ELEARNING / LMS TRANSLATION SERVICES
Although a massive industry already, recent world events have made effective e-learning even more important. Offering your online training in different languages is quickly becoming essential.
Talking Heads has the pleasure of providing high quality translations for many LMS, including for our sister company - an e-learning training provider for linguists! This first-hand experience means we understand the language requirements, of course, but also understand the ergonomics and student engagement required.
Preparing e-learning Course Content
Firstly, we can work with you to make sure your current course content is perfectly optimised to be localised. We’ll look at and learn about your international strategy, target audience, messaging and branding, if necessary.
We are happy to view your existing online course/s and raise any potentially problematic areas - it’s best to do this at this stage, so that we’re not fighting fires later on.
We’re familiar with many e-learning platforms, but if yours is one that we haven’t come across, we’ll do our research to make sure that we understand it completely.
We’ll discuss style guides or Tone of Voice (TOV) guidance with you - if you have brand guidelines already, we’d love to use this in our training for the linguists who’ll work on your project.
Linguist Selection
It’s our job to make sure that we choose the correct linguists from our internal pool. This doesn’t mean just choosing someone who is a native speaker (that’s a given!) - it means choosing professionals who are familiar with the content, subject matter and understand what we are trying to achieve.
Translating e-learning Course Content
Glossaries / Term Bases
Creating and / or using a glossary is essential for using the right terms, and using them consistently across your online training programmes. We use industry-standard software which captures all your content and creates a glossary of commonly featured words and terminology (with Project Manager input). If at this point, you wish to discuss these, or have the multilingual glossary reviewed by a native speaker you already have in your contacts, this is great - it really helps us to understand your content and brand right from the beginning.
Text content
Our translation process is second-to-none. Our ‘Standard Translation’ process contains 14 steps, all focused on producing relevant, accurate and high quality translated content, so that it doesn't read as if it’s a translation! If you need ISO level translations, we also offer that. Read more about our different service options at talkingheads.co.uk/transprocess.
We don’t charge when translating repeated content.
We know that to communicate effectively with your students / delegates, a lot of training content is very ‘human’ language, containing non-standard phrases and terms, and also may include industry terms that aren’t familiar to everyone. We localise source-language idioms, colloquialisms and cultural language to fit your target market whilst carrying out the translation process.
Imagery
Don’t forget about the imagery and graphics on your course. Any text here will need to be translated and the imagery itself may need to be localised to suit your target market’s culture, lifestyle and the end-use of the training they are receiving. Showing a picture of an English red postbox wouldn’t really work on a course for students in the Middle East, for example (unless you are teaching them about English culture of course…).
We take the source imagery / design files you have used on your course and translate and localise them - finding new and relevant imagery if required.
Video content
As with imagery, any videos you may have on your course will need to be localised, by adding translated subtitles and / or a voice-over. This is one of our specialist areas and we handle this all at the same time, so that the final course is fully localised.
Getting Your Content Up There!
Front-end / content
One of the biggest worries some of our e-learning clients have, is “How do you actually get the translated content on the course?”.
Depending on the LMS / e-learning platform / MOOC you are using, we usually take your existing course, duplicate it, and then overwrite the English content with the translation, resulting in a different version of the course per language. We are happy to do this for you, with our native speakers ensuring that all content has been pasted in correctly - they then also then get the opportunity to do a final proofread before publication. At this stage we can also add in any localised imagery and video.
Alternatively, we are happy to provide the translated content in any format for you to implement yourselves, including providing coded files.
Many of our clients are only able to extract course assets (text / video / audio) as a load of data and not always in a logical order, making it impossible for them to rebuild the course in a different language. We take this pain away by managing this whole process, including working with technical experts who are specialists in this field.
Back-end / hard coding
You may also wish for platform headings, gamification, communications, your Learning Record Store (LRS), Learning Data, Learning Analytics, etc. to be translated. Again, most platforms allow for this to be done (either manually or via an API or plug-in, etc.) and we are happy to manage this for you.
Social Learning
Should you also wish to open your e-learning to group interaction, Talking Heads provides translation and interpreting virtually, and in real time, to aid multilingual learning and group communication.