Global eLearning: Faster, Better, Cheaper (infographic)
By Darron | Best Practices, Event | No comment yet
Image Localization – Part 2
By Darron | Best Practices | No comment yet
Welcome back to the series on image localization. As I said in the last post, image localization tends to sap more time and money than any other single piece of a job. If you can master a few principles, then you’ll save exponentially when it comes time to localize. The best part is that these few principles are incredibly simple.
Give yourself enough white space to account for text expansion, and you'll save exponentially at localization.
Today I want to address white space. All too often we forget to account for it. Did you know that it’s not uncommon for target language text to expand up to 30% from the English? 30%! I have personally witnessed the unfortunate expansion of one tiny word on one tiny button to 300%. That’s an outlier, and perhaps statistically irrelevant, but it makes the point. We need to expect text expansion, and to account for it we need to include white space.
Consider the example in the pictures of “Try Again” buttons to the right. In English, this is a very nice button; the text fills the button nicely, and it is consistent with the style of the course it came from. Now consider the two Spanish examples, “Vuelve a intentarlo.” Note that our only options include breaking onto two lines and dramatically reducing the font size. The French “Recommence” also requires a font size reduction despite increasing the button size.
Image Localization – Part 1
By Darron | Best Practices | No comment yet
As part of series on image localization, I’ll be sharing information about common internationalization and localization gotchas. Images consistently cost my clients more in time and money than any other single component of their localization project. Some planning and work up front can save a good deal at the localization stage. In this post, I’ll address one of many considerations: static v editable images.
Giving your localization partner source images with editable text layers saves exponentially on time and money.
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.
eLearning, Transcreation and Internationalization
By Darron | Best Practices, General | No comment yet
I recently read an interesting blog post about transcreation. It got me thinking about transcreation as it relates to e-learning and the technical necessities to account for it. First things first, we’d better agree on a definition of transcreation. I liked the one that Gordon cited:
Wordbank transcreation services adapt, rather than translate, your marketing and advertising ensuring that by staying true to the original and reflecting local culture you achieve maximum impact in each market.
True, transcreation is most often associated with marcoms, but are there cultural and context-specific items in an e-learning application which are intended to help the instructor “achieve maximum impact” on the learner? Of course. We do this any time we give examples or present scenario-based learning environments. The question is, do our examples and scenarios truly translate across a global class room? In some cases, especially if we’re talking about a corporate culture which is heavily centralized, they do. In other instances the content may be far too culturally specific to aid the learner in the way it was originally intended.
