A global manufacturer requires its European machine operators to take the same safety training as its US team. To pass, the employees need to easily understand the content, which means translating it into their local languages. Worldwide, nearly 3 out of 4 people who speak English do so as a second language, so English alone won’t reach most of a global workforce.
This is where eLearning localization comes in. Whether it’s a software certification course or training for a distributed workforce, you must make five decisions before starting translation: what locales are required, whether the course is culturally appropriate, whether the writing is consistent, how to handle multimedia content, and where human expertise is required. Once those are settled, there’s still the work of producing the course, including the tools, the testing, and the accessibility checks that get it ready to launch.
Locale selection tends to be the most important decision since it determines which regulations apply and which languages you need. The other decisions don’t have to follow a fixed order — they just need answers before translation starts.
Why Locale Is More Than Language
Locale selection depends on why the course exists. Mandatory training, like a safety certification, has to reach every plant where employees work. Growth-driven content, like a new product training, usually starts with the markets that offer the most revenue potential. Some jurisdictions have laws requiring employers to deliver training in a language employees understand. In the US, for example, that requirement comes from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).
Once you know which markets need training, the next step is to decide which locale (language plus region) to translate into. Spanish in Mexico and Spanish in Spain differ enough in vocabulary and formality that a course built for one doesn’t automatically work for the other. Portuguese in Brazil and Portugal work the same way. In Quebec, Bill 96 sets specific requirements for workplace communication in Quebec French, which can apply to employee training.
Picking Spanish or French isn’t the decision. Picking which Spanish, and which regulations you need to comply with, is.
Cultural Fit and Translation Quality Are Not the Same
A course can have zero translation errors and still not work for its audience because an example assumes a workplace norm that the learner doesn’t share. Cultural fit issues like this aren’t always obvious to someone outside the target market. A course built by a team in one country can have assumptions that go unnoticed until a learner somewhere else points them out. It can be something as basic as imagery of people that defaults to one ethnicity or gender, or something as significant as religious or political symbols.
To catch these issues before eLearning translation starts, your language services partner can perform a source content review, which looks for potentially problematic legal and cultural factors. After translation, an in-country subject matter expert (SME) can review the finished course for cultural fit before launch.
Inconsistent Writing Causes Inconsistent Translations
Controlled authoring is a best practice that should be used for multilingual training content. This systematic approach uses defined rules for vocabulary, grammar, and structure to keep content consistent, no matter who is doing the writing. Simplified Technical English (STE) and Plain English are two examples of controlled authoring.
Inconsistent terms can have a sizeable quality impact because they get multiplied across every language a course is translated into. A button labeled Submit in module 3 and Send in module 7 gets translated two different ways since the translator is following the original text. A learner taking the course may be confused when they see the different terms.
AI and Human Options for Multimedia Localization
eLearning courses have many kinds of content: narration, on-screen text, video, and animation, and each comes with its own localization decision.
Audio localization has several options, each with different cost, timeline, and quality tradeoffs. Narration can use professional human voice-over or an AI-generated voice. If you have a recurring presenter, like a trainer who appears in multiple videos, voice cloning can preserve their actual voice instead of swapping in a different voice actor for each language. On-camera speakers can also use dubbing or lip-sync, with either a human or AI-generated voice. If you prefer to keep the original audio, subtitles are an option that pairs AI transcription with human translation.
Audio isn’t the only thing that scales with each new language. The more on-screen text and graphics in a course, the more effort each language requires. Video adaptation and visual localization tools cut down on manual work by detecting and replacing text in screenshots and UI walkthroughs. The same tools can adapt animated titles and motion graphics for multiple languages. For courses with a recurring format, AI-assisted tools can produce localized versions of a video, instead of reshooting or re-editing for each language.
When Multilingual Training Content Needs a Human Touch
Every course has a choice between human and machine translation, and the right choice depends on the content. For example, a course using storytelling elements can feel dull or off-brand when machine translation handles the first draft, since a human linguist is better at capturing nuance and creativity.
Risk is a factor too. Since a mistranslation can result in a misunderstood instruction or a failed certification, safety trainings and certification exams need human review. To ensure accuracy, a linguist checks the machine-translated draft, then signs off before publication.
For safety and compliance training, that human sign-off is also documentation. If an auditor ever investigates a workplace incident, being able to show that a qualified linguist reviewed and approved the course is the proof they will want to see.
Lower-risk content, like a module on company history, can also benefit from machine translation since a small error in this content is inconvenient, not costly.
What to Bring to Your First Conversation
The global manufacturer needing to train its European employees isn’t unusual. Corporate training translation for mandatory and compliance courses is one of the three most common types of training companies run. This means most global companies are working through these same decisions.
You don’t have to fully answer the five decisions before speaking with your language services partner. Rough ideas about your locales, your source content, your media, and where you want human involvement are enough to get started.
Once those decisions are made, it’s time to create the localized courses.
Picking Your Authoring Tool with Translation in Mind
The authoring tool you use to build a course decides how translation will go, before you even write a single word.
Many teams work in Articulate Rise or Articulate Storyline. Rise builds courses out of pre-made content blocks, which resize themselves to fit the text inside them. With Storyline, a developer sizes every text box by hand, screen by screen. Because translated text typically is 15-35% longer than the English original, someone has to manually resize the box or shrink the font. That’s why some teams build the bulk of a course in Rise and only use Storyline for the screens that need branching scenarios or simulations. For those screens, the extra manual work is worth it for the control Storyline provides.
Adobe Captivate is used mainly for software simulations, where a learner clicks through a recording of an application. It supports right-to-left languages like Arabic and Hebrew, but only if you turn on a setting before you start building the project — there’s no option to change this later. If you drop translated Arabic or Hebrew text into a course that wasn’t built for right-to-left languages, it displays backward. The only fix is starting over and making sure the right-to-left setting is turned on from the beginning.
Getting Your Course Ready for Translation
Rise and Storyline export the text for translation in a single file. The export doesn’t automatically reformat dates, currency, or phone numbers for the target market, so a linguist converts them as part of the localization process.
Graphics, audio, and video aren’t included in that export file. They are separate files, usually with the same names, so every language version needs its own folder to keep the files straight.
Text on a graphic doesn’t get exported either. Argos uses a tool called MosAIQ ImVisio, which uses AI to detect the text on an image automatically, translate it, and hand it off to a linguist for review before it goes out. Engineers no longer need to open and rebuild each translated graphic manually.
Translating audio in a course means choosing between subtitles or dubbing. Subtitles put translated dialogue on-screen as text and tend to be less expensive. Dubbing costs more because it requires casting voice talent, recording, and matching timing to the original. But for safety and compliance content, dubbing can be worth it, because a lifeless or mistimed line can weaken a message’s urgency. AI can speed up either dubbing or subtitles by providing a first-pass translated voice track or an automatic transcript and translation. A linguist still checks the result for accuracy and tone before it’s used.
Making Sure Your Multilingual Courses Are Accessible
Some learners take a course using a screen reader instead of their eyes, or captions instead of their ears. If those only work in the original language, translating the rest of the course doesn’t help them.
In some places, making a course accessible is a legal requirement. The European Accessibility Act requires digital products and services sold to EU consumers, including online courses, to meet accessibility standards. Training built only for a company’s internal employees usually isn’t bound by the Act.
The Act follows WCAG 2.1 Level AA, the same standard required for US government websites. Its rules say that images need alt text, and audio or video needs captions. Because both regions follow the same guidelines, the same alt text and captions can work for a course on either side of the Atlantic.
WCAG also requires the course to correctly identify its own language. Every localized version needs its language tag updated to match. Otherwise, a screen reader will read the French version using English pronunciation rules, and the translated text comes out as gibberish.
Testing the Language and the Functionality
Courses run inside a learning management system (LMS), which tracks registrations, completion, and scores. Quality Assurance on a localized course means checking two different things: does the translation read correctly in the new language, and does the course still work in the LMS once it’s built.
Linguistic review checks the translated course for accuracy and terminology, making sure it reads naturally and matches the source material’s meaning and tone. Functional testing confirms the course runs correctly, including tracking completion and scores properly. The original and localized versions are tested side-by-side to make sure they behave the same way.
Even a high-quality translation can run into trouble once it’s built. A line that reads fine on its own can be too long once it’s on-screen. Courses in right-to-left languages like Arabic or Hebrew, or scripts like Thai that don’t break lines the way English does, might get an extra review to catch any layout issues before the course goes live.
Back to the Manufacturer
Go back to the manufacturer from the start of this piece, training European machine operators alongside their US team. OSHA estimates that language barriers are a contributing factor in 25% of job-related accidents. For a safety course, every decision in this piece — which locale, whether a linguist reviews the translation, whether a screen reader can read the on-screen text — is what stands between a translated course and one an employee really understands.
None of this happens by accident, and it doesn’t happen in one step either. If you’re creating a course that will be used in multiple languages, contact us for help working out the decisions and production details together.
Argos Multilingual
5 min. read
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