Global eLearning: Faster, Better, Cheaper (infographic)
By Darron | Best Practices, Event | No comment yet
Rapid eLearning Localization
By Darron | Best Practices, Development Tools | 2 responses so far
There are a LOT of rapid elearning platforms out there. Many of them are based on MS PowerPoint. My personal development preferences do not include PPT, but that’s irrelevant. There are clearly enough course designers out there who use PowerPoint to justify myriad rapid dev tools to be built around it. Some producers of such tools include small but excellent companies like eLearning Brothers as well as some big players like Adobe.
Website HTML in XML CDATA – How To
By Darron | Best Practices, Development Tools | No comment yet
Pushing HTML markup through XML is a common way to leverage the power of XML containers while getting the style you hope for. This “how to” shows one example of how to do just that on a Flash website containing Windows Phone 7 e-learning modules.
Save Time and Money by Developing for Global
By Darron | Best Practices | No comment yet
You’ve completed all development work on your creative, integrated approved copy and finished text styling and layout. Your project is complete, and the result is a thing of beauty…in English. Now you are tasked with rolling your creative into 15 languages, ranging from German to Arabic. Is your creative prepared to handle typical localization roadblocks such as the following?
Save Time and Money by Developing for Global
By Darron | Best Practices | No comment yet
You’ve completed all development work on your creative, integrated approved copy and finished text styling and layout. Your project is complete, and the result is a thing of beauty…in English. Now you are tasked with rolling your creative into 15 languages, ranging from German to Arabic. Is your creative prepared to handle typical localization roadblocks such as the following?
• Accessibility and easy sharing of content
• Character corruption due to encoding disparity
• Text-centric functionality
• Text expansion up to 35%
• Style transfer for key terms and other text
Regardless of your development platform, there are some basic items to consider before production commences. Adhering to these internationalization principles will save you time and money (and frustration):
• Externalize text in a tagged format
• Create plenty of white space in the source English creative
• Assign centrally controlled styles
Externalize Text in a Tagged Format
Whether you are developing in a CMS, creating a Flash module or typesetting a print document, getting your text content into a separate tagged file is the first step to success. With Open XML’s increasing ubiquity, XML has become the standard tagged file format to use for everything from InDesign content exports to scratch developed web sites. XML is a great way to store, share and distribute text for a number of reasons. First, XML will typically be encoded as UTF-8, the international encoding standard which pretty much supports every language. This ensures, or at least makes probable, that characters will not corrupt when your creative is localized into disparate language families. Second, it is simple to parse and isolate text for extraction, translation and automated re-insertion. That leads to the third point which is that having your text content isolated from the rest of the creative allows the translators to focus on what they do best without requiring any technical expertise. Similarly, styles and functionality built around the text can be preserved independently, which makes rebuilding the creative much more efficient.
Create More White Space Than You Think
Moving away from actual text and onto text containers, let’s look at why white space should be your first consideration when starting production on your creative. English is known linguistically for its concision. While there are some languages which require fewer characters to express the same idea in English, most of the time you need to prepare for text expansion. Western European languages like French and Italian, Eastern European languages like Russian and even some Asian languages like Japanese will expand up to 35% on average. Consider that paragraphs of text will require additional lines. Be mindful that single words might expand to 300% at times. A good example of that is an OK button. Just build in some extra space to the right and left of a center-aligned OK. Remember that a little extra white space in the English source is better than cramped, crashing text in most of the localized versions.
Utilize Style Sheets Always
Styles can be stored at the document level as in InDesign and HTML, or as an external file as with CSS. In keeping with earlier thoughts about externalizing text, use external styles whenever possible. Styling text properly, and reusing styles appropriately is good development/typesetting practice, but it becomes essential when introducing localization. Styles are intended to preserve look and feel in the source creative, and they are used for the same purpose in localized versions. Adjusting font size, kerning, leading, etc to account for text expansion or contraction is much more easily and quickly accomplished when styles are consistently applied throughout the creative. Think about how tedious and time consuming it would be to find and change text formatting for every paragraph in your creative. Remember too that this work multiplies exponentially with an increasing number of target languages. Now think about how easy and fast it would be to make the same change one time in your style sheet. Get the idea? A very little bit of work up front will save countless hours and dollars on the back end.
A Practical Example
A leading entertainment company needed to distribute online instructional modules on vendor process for moving a product through proposal to final sign-off. The development team spent weeks building the course with hard-coded text on the Flash timeline. When it came time to localize, the text extraction was time-consuming and expensive. Those costs multiplied as the modules were localized into 10 languages. Each text string had to be manually pasted. Text formatting had to be done on a textbox-by-textbox basis. Extra rounds of review were required to ensure that styling was consistent throughout the localized creative; this was necessary to account for human error. The debrief revealed all areas of inefficiency and unnecessary cost.
We made some simple recommendations to the client about how to build an XML-driven Flash module with shared styles and room for text expansion. Text extraction for translation was automated. Re-inserting or flowing the translated text into XML was automated. Style changes applied across the entire module at one time. These changes toward a fully internationalized creative amounted to a 40% reduction in overall time required. Those time savings translated directly into cost savings for our client.
Conclusion
Controlling the storage, accessibility, style and format of text in your creative leads to increased efficiencies and decreased costs. Internationalizing at production start requires thinking and planning, but will ultimately return more manageable localized documents that require less time to reconstruct and clean up.
Save Time and Money by Developing for Global
By Darron | Best Practices | No comment yet
You’ve completed all development work on your creative, integrated approved copy and finished text styling and layout. Your project is complete, and the result is a thing of beauty…in English. Now you are tasked with rolling your creative into 15 languages, ranging from German to Arabic. Is your creative prepared to handle typical localization roadblocks such as the following?
• Accessibility and easy sharing of content
• Character corruption due to encoding disparity
• Text-centric functionality
• Text expansion up to 35%
• Style transfer for key terms and other text
Regardless of your development platform, there are some basic items to consider before production commences. Adhering to these internationalization principles will save you time and money (and frustration):
• Externalize text in a tagged format
• Create plenty of white space in the source English creative
• Assign centrally controlled styles
Externalize Text in a Tagged Format
Whether you are developing in a CMS, creating a Flash module or typesetting a print document, getting your text content into a separate tagged file is the first step to success. With Open XML’s increasing ubiquity, XML has become the standard tagged file format to use for everything from InDesign content exports to scratch developed web sites. XML is a great way to store, share and distribute text for a number of reasons. First, XML will typically be encoded as UTF-8, the international encoding standard which pretty much supports every language. This ensures, or at least makes probable, that characters will not corrupt when your creative is localized into disparate language families. Second, it is simple to parse and isolate text for extraction, translation and automated re-insertion. That leads to the third point which is that having your text content isolated from the rest of the creative allows the translators to focus on what they do best without requiring any technical expertise. Similarly, styles and functionality built around the text can be preserved independently, which makes rebuilding the creative much more efficient.
Create More White Space Than You Think
Moving away from actual text and onto text containers, let’s look at why white space should be your first consideration when starting production on your creative. English is known linguistically for its concision. While there are some languages which require fewer characters to express the same idea in English, most of the time you need to prepare for text expansion. Western European languages like French and Italian, Eastern European languages like Russian and even some Asian languages like Japanese will expand up to 35% on average. Consider that paragraphs of text will require additional lines. Be mindful that single words might expand to 300% at times. A good example of that is an OK button. Just build in some extra space to the right and left of a center-aligned OK. Remember that a little extra white space in the English source is better than cramped, crashing text in most of the localized versions.
Utilize Style Sheets Always
Styles can be stored at the document level as in InDesign and HTML, or as an external file as with CSS. In keeping with earlier thoughts about externalizing text, use external styles whenever possible. Styling text properly, and reusing styles appropriately is good development/typesetting practice, but it becomes essential when introducing localization. Styles are intended to preserve look and feel in the source creative, and they are used for the same purpose in localized versions. Adjusting font size, kerning, leading, etc to account for text expansion or contraction is much more easily and quickly accomplished when styles are consistently applied throughout the creative. Think about how tedious and time consuming it would be to find and change text formatting for every paragraph in your creative. Remember too that this work multiplies exponentially with an increasing number of target languages. Now think about how easy and fast it would be to make the same change one time in your style sheet. Get the idea? A very little bit of work up front will save countless hours and dollars on the back end.
A Practical Example
A leading entertainment company needed to distribute online instructional modules on vendor process for moving a product through proposal to final sign-off. The development team spent weeks building the course with hard-coded text on the Flash timeline. When it came time to localize, the text extraction was time-consuming and expensive. Those costs multiplied as the modules were localized into 10 languages. Each text string had to be manually pasted. Text formatting had to be done on a textbox-by-textbox basis. Extra rounds of review were required to ensure that styling was consistent throughout the localized creative; this was necessary to account for human error. The debrief revealed all areas of inefficiency and unnecessary cost.
We made some simple recommendations to the client about how to build an XML-driven Flash module with shared styles and room for text expansion. Text extraction for translation was automated. Re-inserting or flowing the translated text into XML was automated. Style changes applied across the entire module at one time. These changes toward a fully internationalized creative amounted to a 40% reduction in overall time required. Those time savings translated directly into cost savings for our client.
Conclusion
Controlling the storage, accessibility, style and format of text in your creative leads to increased efficiencies and decreased costs. Internationalizing at production start requires thinking and planning, but will ultimately return more manageable localized documents that require less time to reconstruct and clean up.
Grow with Global Apps
By Darron | Apps, Best Practices, mLearning, Mobile Devices | No comment yet
Mobile is predicted to be a $119B industry in 2015 (see MobiThinking article). With the current 5 billion mobile subscriptions, 3.8 billion outside the US, it is hard to ignore the burgeoning market and the huge potential for reach. If you’re developing an app in English only, you are ignoring 73% of the mobile market–this is not something a global organization can afford to do.
A Case for Human Translation
By Darron | machine translation | No comment yet
I’m all for machine translation. I studied it in school and worked on an inter-university project 10 years ago whose goal was to incorporate it into AI systems. I’ve also looked several times into the feasibility of leveraging the technology more succesfully at my current company. In each case I’ve come to the same result; the state of the art is insufficient to rely on for quality, lasting translation…at least in many areas. Some technical language (or United Nations speeches) come out great. Other areas like advertising and literature get pretty garbled. Case in point, the Chinese restaurant pictured above which is undoubtedly not named ‘Translate Server Error’ in Chinese.
App Development: Simple, Light, Accessible
By Darron | Apps, Development Tools, mLearning | 12 responses so far
Having recently attended The eLearning Guild’s mLearnCon, I made it a point to speak with and listen to attendees and presenters involved in app development. There were two distinct camps: enterprise level solutions and quick and easy dev. The enterprise level evangelists included people like Robert Gadd of OnPoint Digital and Dave Smelser of Intuition. These guys know what they’re talking about. Their companies design custom mobile apps tailored to your specific needs. Robert’s enthusiasm for mobile technology is infectious, and he spews industry know-how like a broken faucet. Dave knows all things BlackBerry. Intuition’s deep involvement with financial industry clientele necessitates excellence in RIM’s secure mobile technology. If I’m deploying a native app that grabs content from a secure server, and it’s centrally controlled by a system admin, I’m talking with one of these guys.
MS Office 2010: catch-up and promise?
By Darron | Development Tools | One comment so far
Microsoft is again playing catch up with one of their main competitors. We saw this tactic recently as Windows 7 narrowed the gap between Mac OS look and feel (previously narrowed by the failed Vista OS). We are now seeing them do the same thing, but this time with the Office suite and Google. There are a few new features to distinguish 2010 from 2007, but they are minor and fairly hum-drum in my opinion.
