Articulate Localization: Create Multi-Language Storyline 360 Projects

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With Articulate Localization, you can translate your Storyline 360 content into more than 70 languages—and manage all language versions as a single file. Watch the video to learn how to translate and share the translations with validators. Then read on for more details on managing multi-language courses and get tips and best practices.

• Translate a Course 
• Manage Languages
• Tips and Best Practices
• Use the language trigger condition to create per-language content
• Find and fix layout issues
• Localize video and audio assets with closed captions
• Double-check localized text variables
• Avoid Animating By Paragraph
• Include Right-to-Left Languages

Translate a Course

Before translating your course, run through this checklist to avoid common issues:

• Make sure you have the latest version of Storyline 360 installed to enjoy all the features and bug fixes available. Here’s how to update to authoring apps.
• Prepare your course for AI translation with the following best practices:
  • Avoid using all caps to emphasize certain words. AI translation often interprets this as an acronym and won’t translate it.
  • Avoid splitting a sentence into multiple text boxes, as this removes necessary context for effective translation.
  • Avoid using emojis. Their meanings can vary across cultures, and machine translation tools may not interpret them accurately. If you need to use emojis, place them in separate text boxes.
  • Use proper grammar.
• Simplify formatting. Complex formatting can create challenges for all forms of AI translation. Here are some best practices: 
  • Use theme colors and text styles in Storyline instead of formatting each text box individually.
  • Don’t format spaces.
  • Let Storyline handle text wrapping. Using shift+enter to manually insert line breaks will impact other languages, where it won’t always be appropriate.
  • Avoid animating by paragraph. If you can’t, follow the workaround here.
• Add extra space to text boxes when you can. Translated text may be longer than the original text, requiring larger text boxes. If translated text overflows, scrollbars will appear—even if the source language shape allows text overflow. This prevents text from overlapping or being cut off and ensures all content remains accessible.
• Check your content one more time for terms that might need to be added to the AI translation glossary. The glossary specifies how terms are translated—or not translated. For example, you might have a specific term for “service” in a particular language. Or you may want to make sure your brand name does not get translated. 

Once you’ve double-checked your course, follow these steps to get started with Localization:

1. Open an existing .story file that you’re ready to translate.
2. Go to File > Localization and choose Translate Course.
3. A translation dialog will appear. You can confirm the source language, select one or more target languages, and adjust the formality if the languages support that option.
4. Click Translate. Storyline 360 will translate your course and add all your selected languages to the project.

Once you've added languages to a Storyline 360 project, all languages are stored in the same project file. You can easily switch between them during authoring, as shown below.

Note that:

• Multi-language files share everything except the text itself. If you edit a slide in one language, your edit will apply to all the other languages in your course. This also means audio and video assets, including text-to-speech content, will be the same across all languages. Learn how you can display language-specific media using triggers and use closed captions to localize videos and audio assets.
• You can anticipate layout issues by thinking about how to align, wrap, and size your text boxes as you’re designing the course. Leaving a little extra space for your content means that if the same content is a little longer in a target language, your layout can flex to accommodate it.
• You can preview target languages by first switching to them in the language dropdown. Storyline will always generate a preview for the current language.
• When you create copies of the multi-language project file—such as using File > Save As or sharing the file with other authors—the copies are treated as the same file when publishing to and importing from Review 360. To create a new multi-language file, use Save Translation As to create a copy of the source language and translate or add the languages you need.

Translate Text Updates

Beginning with the February 2025 update, Storyline 360 detects text changes made to your source language after the last translation run. It allows you to translate these changes without affecting other portions of the project. If the unchanged portions have imported validation suggestions, these will be preserved. Here's how it works. 

1. Update existing text boxes or add new ones to your source language in Storyline. 
2. The Translations are in sync label in the File > Localization menu transforms to Source language changes found.
3. Click Source language changes found > Update Translations to translate only the text updates you made for all existing target languages.
4. When the translation run completes, the Translate Changes option returns to the “No changes to translate” label.

Additional information:

• If your project has already been validated, follow the tips in this article to request validation for only the updated content.
• Importing validation suggestions or updating text in the target languages will not enable the Source language changes found > Update Translations option.
• Adding a new text box in any of the target languages will also add a new text box in the source language and enable the Translate Changes option. Note that the text in the source language will have the same text and will not be translated.
• Translating changes within the same billing period does not affect your total purchased translation. However, the *.story file must be saved after the first translation run to link succeeding translations.

Manage Languages

You can add or remove languages from a multi-language project at any time or save an individual language as a separate Storyline project file. Find these options—and other features that help you manage language versions— under File > Localization, as shown in the image below. Each number on the picture refers to additional information available in the table below the image.

 

 

Tips and Best Practices

The following tips and best practices can enhance your experience using Articulate Localization to create multi-language projects in Storyline 360.

Use the language trigger condition to create per-language content

You can create custom, language-specific content with a new language trigger condition built into Storyline 360. For instance, you might want to show some text only to a specific audience or swap out an image or video to one more appropriate for a different language or culture.

Use this condition on any regular trigger to make it apply only to a specific language in the project. For example, you could set triggers to show different states of an image depending on the language version viewed by the learner, as shown below.

Find and fix layout issues

Articulate Localization has a Layout Issue Finder for Storyline 360. Available under File > Localization for multi-language projects, the tool, when open, shows a list of layout issues introduced during translation. Common issues include text overflowing the bounds of a shape or adding extra lines for the translated version.

Each issue is listed, along with every affected target language. Here’s how it works:

• You can double-click a line to jump directly to the relevant issue in your project.
• Issues can typically be fixed by resizing text boxes or by adjusting the text size in specific target languages.
• When you fix an issue, it will be automatically removed from the list for all resolved target languages. You don’t need to manually verify that your fix worked everywhere.

Note: Translating an old project? Make sure you’re using modern text rendering to take advantage of the layout issue finder. Here’s how to upgrade your project when needed.

Localize video and audio assets with closed captions

Multi-language Storyline 360 projects share everything except the text. That means audio and video assets, including text-to-speech content, will be the same across all languages. You can localize these assets by adding closed captions to all video and audio assets. Since closed captions are text, they will be translated when you add languages to your course.

When using closed captions for localization, you can employ these best practices:

• Edit the translated closed captions and switch between languages as you edit.
• Include the closed captions when validators review the course so their suggestions can be imported like any other text.
• Automatically generate video transcripts from the closed captions to make videos more accessible.

Double-check localized text variables

To fully localize courses and ensure text variables work across languages, Storyline translates the values of text variables. This includes the text variable's default value, the values set using adjust-variable triggers, and the text values used in trigger conditions. Ensure the translated values for these variables are appropriate for your trigger. The image below shows how the same trigger is translated in different language versions.

Avoid Animating By Paragraph

Text animations may not work as expected in multi-language published courses when you set them By Paragraph using Animations > Effect Options > Sequence. As we work on improving this experience, we recommend avoiding this setting for multi-language projects or following these steps as an alternative:

1. Place each paragraph in separate text boxes. For better translation quality, keep sentences together so translation engines have context. 
2. Add animations to the text boxes, ensuring the effect sequence is set to As One Object.

Adjust the timing of the text boxes using the timeline. (Learn more about timeline scrubbing.)

Include Right-to-Left Languages

As of the March 2025 update, Storyline 360 supports multi-language projects that have both left-to-right and right-to-left languages in one project file. Ensure you have installed the update to use the features mentioned below. Here are some specifics to consider:

• When translating from a left-to-right language like English to a right-to-left language like Arabic:
• All shapes with text in the right-to-left language version are set to right-to-left text direction. 
• Text alignment is reversed, so left-justified text is switched to right-justified and vice versa. Centered text does not change alignment. 
• The same text formatting applies when translating the other way around—from a right-to-left language to a left-to-right one. All text elements are set to the left-to-right text direction, and text alignments are reversed..
• You can choose to set the sidebar position and player text direction to follow the text direction of the corresponding language version. Here’s how:
• From the Player properties > Features tab, click the Sidebar dropdown and select By Language.
• From the Player properties > Others tab, click the Text is read from dropdown and select By Language.
• Slide layouts remain the same across language versions, so it’s best to design layouts that work well for both left-to-right and right-to-left text.
• A built-in true/false variable, Player.LanguageIsRightToLeft, is available and will be set to True when viewing right-to-left language versions. Use this variable in trigger conditions to perform actions specific to right-to-left languages. For example, if you have a different slide layout for right-to-left languages, you can create the layout on a slide layer and then add a trigger to show this layer when the slide’s timeline starts if the Player.LanguageIsRightToLeft variable is True. This example is illustrated below.