Forum Discussion
Lost Text Animations by Paragraph After Translation
I was hoping for a solution that would not require manual editing in Storyline, especially because I don't speak Spanish so resetting all the bullets to match the audio will be very challenging (I also need to do this for other languages that I do not speak, compounding the challenge). My project has about 45 slides with bulleted text boxes with several items, each of which is timed to the audio narration. Since importing the translation document breaks all the animation timing (resets everything to the start of the slide), that's a lot of Storyline work to fix something that shouldn't have changed. Is there anything that can be done in the Word doc itself that will make it so the import doesn't mess up all the animation?
Hello David_LeFevre,
Thanks for sharing more detail with us! I can see how frustrating it is to lose all that timing across 45 slides, especially working in a language you don’t natively speak.
When importing translated text from Word, Storyline treats it as new content, which resets animation timing. Unfortunately, there isn’t a way to preserve those timings through the Word doc.
If you’re open to it, we’d be happy to take a closer look and see if there’s a way to reduce the manual work. Feel free to share your .story file and translation materials in a support case so we can continue troubleshooting.
Looking forward to hearing from you!
FYI: I tried the new Localization service Articulate offers and it at least translates the bulleted text without losing all the animations. It even translated the AI audio, which the Word doc import did not do. So that looks like a good solution that will save a lot of time. I still have to time the animations to the new language, but that is expected (would be wonderful if it would look at the timing in English and auto-adjust it to the same translated phrase--can't AI help with that?). It was the total loss of animation that was a surprise. Now we just have to figure out pricing...
Hey David_LeFevre,
Great to hear that you've been exploring Localization in Storyline.
The Localization tool preserves Slide structure and animations. However, there's currently no feature that automatically retimes animations or Slide timing based on translated text/audio. Right now, timing adjustments still need to be done manually after translation, since animation timelines cannot dynamically adapt to new lengths.
I understand that having this level of functionality could further improve your workflow. I've submitted this as a feature request on your behalf! We'll be sure to notify you if we release a future update that helps.
Just to be clear, I am NOT asking for Storyline to automatically retime animations to a translated language (though that would be awesome). I am asking that if I have paragraph-level animations on text (entrance in my case but could be other animations as well), that that setting be preserved in translation. The timing still has to be manually adjusted (and I would expect to do that with each language) but losing the paragraph-level animations creates a ton of work that wouldn't be necessary if the export/import worked correctly. It seems to work correctly with the new localization tool that I just tested but if you use the export to Word/import feature, it loses all the paragraph-level animations and turns the entire text block into one animation at the start of slide, requiring substantially more rework than would be the case if it just maintained those paragraph divisions and animations. So, the request is to maintain paragraph-level animations on export/import.
