Forum Discussion
Localization News!
Hello, I just wanted to take a moment to share a couple of announcements that I'm super excited about!
The big news is that we just launched Articulate Localization, which allows you to translate, validate, and manage your courses from within the Articulate 360 platform. đ Check out this article for more information.
Along with that, I'm happy to share that we just launched a new Localization group where you can ask questions, discuss localization best practices, connect with others who work with localization, and more. Just hit the Join Group button to get started!
I'm curious, have you started a trial of Articulate Localization yet? Let us know in the comments!
38 Replies
Hi Community,
I am curious if we have any members who have committed to license the localization option. Maybe they can share part of their business case and if it is still working for them.
From testing the product we are all sharing our praise and criticism of the current limitations but from a business perspective I have yet to hear a convincing story from a customer.
Hey AndreasMetzmannâ! I totally get that you might be looking for more organic shares from community members (and I hope to see that, too!), but when this popped across my radar I thought it might be helpful to share back a couple of the case studies we've put together here at Articulate for this purpose.
Here's one case study on a restaurant group using localization to translate courses in bulk; here's one about NHSA increasing access to early childhood education credentials using localization.Hope these serve as a good starting point!
Hi Articulate Team,
I wanted to share some thoughts on the localization feature in Storyline after using it across multiple courses in different languages. First, I want to acknowledge the things I really appreciate:
- Itâs incredibly convenient to be able to manage multiple language translations within a single course setup.
- The review process is well-designed â I especially like the feature where reviewers can leave direct feedback within the training itself. This streamlines things on our end since we can implement changes without having to manually re-enter feedback from other sources. Thatâs a major plus.
However, the actual translation quality being generated is unfortunately a major drawback. Iâve tested this feature while on a free trial and translated several courses. The outcome across all languages has been disappointing. The translations were inaccurate, awkward, and in some cases, outright incorrect â to the point where several native-speaking reviewers provided very negative feedback.
Because of this, Iâve had to revert to using DeepL Pro and Poedit to ensure accuracy. While these tools require me to manually input all changes into the course, the result is significantly better and more professional. That said, it does increase the manual workload, which this built-in feature was supposed to help minimize.
The current translation engine not only affects quality but is also slowing down our overall localization timeline â which defeats the purpose of using the tool in the first place. Given how costly it is, I would strongly recommend rethinking the translation engine and exploring integration with more advanced AI models (such as DeepL or similar) that can deliver higher quality from the start.
This is a promising feature, but it needs major improvement in its core function â translation accuracy â to truly add value.
Thanks for listening,
ConnieHello Chirzel,
I appreciate you sharing your experience when using Articulate Localization in Storyline 360. I've shared your insight with our product team so they are aware.
Hope that you have a great afternoon!
I totally agree to the comments on prices. I tried Localization too and was eager to buy it but the pricing did also stop us from doing so. The translation is very fast and the review process is great but we tested another authoring tool with same functionalities but the translation costs are way - and I mean really way cheaper. So unfortunately we are thinking about changing the tool, at least for the bigger projects.
Hi Andrea, can i ask out of interest which authoring tool you're thinking about changing to? We're in the same boat - we were really eager to add this but was horrified with the pricing. I work for a big firm but there's no way we would ever be able to get the sort of budget this would need. I think Articulate have made such a huge mistake with this.
I made intensive use of the test period. The feature is great no question about it. But after talking to the sales team, I was very disillusioned. It's far too expensive - especially when you consider the fairly moderate price for Articulate360. In our case (200 translations required), one translated unit costs round 150 euros. This is disproportionate to our previous approach (Xliff Export - use the software PoEdit for automatic translation via DeepL - Xliff Import). The procedure takes 5 minutes and I have translated the unit. I can't for the life of me explain to any of our customers what the advantage of spending 150 euros to save 5 minutes of time is.
The only advantage is that I can have several translations directly in one unit, which is great...but not worth the extra cost. For 3 more languages in one unit, that's 450 euros. Then I'd rather use the functionality of the LMS.
Fair enough, the feature is well implemented and well thought out, but the price is simply excessive, considering the alternative you have and costs me next to nothing in comparison. The price for PoEdit incl. DeepL translation is just 48 euros per year(!!!) + a few more euros if the tokens per month are not enough.
MaReâ when I ran the trial, I did see other benefits, in that you have a single multilingual module where the user can easily switch between languages, rather than multiple separate language modules that you would deploy separately in the LMS. I think some users might see the benefit in that and will feel it is worth the 150 euros if it means maintaining a single module. I think we'll see in future how this all pans out. I do think they will be monitoring these forums closely to see the users reaction to pricing and will most likely adjust.
I don't mind the price and could justify spending that. What I'm not a fan of, is that it's out of reach of users who don't do a large volume of translations per year.
Thank you. I met with our representative, and she answered all my questions. Although this is an awesome addon, I think it's expensive in relation to the cost of Articulate. Having to pay for each addon (e.g., AI, Localization) is putting us in the position where we need to explore alternatives - even if we don't want to.
I completely understand how frustrating it can be not to have full visibility into pricing right away. Iâd love to provide some clarity on that.
As for pricing, youâre right to want more insight. The reason we donât publish a fixed pricing chart is that there are a few account-specific details that really affect the final cost, such as existing contract terms or configurations, which need to be handled on a case-by-case basis.
That said, I can share some basics to help frame expectations: pricing is primarily based on the number of languages and the number of courses youâre localizing. This approach allows us to offer more flexible and scalable pricing than models that charge per word. The length of the course doesnât factor into pricing, which I know was a specific question. Our goal is to make the process as straightforward and fair as possible, while ensuring each customer gets a plan that reflects their actual needs. Weâre here to help, and we truly appreciate your patience as we work through those nuances with you directly.
Hi GingerSwartâ please correct me if I'm wrong here, but reading this explanation, what I think Articulate may be doing is called dynamic pricing, which is a very common thing with tickets for gigs nowadays, but not with things like software licenses.
It's just a bit frustrating/disappointing that Articulate are going down this route with these new features, as many (most?) people/companies won't be able to afford the running costs of these great features if they are based on dynamic pricing. It can be difficult to put an exact estimate on the number of translations per year on your work pipeline, as requirements aren't always set in stone.
The same goes for the cost of Articulate AI.
When you add up the costs of all these features on top of your standard Articulate 360 license, it's quite simply too much for your average department/team budget.Hi PatriciaNunes-dâ (& cc SusanLoubserâ who brought up this question initially). My name is Noele, I'm the Director of Community here at Articulate and have been following this thread and feedback closely, and wanted to chime in and share some thoughts:
First, wanted to say a heartfelt thank you to you both for taking the time to share this feedback. As a community person I know writing these comments effort, and I want you to know we do read them, chat about them internally, and learn from themâso thanks for that!
Patricia, you shared a concern that we are doing dynamic pricing on this feature that I want to address really clearly and directly: Articulate does not use dynamic pricing (in other words, "surge pricing" based on supply & demand, like how the price of your taxi goes up during rush hour) on our localization features, or on any other features.I completely get why when pricing doesn't feel transparent to you, it may make you worry that there's something like that going onâbut, I want to really reassure you that the reason we don't publish pricing is not because it doesn't follow a fair and predictable model, but rather because we feel really confident that that model would be too complicated for our customer base to self-serve on interpreting.
In other words, we think that if we were to publish the full pricing model, it would lead to customers misquoting themselves regularly enough that we think we can give you better service by giving you a quote through our sales team (something we are usually able to do in about 1-2 business days). To give one concrete example of how the pricing model can get really tough to self-quote (above and beyond the factors of number of courses & number of languages that GingerSwartâ already mentioned): many customers of Articulate have different contract term lengths, contract ages, and contract renewal dates that influence what adding localization to those specific contracts would look like, and makes it so that although the pricing model is static, almost no two cases end up being exactly the same in practice.
What I can say that I think will reassure both of you (and anyone else who may be reading this!) is that although we're choosing not to publish a pricing chart for the reasons I shared above, when you are having a conversation with our sales team about pricing for your specific case, they can absolutely share with you what factors influenced your quote during that conversation. Which is to sayâonce you get a quote, it shouldn't feel mysterious why the quote is what it is and what factors went into it, and it wouldn't be the case that, say, two people with exactly equivalent scenarios would get different quotes.
Let me know if this helps reassure and answer some of the questions you raised hereâI'm watching this thread and happy take note of any other feedback!
The functionality of this localization tool should be included in the standard subscription, AI translations no as I can see the added cost there, but the ability to create these multi-language storyline files should be. I have no need for the translations because we have in-house translators and based on what we saw the AI translations are not that accurate. I am dissapointed this functionality is not standard!
Steve_Reynoldsâ I don't think they can make this standard, as the cost is based on volume. You'd therefore be asking users who don't use the service, to pay for others using the service. I'm not 100% sure on this, but I'd say they would be using a third party service to complete the translation and is therefore an added cost. I think it's just to hard for them to bundle as a single cost. As I said, people would be paying for it in their 360 subscription, that don't use it.
Its not about the translations, as I mentioned I dont need that functionality I have in-house translators and free AI options that do as good a job if not better. The ability to have a single scene containing these different language versions is something I believe should not be a paid extra and is a great feature for those of us that do multiple language versions, if you want the in-built AI translations then sure I would expect to pay for that but in my case I dont. This single scene functionality is great but should be included as part on the standard subscription.
I was so exited about this. It sounds and looks very promising. Sadly the pricing is 10x (sic) as high as I expected. With the current pricing model this is only of interest for very big projects (a lot of slides and large target gorup). All of the smaller projects (lower number of slides and or a smaller target group) e.g. for the colleagues in production cannot profit from this as it would be much to expensive in comparison to manual translation (collagues, deepl or translation office). I was expeciting something different.
Hi AndreasMetzmannâ , can you share the localization pricing info with the community? So not everyone has to ask for it ...
I was quoted $7000 for the cheapest option, which allows for 25 translations but which does not include all the features.(Crazy, right?). And$11,000 if I want all the features included.
How does this work on the learner side? Can learners select a language in real time when they take the course, or is the localization workflow for authoring only? We want to publish a SCORM course to our LMS, not Reach 360.
Hi MadhuBibikarâ For multi-language courses, the learners will see a dropdown for language selection when the course launches. There are some screenshots in these two articles: Rise & Storyline.
Will a translate audio feature be added to Localization? I'm testing it during the trial period and just noticed that it only translates the text on screen, not the audio, so we have to type or re-record the text in the new language.
Thanks for the feedback on how we can improve Articulate Localization!
I'm happy to share that we are tracking a feature request for Localized Audio. I've included your voice in the report!
We'll be sure to update you if this enhancement makes it to our product roadmap.
