How to design e-courseware for maximum local impact
By some accounts, e-learning is already a US$56 billion (nearly R600 billion) global business, and is set to double by 2015. The US and Europe account for 70% of the market with the Asia-Pacific contributing to aggressive global growth. In South Africa and Africa, a growing percentage of companies of all sizes and industries are looking to e-learning because of its low delivery costs and high success rate in territories with low levels of fluency and literacy in English.
Retailers, financial services providers, mining groups and fuel companies are some of the early adopters, with applications ranging from sales and customer service training to induction courses, professional board exams, and even flight and surgical procedures training.
In a linguistically and culturally fragmented world courses must be locally relevant
South Africa, it bears repeating, has 11 official languages and many different cultural experiences. This means that to maximise the effectiveness of e-learning - or any other form of learning - providers must broadly localise the course, accommodating at least some local languages, accents, images and references.
Of course, it may not be possible or practical to produce courses in all the local tongues, but it is possible to design courses in a way that makes localisation reasonably easy for a language and localisation service provider.
E-learning companies traditionally design courses with the help of a creative agency
In the ‘old-fashioned’ process, here’s what happens:
1. In the (increasingly frequent) event that a translation is needed, the agency will instruct a translation company to do this.
2. Once translated, the content is incorporated into the courseware and the finished product is passed back to the translation company to proof the outcome. It makes its way back to the creative company to make any further changes until both parties are happy and the client signs off the product.
This process is deeply inefficient – both in terms of process and technology - and the project management is left up to the creative agency and client, who do not have this capability. When other localisation components, such as voice-overs and images, are added to the material, the ‘to-ing’ and ‘fro-ing’ increases and inefficiencies are compounded.
There is a better way to do this
By contrast, a full-service language and localisation service provider offering software automation and project management skills can greatly speed up the process and introduce cost-saving efficiencies:
- A language service partner (LSP) approaches translation from the point of view of eliminating repeatability by removing duplicated efforts, introducing automation and using computer-aided translation (CAT) techniques, including using a translation database, to avoid translating unmodified parts of texts.
- Some work within learning management systems, eliminating the ‘cut-and-paste’ of working in a third-party text editor. This gives the LSP a uniquely integral perspective on activities, allowing him to take on project management for the entire effort. This, in turn, speeds up the process as the abovementioned back and forth of coordinating multiple agencies is taken out of the equation.
The benefits of this approach add up as the variety of content types increases
For example, when a soundtrack in the form of a voice-over of a course slide comes into play, a creative agency may learn the hard way that the length of the translation must match the timing of slide-ware. Bearing in mind the cost and coordination burden of studio time and resources, inefficient processes can have severe financial knock-on effects.
An experienced LSP will ensure the translated audio segment does not have a different duration from the original audio. This could take the form of technology or process alerts to changing parameters.
Make localisation easy for your LSP with courseware designed for custom local conversion
By no means does this need to be a restrictive step; it must be an enabling one that introduces valuable sophistication and control to the process:
- Specify time and other parameters: Provide upfront information about how long audio recordings accompanying course content need to be. This will cut out unnecessary repetition.
- Think like an editor: The text elements of the courseware must remain editable – Adobe Flash is one of the tools used in designing courseware. Use Flash in a way that incorporates text material in an easily editable XML format rather than image formats. This will make it far easier to translate.
In following the basic principle - localisation should be in the DNA of your courseware - e-learning design can become a slick and repeatable process that, for example, eases health and safety compliance in the fuel industry, speeds up time to evaluate candidate attorneys, improves customer service, and much more…
