Articulate Localization: Overview
Develop high-quality localized courses seamlessly with Articulate Localization, a localization solution integrated right into Articulate’s unparalleled authoring platform. This overview covers the basics of Articulate Localization and explains how to access it. What Articulate Localization Does What Languages Are Available What Gets Translated How to Access Localization What Articulate Localization Does Articulate Localization helps you upskill your global learners more quickly and efficiently with three primary processes: One-Click AI Translation Instantly translate Rise 360 and Storyline 360 courses into 80+ languages with fully integrated AI translation. Upload custom glossaries to maintain consistency and incorporate specialized terminology. In-Context Language Validation Verify the accuracy of localized content with a new language validation experience in Review 360. Validators can preview their changes in context, and authors can import them directly back into the source project. Multi-language Workflow Management Streamline end-to-end localization for your Rise 360 and Storyline 360 courses. Manage all your languages in a single project, keep track of the validation process in Review 360, and publish all languages at once to Reach 360 or your LMS. What Languages Are Available Translate your content into over 80 languages, including certain regional variations such as Canadian French and Brazilian Portuguese. Afrikaans Finnish Lithuanian Sinhaha Albanian French (Canada) Luxembourgish Slovak Amharic French (France) Macedonian Slovenian Arabic (Modern Standard Arabic) Georgian Malay Somali Armenian German Malayalam Spanish (Latin America) Azerbaijani Greek Maltese Spanish (Mexico) Bangla Gujarati Maori Spanish (Spain) Bosnian Haitian Creole Marathi Swahili Bulgarian Hausa Mongolian Swedish Catalan Hebrew Nepali Tamil Chinese, Simplified Hindi Norwegian Telugu Chinese, Simplified (China) Hungarian Norwegian Bokmål Tetum Chinese, Traditional Icelandic Nyanja Thai Chinese, Traditional (Taiwan) Indonesian Pashto Tigrinya Croatian Irish Persian (Iran) Turkish Czech Italian Polish Ukrainian Danish Japanese Portuguese (Brazil) Urdu Dari (Afghanistan) Kannada Portuguese (Portugal) Uzbek Dutch Kazakh Punjabi Vietnamese English (UK) Khmer Romanian Welsh English (US) Korean (Standard South Korean) Russian Estonian Lao Samoan Filipino (Tagalog) Latvian Serbian Note: Many languages available for one-click translation also offer different degrees of formality. Articulate Localization defaults to Automatic, which determines the best formality level based on your content. However, you can adjust the formality of the translation based on your organization’s communication style. Tool Tip: Use our language lookup tool to see which target languages are supported for your source language and if the language pair supports glossary, formality, and right-to-left. Here’s how to use it: Launch the language lookup tool in a separate browser window. Select your source language from the Select a Source Language dropdown. A table displays all the supported target languages for the chosen source language with columns for glossary, formality, and right-to-left. A green checkmark in these columns means the corresponding target language supports it. What Gets Translated The following chart explains which parts of courses are translated and how: Part Behavior On-slide text, including slide notes and text variable values (Storyline 360 only) Automatically translated Block text (Rise 360 only) Automatically translated Closed captions (video, audio) Automatically translated Text labels in Rise 360 and player text labels in Storyline 360 Default text labels for each target language are automatically assigned. Custom text labels are not translated. However, in Rise 360, you can assign custom label sets to individual language versions after translation. Alternative text Automatically translated for customized alternative text but not default alt text generated by the app Question banks Questions drawn from question banks are translated together with the course. How to Access Localization Articulate 360 owners and account admins can start a free trial by clicking the Start a Trial button under the Localization section of the Manage Subscription page. To purchase directly, contact our sales team. During a trial, all seatholders are automatically given the ability to translate content in Rise 360 and Storyline 360 and start the localization workflow. Account owners and account admins can remove an author’s translation access via the Localization section on the Manage Team page. Translation access settings are retained when purchasing from a trial. When Localization is purchased directly without a trial, seatholders aren’t given the ability to translate by default. An account admin must navigate to the Manage Team page to grant translation access to specific seatholders. Those seatholders must start any localization workflows. Once Articulate Localization is enabled, seatholders with translation access immediately see the Translate option when they click the more (...) icon of any content tile in the Rise 360 dashboard. If it’s not showing right away, simply refresh the page. For Storyline 360, seatholders with translation access see a Translate Course option when they navigate to File > Localization. They must use Storyline version 3.94.33593.0 or later. Here’s how to check the Storyline 360 version and how to update to the latest version of the app.Articulate Localization: Create Multi-Language Rise 360 Courses
With Articulate Localization, you can translate course and microlearning content into 80+ languages and manage all the language versions as a single project, right from the Rise 360 dashboard. 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. Translate a Course Early-Access Course Stacks Translate Text Updates Manage Languages Add or Replace a Language Remove a Language Capture Course Stack Versions with Snapshots Save a Copy of a Language Tips Add Collaborators Localize Video and Audio Assets Understand Question Banks Include Right-to-Left Languages Translate Storyline Blocks for Use in Rise 360 Courses Translate a Course Before translating your course, run through this checklist to avoid common issues. 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 blocks, 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. Use proper grammar. Simplify formatting. Complex formatting can create challenges for all forms of AI translation. Here are some best practices: Don’t format spaces. Let Rise 360 handle text wrapping. Using shift+enter to manually insert line breaks will impact other languages, where it won’t always be appropriate. Scan through 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: In your dashboard, hover over the content tile for the course you want to localize, click the more (...) icon, and select Translate. 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. Choose a glossary for the translation run. This glossary will be used for all succeeding translations for this course, including updates. Click Translate. Rise 360 will create a multi-language course with all the language versions presented as a single course “stack”. The course stack tile on the dashboard indicates how many languages are in the stack, as shown below. Multi-language courses share the same theme and structure. If you add, move, or delete a block, lesson, or section in one language, those changes will apply to all other languages in the course. Other factors to note: Clicking the tile opens an overview page that lists all the current languages in a sidebar and allows you to preview each language. Click EDIT COURSE to make changes to any language version. The language dropdown on the top left lets you switch between languages while authoring, as shown below. Here are some guidelines to keep in mind when choosing a language from the dropdown: Stay in the source language if you want to make changes in all languages, such as updating course content, adding new blocks, lessons, or sections, and changing themes. Switch to a target language if you want to make language-specific changes, such as replacing media assets, editing existing text, and changing course labels. Custom label sets are not translated, but translated courses will automatically have default label sets for each target language. If you prefer to use custom label sets, you can assign them to individual language versions after translation. Audio and video assets will be the same across all languages after translation. Any changes you make to the media—such as alt text or image alignment—in the source language will be applied to all target languages. You can have language-specific media by modifying the media asset in the target language. Remember that editing a target language disconnects the asset from the source language, so any changes made to the source won’t be applied moving forward. If you accidentally choose the wrong glossary, translate the course again and select the current languages to enable the Glossary field. Custom blocks are not currently supported for Localization. Early-Access Course Stacks Multi-language courses created during our early-access program will have an [Early Access] tag on the course tile and course stack. This older version has the following differences: When you add languages to a Rise course, each translated language becomes a separate copy of the original course, so changes you make to one language version will not affect other languages. To edit an individual language, switch to it in the sidebar and click the Edit button in the top navigation bar. Any changes you make affect only the language you are currently editing. There’s no option to translate updates to the source language and publish a single-package, multi-language output. Learn more about the early-access version of multi-language Rise 360 courses. Refer to this user guide when working on this version. Translate Text Updates Rise 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 course. If the unchanged portions have imported validation suggestions, these will be preserved. Here's how it works. Update existing text or add blocks to your source language. A blue notification dot appears on the language dropdown on the top left. Click the language dropdown and select Back to Stack. From the course stack, click Update Translation to translate only the text updates you made for all existing target languages. When the translation run completes, the Update Translation option disappears. Additional information: Text updates are determined by translation units called text segments. A text segment breaks down the source text into smaller parts while retaining its meaning in context. Segments can vary in length and structure—from single words to complex sentences or even short paragraphs, depending on context. In Rise 360, a segment is typically the text in a block. Any text change in a segment will retranslate the whole segment. You can see how your course is broken down into segments when you publish to Review 360 and view the translation table. If your course has already been validated, follow the tips in this article to request validation for only the updated content in Review 360. Importing validation suggestions or updating text in the target languages will not enable the Update Translation option. Adding blocks, lessons, or sections to any target language will also apply to other languages, but they won't get translated. If you accidentally added them to the target language, simply delete them and recreate them in the source language. You can’t duplicate or send a copy of the multi-language course until all pending translations are updated. Translating updates within the same Articulate 360 subscription contract term does not affect your total purchased translation. Manage Languages You can add or remove languages from a multi-language project and create snapshots at any time. You can also save a copy of a language as a separate course. Add or Replace a Language To add or replace (retranslate) a language, re-run the translation tool by selecting Translate from the stack tile option in the dashboard or clicking Translate at the bottom left of the stack overview. If the language exists in the course stack or the Archived Translations folder, click Translate again to overwrite existing versions. Note: Retranslating or using AI translation for existing languages in a multi-language course within the same Articulate 360 subscription contract term does not affect your total purchased translation count. However, if you duplicate the multi-language course or send a copy to someone else, any new translations on the copy—including translating text updates—will be counted. Remove a Language To remove a language, click the ellipses (...) beside the language from the stack overview, and choose Archive. The language moves to the Archived Translation folder at the bottom left. You can restore or permanently delete the language from the Archived Translation folder. Retranslating archived languages will also permanently delete the versions in the Archived Translations folder. Capture Course Stack Versions with Snapshots Create and manage snapshots of your multi-language courses by selecting the Snapshots menu next to the course title in the course stack overview page. Similar to single-language snapshots, versions are automatically generated whenever you publish a multi-language course. You can also save different versions and restore them as needed. Key points to remember: Snapshots are not available in early-access versions. Snapshots created before you translated the course are still included. While you can't revert to these pre-translation versions, you can save them as a new course or microlearning. Restoring an earlier version won't impact your translation count. If any languages are removed during a restore, retranslating them is free, as long as you do this within the same billing period. Save a Copy of a Language To save a language as a separate course or microlearning, click the ellipses (...) beside the language from the stack overview, and choose Save as. Give the copy a name and click Save. The copy is saved in the same folder as the multi-language project and includes the default label set for the corresponding language. The label set is also added to the list of built-in label sets under Course Settings. Tips Add Collaborators You can add collaborators to your multi-language course in three ways: Click Share > View collaborators from the course stack or while editing the course to add them via course settings. From your Rise dashboard, hover over the content tile for the course, click the More (...) icon, and select Share to add them via share settings. If the course already has collaborators, a Share Settings option displays instead. Hover over the content tile for the course from your Rise dashboard, click the More (...) icon, and select Move to move the course to a team folder. Everyone who has collaborator access to the team folder you choose will have the same access to the course. You can add anyone with an Articulate 360 Teams subscription, but they must be on a subscription with Articulate Localization to access course stacks. Note that course managers and editors can view and edit multi-language courses. However, only course managers can manage languages. Course managers can also initiate course translations or add new languages if they have translation access within the same subscription. Collaborators without access to Articulate Localization can’t access the course stacks, but course managers can save separate copies of each language to their account when they try to launch the course stack. Localizing Video and Audio Assets Localize video assets automatically by adding closed captions before translation. Captions translate along with other course text when you add new languages. They’re also included in the validation process when you publish to Review 360 for validation. Validators can play the video and click the CC button to display the captions. Learn how to add closed captions to videos. For blocks with audio, you can add transcripts after recording or uploading your narration. These transcripts will be translated automatically. To include a transcript: Enable the Transcribe audio file toggle when you upload or record audio. Or, generate text-to-speech with AI Assistant, which automatically includes transcripts. Read on for instructions. If you have AI Assistant and the target language is supported, you can create AI-generated text-to-speech from translated text. Here’s how Include a text version of your narration in the course, either in the block or as an audio transcript. Translate your course or microlearning. Publish your course to Review 360 for validation. Validators will also see the transcripts as they review the whole course. When the validation process is complete, follow these steps to generate text-to-speech for each audio asset in the target language or languages: To use text from the audio transcript: Click the Options (...) icon on the right of the audio player and select Edit transcript. Select the transcript text, press CTRL+C to copy, and then click X or Cancel to exit. Click the Options (...) icon again, then choose Edit audio. Paste the copied text into the script field. Choose your preferred voice from the Voice drop-down menu. Click Generate Speech at the bottom. Click Insert to add the audio to your course. To use text from the block: Click the Options (...) icon, then choose Edit audio. Click the insert block text link above the script field to add the block’s text. Choose your preferred voice from the Voice drop-down menu. Click Generate Speech at the bottom. Click Insert to add the audio to your course. For language-specific media assets, upload them directly to the target language to avoid affecting other languages. Learn more about adding language-specific media. Understand Question Banks Questions drawn from question banks are translated together with the course. When publishing to Review 360 for validation, we recommend including all the questions from the question bank so validators can review them. Learn more about using question banks in knowledge checks and quizzes. Include Right-to-Left Languages Rise 360 supports multi-language courses with both left-to-right and right-to-left language versions. In edit mode, right-to-left language versions are in a left-to-right layout, but they will automatically adjust to right-to-left layouts when the course is previewed, reviewed, or published. Translate Storyline Blocks for Use in Rise 360 Courses Storyline blocks must be translated and validated through Storyline 360 before the translated versions can be embedded in Rise 360 content. Here’s one approach we suggest: Finalize your Rise 360 course and Storyline blocks in your source language. Translate, validate, and import suggestions for the Rise 360 course in Rise 360. Translate, validate, and import suggestions for the Storyline blocks in Storyline 360. After completing the Localization workflow in Storyline 360, publish the final version of the multi-language Storyline course to Review 360. Embed each Storyline language version to the corresponding language in the Rise 360 course. Follow these steps: Launch the Rise 360 course and click Edit Course. Click the language dropdown on the top left and select one of the target languages. Navigate to the Storyline block and click the pencil icon to edit. When the sidebar opens, click Change and select the Storyline course for this language. Each language version will have the title suffixed with the language code, such as “Onboarding Course - FR” or “Onboarding Course - DE.” If you use a single Storyline file for multiple Storyline blocks, you can publish the whole project to Review 360 for validation. Consider these options to ensure your validators are aware of the different slides/scenes: Instruct them to use the course overview navigation dropdown in the Translation tab in Review 360. (Note: The Translation tab isn’t available in the source language.) Enable the Storyline 360 player menu during the validation process. After validation, hide the player menu and republish the final version for embedding these scenes/slides as Storyline blocks. To publish slides or scenes as separate Review 360 items, save each language as a separate file—including the source language—to turn them into single-language project files. The Review 360 items can then be inserted as separate Storyline blocks. However, localization features like course updates, language validation, and multi-language workflow management won't be available for these copies.Tutorial - How To Control Rise Block Interaction From Storyline Using JS!
Hi Heroes! It’s fantastic to see that Storyline developers interested in using JavaScript to enhance the user experience now have our own dedicated group with the latest E-Learning Heroes website update! Nearly three years ago, I launched my ‘Storyline Magic’ tutorial series on YouTube because I wanted more resources to be available for those looking to leverage JavaScript coding to push the boundaries of what’s possible working with Articulate software. In the very first episode, I demonstrate how combining JavaScript with CSS in Storyline can automate actions within an Articulate Rise course. Specifically, I show how to automatically advance the learner to the next lesson in Rise after they complete the required actions within a Storyline activity: Storyline Magic Series - Episode 01 Controlling Rise Navigation In Articulate Storyline --- My name's Chris Hodgson, an eLearning developer and software trainer based in the UK. I enjoy creating fun, unique, and engaging online experiences using Articulate software! Connect with me on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrishodgson44/New Tutorial! Create and Control Glassmorphism Effects With JavaScript In Storyline
Hi Heroes, I'd like to share the latest episode in my Storyline Magic Series on my YouTube channel! In this episode, we'll delve into 'Glassmorphism'—a modern and powerful design technique that blends translucent surfaces with frosted glass effects. This approach not only enhances the aesthetic of your content but also helps learning designers create depth and establish a clear visual hierarchy. I’ll show you how to create and control this stunning effect entirely within Articulate Storyline 360. Let me know if you'd enjoy seeing more comprehensive start-to-finish project builds like this in the future! And see how other Storyline devs are using Glassmorphism here: https://community.articulate.com/blog/e-learning-challenges/using-glassmorphism-designs-in-e-learning-course-development-310/1151525 --- My name's Chris Hodgson, an eLearning developer and software trainer based in the UK. I enjoy creating fun, unique, and engaging online experiences using Articulate software! Connect with me on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrishodgson44/
