Many organizations are discovering e-learning as a cost-effective way to upskill their international workforce. In terms of reaching learning goals, multiple studies have shown that e-learning is more effective if the course content is offered in the student’s native language. This is why translation and localization are to be considered equally important as the content itself and should be well planned out beforehand as part of the e-learning development process.
Learning departments often spend considerable time developing their education program content, carefully deliberating the messaging to maximize the course impact. To achieve the same maximized impact across all languages, the translation requirements should also receive a great deal of attention during the e-learning development process. But what does this process typically look like? And where does translation fit in? In this article, we will discuss one of the most widely used e-learning development process models: ADDIE (Analyze – Design – Develop – Implement – Evaluate).
How does ADDIE work?
The ADDIE model is one of the most popular methodologies for the creation of e-learning courses.
1. Analyze
The first step is to analyze your current situation. Which problem or knowledge gap in the company is your course trying to solve? Who is your audience and which goal are you trying to reach?
2. Design
In this phase, you need to think about the structure of the course. Which pieces of information need to be transferred to the audience to reach your goal? How will you offer your content to your audience: text, audio, video, interactive quiz, games?
3. Develop
This is the phase where you start building your e-learning course. Creating the actual deliverables for your course – text, video, animations, voice-overs – can be a huge task, so it’s best to approach this in an agile, iterative way: test one block of content with your audience and then adapt your design or delivery based on learner feedback.
4. Implement
Developing a course is one thing. Bringing it in front of a live audience is something else. A pilot run of your course can be an instructive event, offers valuable feedback and allows you to adjust where needed.
5. Evaluate
The final phase is evaluation. This is where you reflect on the entire learning journey. It’s a good idea to collect data from your students and use their feedback to improve in the next iteration of your e-learning development cycle.
Where does translation and localization fit into the ADDIE process?
Translation and localization are often planned at the end of the development stage or even early at the implementation stage, when most of the content has already been developed. If at this point in the process, serious localization issues come up, the design of the course may have to be adapted.
Sometimes, language structure can be so different, that it can have a serious impact on the functioning of your course. A few examples:
If you need to match on screen actions with a specific word in the voice over, then you need to be able to give effective instructions to the person who synchronizes the final e-learning versions but who might not understand all target languages.
Or, if your quiz has text boxes for students to fill out, you may need to adapt the placement of these text boxes in the sentence according to the target language.
Finally, let’s say you want to translate your course into Arabic, Urdu or Hebrew. Then you need to be sure that you use an e-learning tool that supports right-to-left languages, which is not always the case.
To avoid laborious redesigns and unforeseen translation costs, we recommend getting around the table with your translation partner as early as possible. Translations can significantly affect the design and structure of your course, so planning for localization as much upstream as possible, in the analysis or design phase of your course development, will improve your chance of success at the end.
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