I would split up the audio script into sections based on the animations. For example, your script could look like this:

Slide 1

[01] This is the first part of my script.

[02] This is the second part. It should be read as the second animation arrives.

[03] This is the third part. It should be read as the third animation arrives.

Make sure you tell the translators not to touch anything in brackets and the voiceover professionals (or whoever is recording the audio) not to read the numbers out loud. Then ask the voiceover professionals to cut the audio and name the files according to the numbers. For example: Slide1_01.mp3, Slide1_02.mp3, Slide1_03.mp3, etc.

That way, all you'll have to do is replace the audio files. Note that the audio files themselves may be longer or shorter than the English versions, so you may still have to adjust the timing of the animations, but you'll be able to simply drag them to the beginning/end of the audio files, which is fairly easy to do.

I hope that makes sense! While I'm at it, I thought I'd share some articles on localization that may make this whole process easier for you in the future:

I hope that helps! :)

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