Mastering elearning content translation

In 2010, Coursera offered a handful of courses in 3 languages. Fast forward to now, and they offer 4,200 courses in 17+ languages. Since then, many Fortune 500 brands have also ramped up global course rollout for employees, customers, and partners.

It’s likely that you work for a company that is embracing universal access for learners. Maybe you’ve just been tasked with translating your e-learning content, or perhaps you’ve been managing an elearning translation project for some time now and you’re looking for a better way.

Whether you’re planning your global e-learning strategy or looking to accelerate rollout, here’s everything you need to know about e-learning content translation from A-Z.

Translation for Learning and Development (L&D) involves offering your existing learning materials in new languages.

For example, if an L&D department creates a corporate training course in its source language, it might also need to translate it into the native languages of its dispersed employees.

Depending on your business, you may have several goals to achieve with your training programs. The obvious reason to create multilingual L&D programs is to provide access to learning and training in each employee’s native language. A joint study from Rosetta Stone and Forbes shows that 80% of employees are more productive when receiving instructions in their native language. EdTech reveals that companies can see a 50% boost in productivity from learning delivered in the learner’s native language, while it can also drive cost savings by 50-70%. And according to research from the University of Chicago, using a foreign language “reduces vividness of mental imagery”, pointing to a reduction in knowledge retention when learning in a non-native language.

Here are additional benefits:

• Broadening the recruitment pool

• Filling employee skill gaps

• Retaining talent

• Employee happiness

• Improving overall business performance

Research from Learn Upon shows that learning leaders' top priorities vary. While the top-cited priority was demonstrating the impact of learning programs, 74% said meeting learners’ expectations and engaging them was also a top priority. One of the best ways to engage learners is to tailor content to meet their language needs. It's true: 90% of people prefer to learn in their native language.

"Serving up English-only content to an audience of global learners invites them to show up only as their partial selves. Learning happens at 100% when you're meeting people where they are, in their language, in their culture,” says Matt Smith, Manager, Learning & Growth Operations at Flywire.

With more than 6 in 10 L&D leaders (61%) saying they have their highest budget this year, in 2024, since 2019, there’s an opportunity to spend more on the technology and resources needed to accelerate global course rollout.

Expanding your L&D program into multiple languages takes deliberate planning. Here are the key items that leading L&D managers consider when reviewing and evaluating the right approach to translating their e-learning content. Without focusing on the essentials as a priority, streamlining your translation workflow will be difficult, especially when you add more languages.

Increasingly, most of your company’s content will include many multimedia elements, including images, text, presentations, audio, and videos.

Each of these elements and file formats requires a different approach to translate effectively.

First up is generally the most straightforward element to translate—text. Even if your L&D program is video-heavy, you likely have a lot of text in your course modules, interface, assessments, multimedia content descriptions, and presentations.

Most companies use an e-learning platform to create and host their courses. At Smartcat, most of our enterprise customers use learning platforms like Articulate 360.

For instance, the global retail training team at Clarins (one of our clients) wanted to translate Articulate content into 12 languages. They had three options:

1. Local employees/native speakers

2. Translation services

3. Translation tools 

Initially, the team opted for option one and used local employees to manually translate the content into each language. They quickly realized that using employees who checked the boxes for language and technical skills was time-consuming and costly, and generated varying levels of quality.

How did their team build a faster, more streamlined workflow? Smartcat for Articulate.

Using Smartcat, they simply export their course content as an XLIFF file, translate using AI, review with subject matter expert reviewers, and import it back into Articulate in 12 languages.

Here’s how it works:

Pro tip: A prerequisite for a streamlined translation workflow is making it easy to convert course content into the correct file formats like XLIFF. Additionally, duplicating your course before exporting the content ensures that the original course isn’t overwritten by the new language version. For more on this topic, check out our short video tutorial.

As mentioned, your e-learning content is likely rich with different document types such as PowerPoint, PDF, Word, Google Docs/Slides, and more.

In the past, translating documents and presentations was a pain because it required heavy human lifting to manually extract all the text and move it into a spreadsheet or Word document. With Smartcat, you can translate different document types with AI in seconds.

Smartcat works with 80+ file types and provides 30+ out-of-the-box integrations with the world’s most popular workplace apps and platforms. To translate your documents, s imply upload your files, choose languages, click AI translate, review, download, and re-upload your files into your learning platform.

Pro tip: If you’re going to include multiple file formats, use a translation tool that supports various file formats so you can easily translate all your content and store it in a centralized repository.

People often ask whether they should translate subtitles or use native speakers to dub videos. The short answer is that it depends on your audience, content, budget, and timeframe.

• Does your audience speak the original language of your content? If so, subtitles may suffice.

• Are your videos animations that rely heavily on visuals like explainer videos? Again, subtitles may suffice.

Ultimately, just translating subtitles is the fastest and cheapest option. Gone are the days of burning subtitles directly onto videos. The best way to add subtitles is with a text file as an SRT, which includes the text's timestamps (start and end timecodes) so you can easily match your audio.

If you have a large number of subtitles to translate, we suggest using a translation tool with a built-in SRT translator. You'll be able to simply upload your SRT files, choose your language pair(s), and translate them. If you only have a few videos to translate and don’t want to outsource to a large agency, you will find professional translators in our marketplace.

While subtitles will sometimes cut it, many companies prefer dubbing. It’s generally seen as a better approach to increase and maintain engagement. That said, a dubbing workflow isn’t as straightforward. In most cases, you'll need to create a script from the original content first. Once you have your translated script, the dubbing process can begin. You'll need voice talent with fluency in both the original and target language for the best results.

Pro tip: Technological advancements like generative AI are making the dubbing process much faster and cheaper. Consider using AI translation software to get automatic subtitles and voice-overs.

Images, illustrations, and infographics should generally be localized to reflect the cultural norms and preferences of your learners. This may involve replacing or editing existing images to ensure all visual assets are inclusive and relevant to the local target audience and language.

You can simply translate the text on the visuals if the imagery is neutral. Ensure that you s eparate text from images to easily reuse the visuals in each of your languages.

You need to be efficient and thorough to make your e-learning translation project successful. Here are some best practices to follow:

1. Optimize your original course content: Before you begin translating your course content, make sure your original content in the source language is translation-friendly to speed up time to market.

2. Identify your company’s highest ROI languages: Don’t go all-in on day one. Instead, choose your languages for translation. For most companies, the most effective way to get started with multilingual training is to identify the top handful of non-majority languages used and focus on designing training content around them.

3. Work with local stakeholders: Involve your local partners or teams who know what’s most appropriate and relevant in the translation process for e-learning.

4. Centralize the process: Keep your translation workflow centralized so you can keep consistency across all your e-learning modules. Use a common repository for glossaries, style guides, and translation memories.

5. Use Generative AI: Can you guess what recent mega-trend allowed Coursera to exponentially increase the number of languages offered? That’s right: Generative AI. “The first big thing that we did with generative AI is we jumped on AI-powered translations to translate 4,200 courses into 17 languages,” says Coursera’s CEO.

To accelerate global course rollout, use Generative AI, AI-assisted video dubbing, and other AI technologies to streamline workflows and reduce costs.

Generative AI is powerful, but don’t just take our word for it. Here’s a case study to inspire you to take action.

We’ve briefly covered the value of Generative AI above, so here’s a quick recap – you can:

• Improve spend efficiency

• Increase translation turnaround time

• Decrease workload for your team

• Launch global courses in multiple languages

Now, let’s look at an example of some quantifiable benefits in some of these areas.

Smith+Nephew is a multinational medical equipment manufacturer that provides its global employees with e-learning training in seven languages. We recently sat down with Barbara Fedorowicz, translation department manager at Smith+Nephew, to discuss the organization’s transition to establishing an in-house translation service with Smartcat’s Language AI platform at its core. The challenge Smartcat solved – implementing Smartcat’s AI helped the team to:

• Control costs: The translation agencies that Smith+Nephew worked with charged high rates for human translation. With increasing e-learning translation needs, budgetary pressures generated a bottleneck to upskilling their sales team.

• Control translation quality : The team found that translation accuracy differed from one translation to another with previous translation service providers. There was also a lack of consistency in terminology across content and languages.

• Reduce editing time : Translations from the agency often required hours of work to edit them for the appropriate consistency and audience suitability.

The results: O verall, Smith+Nephew has been able to improve their localization KPIs across the board, helping them to:

• Achieve substantial cost savings

• Lower editing workload by 70%

• Reduce end-to-end turnaround time 400% from an average of 10 days to 2.5 per translation project.

Most importantly, “quality has markedly increased,” says Barbara Fedorowicz, Translation department manager at Smith+Nephew. She adds: “ Our reviewers compared our legacy content done by translation agencies to content produced by my team with Smartcat AI automatic translation. The number of corrections is much lower now, and the editing process is faster and less labor-intensive.”

Like any significant process change, incorporating AI into your L&D workflows may seem daunting at first, but it really needn’t be. With the right language AI partner, your department can get up and running quickly and soon see the exponential benefits of using AI to help take your corporate learning initiatives to a whole new level.

Before long, your department will be positioned to significantly improve employee engagement rates and learning knowledge retention. Additionally, it can empower you to generate substantially more course content and additional learning materials without increasing budget.

Discover how with Smartcat AI, the multilingual content partner of choice for the Fortune 1,000.