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.
