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Imagine that you are taking a foreign economics course. The lecturer mentions companies you don’t know, all the amounts in these examples are in foreign currency, and some terms remain a mystery to you. What’s the problem with such a learning process? That educational content is not localized for your country.
Now imagine that you are creating eLearning content yourself. You understand how important localization is for entering a new market and how it improves learning experience. You appreciate the quality of the product and try to please your customers. Let’s take a closer look at the eLearning localization process and its value for customers.
With quality localization, the client is more likely to choose your product, and here’s why:
A localization strategy will help you interact more effectively with a new target market. Strategy is the first thing to prepare because without it, your actions can become chaotic and cause mistakes. Therefore, it’s necessary to go through several stages of preparation and clearly define the details of future work.
First, define the targeted culture and demography: country, age, gender, and other characteristics. This will help you localize the product well to meet customer expectations.
Second, set goals that you want to achieve using localization. Increase revenue? Build brand awareness? Become an international company? Each goal is individual and plays a vital role in the localization strategy.
Third, it’s necessary to outline the range of issues that you may encounter: for example, cultural differences, language barriers, purchasing power, and others. Being prepared for them will help you work more efficiently.
Fourth, prepare the online training content that you will localize. It might be worth starting with small materials and testing their performance in a new market. If this stage is successful, you will continue expansion more confidently.
The localization process is something that is best left to professionals. Most likely, you will not be able to consider all the features of the culture of the new targeted audience and correctly translate each sentence. However, the choice of a translation company must be approached responsibly and checked for compliance with key criteria.
Whatever you are about to pay for, you most likely look at reviews first. Much the same with localization, check the ratings of the company on different websites and find out what other people say about it before you collaborate with someone. In addition, perhaps someone you know has already contacted a localization company and can recommend a reliable contractor — be sure to find out.
Whatever you are about to pay for, you most likely look at reviews first. Much the same with localization, check the ratings of the company on different websites and find out what other people say about it before you collaborate with someone. In addition, perhaps someone you know has already contacted a localization company and can recommend a reliable contractor — be sure to find out.
From the first minutes of communication with a company representative, you can draw a conclusion about customer service: how politely they communicate with you, whether they describe the services in detail, whether they quickly respond to requests. Of course, this is a rather subjective question, but you must be comfortable interacting with the company in order for the entire localization journey to be effective.
If your educational content is related to a specific field (such as law or medicine), ask if the localization company has a specialist in this area. An inexperienced translator may mistranslate important details, which will significantly reduce the quality of the material.
We have already described the development of a strategy above, but you can find more details of this process in our article about successful eLeanrning localization. The main thing to remember is that a localization strategy is essential for this process. Without it, the process can turn into chaos and, in the worst case, take too many resources from you to continue development.
Choose what exactly you are going to translate. Answer the questions:
This way you can determine what to translate. After that, adapt the content for localization and get rid of most of the potential difficulties, which are:
If your message has a lot of specific terminologies, you need to create a glossary, which is a dictionary that contains the correct translation of all important words. These can be names of medicines, legal terms, plant names, and other key content elements. Without their correct translation, all material will be practically useless, so pay special attention to these details.
At this point, you need to discuss all the details of localization with the translators who will be involved in the project. This stage requires close communication between the localization company and the customer, and employees of professional service providers will need detailed information about specifics of your company and your requirements to the final product to accurately complete the task.
This is where the actual translation of the content begins. This work may require consultations and corrections. At this stage, it’s essential to maintain harmony: on the one hand, take a responsible approach to your project, and on the other — trust localization professionals. Together you can achieve the best result.
When all the texts are ready, the localization company continues to work: for example, it integrates the localized texts in your courses (test modules, multimedia content) to create a better user experience. Depending on the amount and type of content, the timeframe can vary, so be sure to discuss the terms of the content development process and revisions with the contractor in advance.
It’s impossible to take into account each of them before reviewing your eLearning content, so we advise you to carefully work with the material in the source language to avoid issues in the future. Here’s what you might encounter:
