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RolfFritze-ed6d's avatar
RolfFritze-ed6d
Community Member
28 days ago

Storyline 360 - Translation - SmartCat

I created i big project in English (app. 250 pages using the full power of Storyline with 100s of links, popup windows and videos etc.) - a manual for the aviation industry.  The we had the idea to provide this manual in various languages to our customers and Articulate recommended SmartCat for the translation (app. 75.000 words). We thought that this would be easy: Just creating an XLF file, translating it in SmartCat and then reimporting their XLF-file again into Storyline. We had not the idea that after the import we had to "adjust" the content in Storyline again.

But the result was a "desaster" because of the following reasons:

  1. The XLF-file created (after the translation) had many mistakes which resulted in heavy reformatting of many items in Storyline after the import and even some parts were completely missing.
  2. The translation did not recognize the general content of our document (with many specific expressions used in the aviation industry) and therefore all these expressions would have to be reworked heavily later in Storyline. This I can judge because we used German for this test and this is my mother tongue.
  3. This only could be done by people speaking the language in question very well (difficult to find and to hire) which also would require  additional Articulate licenses.  

I estimate that correcting all those formatting- and translation mistakes would cost me at least 2 weeks and therefore we buried the whole translation project because of time and costs.

My question is: Are there people with similar experience in using SmartCat for translation of Storyline content or can someone suggest another company?

storyline 360
  • JudyNollet's avatar
    JudyNollet
    Super Hero
    28 days ago

    A client of mine used Trans Perfect (https://www.transperfect.com ). They definitely knew how to handle Storyline.

    My client was a global company, and they also had employees who were native speakers review the translations. That helped to ensure the industry-specific text was translated appropriately. And I reviewed/tested the files before publishing.

    I wasn't involved in any of the pricing discussions, so I can't offer any info about that aspect—except to say that good translations aren't cheap. Personally, I'd be wary of super-low prices, because that probably indicates machines are doing the translations instead of humans. (At the very least, humans should be giving machine translations a thorough review.)

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