A USEFUL GUIDE TO ELEARNING CONTENT LOCALIZATION
Elearning is a cost- and time-saving way for both businesses to train employees, educate customers and for individuals to improve themselves. Localization helps this valuable content be made relevant for all, no matter where they are from.
What is eLearning content localization?
Elearning, is the delivery of educational and training materials via digital resources.
Localizing an eLearning program involves translating and adapting its content to a specific culture. This contains moderating: text, visual elements, idioms & phrases, currency, dates, audio narration, abbreviations. The goal of eLearning localization is to deliver the exact meaning as the original course in a new cultural context, to maximize educational impact.
Why should you localize your eLearning content
People in many regions of the world are not fluent in English, so most of them still prefer their mother language when it comes to learning and communication. Multilingual localized e-Learning content gives companies a huge advantage to share knowledge, such as:
- Create adequate backgrounds for each audience, so they can understand what they are learning in their own terms.
- Adjust the content to legal and contextual references.
- Adapt variable factors which differ from one country to another.
- Generate new content maintaining the original meaning and intention for every concept and central idea.
5 important things about eLearning content localization
A localized mindset removes barriers to global success. When you’re designing learning content for people from different backgrounds, cultures, or even first languages, talk to them. Figure out how they learn best, any gaps they might have, and how you can help them be confident.
A professional translation agency will study this for you and give the most culturally appropriate content for your eLearning materials because effective translation alone cannot ensure precise understanding of the content. To convey content’s intended meaning, it is essential to provide relevant cultural references. A deep knowledge of the target audiences’ culture, their practices and of what is considered legal or against the norms, are required. For example, purple represents richness and royalty to Westerners, while in Thailand it represents death and mourning.
Choosing the right company to help launch your content is key. A good language partner will give you useful consultancy throughout the process of translation and localization thanks to their pool of knowledge and experience, as well as their large database of translators specializing in this type of project.
It’s best to provide your language partner with the full set of files, workflow processes and storyboard details. These help them build a complete picture and eliminate any uncertainties. If you provide all source materials, you can also expect your partner to deliver schedule faster.
Subtitles in videos help the students understand the content effectively. Some languages, however, are written from right to left and some have long texts. Professional translators should offer precise and efficient translation of the content so that the learners remain interested.
With non-text elements, we mean voiceover and images. You must gather experts in their respective fields to deliver audios with special attention to pronunciation. Images are also an essential aspect of any learning course, and even accounts for a bigger part when it comes to eLearning. We all agree that a picture can paint a thousand words, but think twice, that “meaningful” picture might make no sense in another culture or worse, it might convey a very different meaning. That’s another reason for you to find a professional language provider to do extensive research and include appropriate visual elements.
It’s wonderful if your translation partner has an expertise in eLearning authoring and localization tools such as Flash, XML, HTML, action scripts and much more. These tools will offer a great help to make the flawless localized eLearning content in the shortest time.
