Thanks to our globalized world, no one has to travel or relocate somewhere to learn a certain craft or skill that’s only taught by some last surviving medieval wizards in central France.
Now, eLearning content that’s available online, for free, can reach anyone in the world with a few clicks.
Companies and corporations are benefiting from that because, after the massive work-from-home opportunities post-COVID-19, work-from-home employees get their training and onboarding simply via e-learning content.
The only thing that acts as a barrier in this ideal picture, is language, which is what elearning localization is here to solve…
What is E-learning localization?
E-learning localization is a relatively new branch of localization that aims at adapting the digital learning/educational/tutorial content all its variety to suit the cultural and linguistic context of the target audience.
Elearning content could be any of the following:
- Educational content is offered by websites like Udemy, and Coursera.
- Training content made by your company to onboard, and teach new hires.
- YouTube online educational content on any topic.
- Multimedia presentations.
- Interactive educational content.
Read more: Best localization agency in the Middle East
What does elearning localization involve?
If we apply the essence of localization to e-learning content, what will that look like?
Localizing of linguistic elements
This involves translating and localizing what the instructor-if any-is saying. It includes other textual elements like the video transcription, or video summary, and its subtitles.
Other examples can be localizing names, and cultural references for local relevance, ensuring that idioms, abbreviations, and colloquialisms are adapted to the target user.
For instance, let’s imagine that one learning video about Great Medieval Philosophers mentions the name (Averröes), one good localization effort here could be translating it into Arabic to (Ibn Rushd) To avoid offending them into westernizing essentially Arab scholar names, which can be offensive for some Arab or Muslim audience.
Metrication
This involves adapting textual things such as measurement units, date, time, currency, symbols, and number formats to match local norms.
For example, localizers could attempt to convert measurements from Pound to Kilo if the target audience is more familiar with Kilos as a means of measuring weight.
Visual and audio localization
This is where the big difference between localization and translation stems from. Localization looks beyond the textual, this involves things like images, illustrations, sound effects, music, and video on-screen texts, voice-overs, subtitles, and closed captions…etc.
Localizing for User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX)
When dealing with digital and visual mediums, it’s very likely that the interface will change after you localize its content, this is due to several factors:
- Text expansion (One language says something in more words than another)
- Text contraction (One language conveys the same information in fewer words/space)
- Text direction (Arabic, Farsi, and Hebrew are right-to-left (RTL) languages, unlike European languages)
Therefore localizing the UI can include:
- Redesign the UI (user interface) to support the reading direction (left-to-right or right-to-left) languages and text direction.
- Selecting fonts, text size, typography styles, and spacing to be in harmony with the target language.
- Adjusting the learning experience and content presentation to align with the audience’s learning preferences.
What is the process of e-learning localization?
Each project is unique, however, there are some typical steps you encounter in almost every elearning localization project:
Project Planning
Identify the target audience and their cultural, linguistic, and regional requirements. What’s their intent out of interacting with your content? What are their preferred learning methods?
Content Preparation
Here, the team extracts the content from source files, which could be anything from text strings to videos or images.
Translation and cultural localization
The team of localizers adapts the entire content, they use a style guide to maintain consistency of tone and style.
Multimedia Adaptation
Most likely, the eLearning content contains videos or audio that need to be subtitled or dubbed. This acts as an essential step because it directly affects the user’s first-hand experience with the content.
eLearning Platform Localization
Maybe the learning content is available on a separate platform. The menus, pop-up messages, and UI of the platform too are to be localized.
Content Accessibility
The localized eLearning content should be accessible to a spectrum of learners, even those with disabilities. For example, this includes writing alt text for images, including captions for videos, being compatible with their disability assistive technologies, providing audio narration of text for visually impaired learners…etc.
Quality Assurance and Testing
Testing is crucial to ensure that the content is error-free, suitable for the target learners, culturally sensitive, avoids negative connotations, or offensive implications, is easy to comprehend, and doesn’t contain contextual ambiguity or complex concepts.
Post Launch Feedback
The process has not yet ceased to an end, because your most valuable feedback is the one coming from the users themselves. What issues do they raise? Or recurring problems they face with the eLearning platform? This is what you need to address.
How is eLearning localization different from eLearning translation?
Elearning translation simply converts the material or content from one language to another, while still making linguistic choices.
Localization is Translation+(a whole group of non-linguistic aspects) It’s going the extra mile to make the user experience more familiar, doing whatever it takes to achieve that.
Read more: What is Translation?
Why is eLearning localization so important?
- Accessibility of knowledge to a wider audience who can benefit from it.
- If you’re localizing e-learning training materials for employees, it’s a great way to show inclusivity and respect to employees from different backgrounds and locales.
- Related to the previous point, localizing e-learning content is part of implementing serious DEI measures at work, which can have an amazing effect on your overall employer branding and company reputation.
- Instead of creating new content, localizing existing ones into different languages is much more cost-effective and less time-consuming.
Find elearning localization experts at Fast Trans
Get top-tier quality and rock-bottom prices at Fast Trans.
Do you have an eLearning content at hand that you wish could reach more audience? Our team at Fast Trans is more than eager to help you unlock the potential of quality e-learning content as one part of its comprehensive localization services coverage. We’ve got our hands on experts in 120+ languages who have extensive industry expertise.
Reach out to us here, we’re available around the clock for you
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