Is Your Learning Content Ready for the World?

article by: at: 10th Aug 2018 under: Informational

Is Your Learning Content Ready for the World?

When creating learning content for your company’s employees, the consumers of your products, or the general public, and you are planning on translating your training modules into other languages, special attention needs to be paid to internationalization guidelines. Our localization experts have put together a set of “best known methods” to follow to make your courses localization ready.

We are making the complete set of guidelines available to anybody who is interested. Please contact PTIGlobal by web form or email to getstarted@ptiglobal.com to receive the complete slide set.

Here are a few of the most important considerations:

Guideline #1: Pay attention to the writing style for all audiences

Even when the training is not going to be translated, there are some guidelines to follow to make the content appropriate for a worldwide audience.

Keep your content locale neutral. Avoid humor. Avoid colloquial language (jargon, slang, buzzwords). Avoid abbreviations or acronyms. Avoid culture-specific references. Use proper grammar, spelling, product names.

Guideline #2: Additional style considerations when translating the training

Clarity and simplicity are important when writing for localization, and following these guidelines will make the translators’ job easier.

Keep sentences whole (avoid fragmentation). Avoid passive voice. Avoid noun strings (metal cap cutter tool). Use consistent terminology (phone, telephone, smartphone, handset).

Guideline #3: Icons and imagery

Keeping icons and imagery as neutral as possible is important for information to be globally understood and avoiding controversy.

Use culture-neutral icons for common commands or indicators instead of text.

Guideline #4: Support for languages and typefaces

You need to verify that your authoring tools and output formats properly supports languages, text direction, and fonts required to display the text.

Unicode support, font support, bi-directional language support

Guideline #5: Text flow and UI layout – narrow columns

There are many potential designs that can cause text flow and layout issues, especially in languages that require extra space and use very long words.

Avoid very narrow text containers (German, Russian).

These are just five of over 25 guidelines to be aware of. The more closely they are followed, the easier and cheaper localization will be, and your global audience will have a positive and complete learning experience. Get the entire slide set today by sending us a message by web form or email to getstarted@ptiglobal.com.