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: Translating Your Storyline 360 Courses Just Got Easier Storyline 360: Enhanced Word Translation And to keep tabs on Storyline 360 features in the works, check out our What’s New, What’s Next page.

Mike, we use the "Export as Single Table" option. When the text contains formattings, the text is split into speparate cells, but only in the Translation column (see attachment). It should be in one cell like in the Source text column. Could you change this? Thank you!

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!!!

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.

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.

MikeOlivieri-6f

Former Staff

4 years ago

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.

storyline 360

MarianoAran-477
Community Member
2 years ago
Hello Eric,

While I appreciate your response, I can see that you're not up to date with what the issues are.

The problem is that the new export engine exports text segmented and when it's imported in a translation software it appears all broken up.

Translators need to see whole paragraphs to translate correctly, so instead of seeing something like this sentence:

"So sorry for the trouble with Word translation"

they see things like this for example:

"So sorry"

"for the"

"trouble with Word"

"translation"

Each line in a different cell, meaning that it will show each line as a different paragraph when imported in the translation software.

To see the issue, you just have to take any storyline file and export it with the old engine and the new engine and compare the results to understand see the segmentation.

Then, understanding why segmentation is bad for translation, is a different matter. You have to work with translators to understand the issue fully, which I hope Articulate would have done when creating a feature that would be used by them.

Besides breaking paragraphs rendering them untranslatable, segmentation, creates another issue for translators. These translation softwares have memory, so they can reuse old translations that have been previously approved so, if they have the following translation for the phrase saved for example:

"Word translation"

And in the new export it comes as two cells:

"trouble with Word"

"translation"

you will see that "Word translation" has been broken appart so it won't be recognised by the memory.

The fixes you are referring to that Articulate made in the past, took 90% segmentation, to 70% segmentation, which really did nothing to solve the problem for translators.

To solve the problem, paragraphs need to be exported complete (in one cell) as they are in the storyline file, regardless of they having words in different colours, bold, italics, etc.

I hope this clarifies the request.
TexHale1
Community Member
4 years ago
Mike, this is awesome. Our translators will be so happy that they are not translating blind, now that they can see a snapshot of the slides. Also they don't have to worry about messing up any formatting.

Thank you Articulate - keep the changes coming.
MalikWaqas-0a46
Community Member
4 years ago
Mike, this is magnificent. Our interpreters will be glad to the point that they are not deciphering blind, since they can see a preview of the slides. Additionally they don't need to stress over wrecking any designing.
BarbaraWiedl-63
Community Member
4 years ago
We have the same issue and had to switch to legacy mode. All of our courses have to be translated into two other languages. Do you have a timeline when this new feature will be fixed?
RenGomez
Staff
4 years ago
Hi Barbara,

While I don't have a timeline to share, our team does have this prioritized and is currently collecting feedback to help refine the feature.

We'll pop back in here when there are any new updates!
Developer6-1
Community Member
4 years ago
What??? This is causing a huge problem for everyone (clients, Devs,translation services...) . It is causing inconsistent translations. Please Articulate stick with the legacy version.
DavidGaw-0eef30
Community Member
4 years ago
Just spoke with our translation partner, and they too report the new format as unusable. We've had to fall back to XLIFF for our current project, which they can fortunately support. I suggest it would be better for Articulate to scrap the new layout completely and restore the previous functionality while working on fixing the new design.
LeslieMcKerchie
Staff
4 years ago
Hello everyone,

Great news! We just released another update for Articulate 360 and you can see all the details in the release notes.

The item you'll be interested in is:

Enhanced: Thanks to your feedback, Word translation no longer splits text strings with basic font formatting, such as bold and italics, into multiple rows in the exported doc. And Storyline 360 preserves basic font formatting that you add to translated text in the Word doc when you import it back into your project file. Learn more.

Just launch the Articulate 360 desktop app on your computer and click the Update button for Storyline 360. Details here.

Please let us know if you have any questions, either here or by reaching out to our Support Engineers directly.
ReinetHerbst-86
Community Member
4 years ago
Hello,

We are currently experiencing the same issue with regard to the sentence and word string structure in both the Word and .xlf format documents.

Our translation partner is having a lot of difficulty - for the exact reasons Stefan has mentioned above. The manual "fixing" of sentence structure is affecting the translation memories they have for our content.

Is there any feedback on improvements or solutions to this issue yet, or should we continue using the legacy format?

Thank you
billhardy
Community Member
4 years ago
Hi,

Why my card doesn't work when I I'm going to pay.