I'm looking to translate an Articulate Rise course from English to Spanish. I've seen the instructions for how to duplicate and export the course to an XLIFF file, and then import the translated file. That part seems straightforward.
I'm looking for some advice on how to translate the file. Do you typically send the file to a translation company and let them do the work? Do you use an online tool (and if so, which one?) to do the heavy lifting and have a native speaker do a quality assurance review of it?
Eager for some thoughts from folks who have done this before.
Referring to my experiences in a previous job, when we translated a course from English to Spanish, we started by using a professional translation company and then did an internal review by an employee that was a native Spanish speaker.
Some of our courses were highly technical and used a lot of industry specific technical terms. Even though we had worked with the translation company to create a lexicon with technical terms, they still missed the mark on a regular basis.
The employee we were using to do the validation ended up doing all of the translation.
Another problem we encountered that wording that worked in Mexico, did not always work as well in Venezuela, Colombia or Argentina for example. So it took quite a long time to come up with our own company internal generic Spanish to account for regional differences.
That is incredibly helpful, thank you. I was worried about both technical terminology and regional dialects. I was hoping to save our bilingual staff member some time, but it sounds like any sort of third-party work didn't save you much time. Good to know!
Can I ask how you facilitated the internal translation? Did you give your colleague access to Rise and let them translate directly in the course? Did you copy and paste the content into Word documents and then copy translated text back? I'd love your thoughts on how to do this efficiently.
We used a Word doc, English in one column and Spanish in another column for the translator to work on. The persons updating the courses did not speak Spanish, but as the English and Spanish were side by side, it was easy to determine the corresponding replacement text that needed to be copied over.
We also had to deal with issues related to images that had English labels as part of the image that also had to be translated, so you will need to develop a process about how you are going to handle that type of thing. Needless to say, Spanish text is longer than English.
Hi there, Shane! I wanted to pop in to mention that if the translations are being done by a fellow coworker or in-house team, do a quick Google search, and you’ll find a ton of free tools that allow you to easily edit XLIFF files. Some people have had success with a free translation tool called SmartCat, so you may want to give that one a try!
4 Replies
Hi Shane,
Referring to my experiences in a previous job, when we translated a course from English to Spanish, we started by using a professional translation company and then did an internal review by an employee that was a native Spanish speaker.
Some of our courses were highly technical and used a lot of industry specific technical terms. Even though we had worked with the translation company to create a lexicon with technical terms, they still missed the mark on a regular basis.
The employee we were using to do the validation ended up doing all of the translation.
Another problem we encountered that wording that worked in Mexico, did not always work as well in Venezuela, Colombia or Argentina for example. So it took quite a long time to come up with our own company internal generic Spanish to account for regional differences.
Hi Karl,
That is incredibly helpful, thank you. I was worried about both technical terminology and regional dialects. I was hoping to save our bilingual staff member some time, but it sounds like any sort of third-party work didn't save you much time. Good to know!
Can I ask how you facilitated the internal translation? Did you give your colleague access to Rise and let them translate directly in the course? Did you copy and paste the content into Word documents and then copy translated text back? I'd love your thoughts on how to do this efficiently.
Much appreciated,
Shane
Hi Shane,
We used a Word doc, English in one column and Spanish in another column for the translator to work on. The persons updating the courses did not speak Spanish, but as the English and Spanish were side by side, it was easy to determine the corresponding replacement text that needed to be copied over.
We also had to deal with issues related to images that had English labels as part of the image that also had to be translated, so you will need to develop a process about how you are going to handle that type of thing. Needless to say, Spanish text is longer than English.
Hi there, Shane! I wanted to pop in to mention that if the translations are being done by a fellow coworker or in-house team, do a quick Google search, and you’ll find a ton of free tools that allow you to easily edit XLIFF files. Some people have had success with a free translation tool called SmartCat, so you may want to give that one a try!
Also, don't forget to duplicate the Rise 360 course before exporting the XLIFF file. All the steps are outlined here!