eLearning has now become a full-fledged industry. By using existing Web technologies, eLearning companies have been able to make educational content available to larger and more international audiences more efficiently than ever before.

Even if cultural references are less present in those courses dedicated to technical training, culture plays a large part in the content involving daily or business frames such as sales, human resources, finances, accountancy, management and public relations. These cultural references must be translated with great care, the objective being that the learner should feel completely immersed in the courses. The learner of any eLearning course should be able to interact with the content of a course with ease and fluidity, without stumbling on an expression or a cultural reference that they cannot understand.

Names, jargon and society

    The first thing to do when you encounter names in an eLearning course is to ask your customer whether they should be localized for the target market. Perhaps a Joe, Bill or Jane will be acceptable in Taiwan, where students are asked to choose a Western name in order to prepare for their future international business life. However, if you want to market your product in other Chinese-speaking regions, it is wiser either to translate these names into Chinese characters or to replace them with traditional Chinese names like Ming, Wen or Yi. Going further, a company concerned with providing learners with the an environment free of any cultural anomalies may even decide to re-shoot a video sequence of the course with Asian actors replacing the original Western characters.

However, asking the translator to simply adapt the names from one culture to another seems like a piece of cake compared to names containing play on words in a sales course (see Table 1).

French

[...] Voici donc l'histoire d'Albert Lalouse, commercial expérimenté des établissements Jean Bave. Ce matin, Albert Lalouse accueille une nouvelle commerciale dans l'équipe, Léa Prenti. [...]

    The fictive names Albert Lalouse, Léa Prenti and Jean Bave may sound like common French names to foreigners, but lalouse is a slang word meaning loser in French. The choice of the company name Jean Bave is not so innocent either, as it is the homonym for the French expression j'en bave meaning "I'm having a rough time." And finally, Léa Prenti, when read out loud, becomes les apprentis (the apprentices).

    These names are humorous but quasi-untranslatable, and our translators actually had a difficult time to find the right names, in English and also in Dutch and Spanish.

French	Albert Lalouse	Jean Bave	Léa Prenti
English	Albert Loser	John Spit	Lea Prentice
Dutch	Albert Loezer	I.K.Baal	Mevrouw L. Eerling
Spanish	Alberto Lalouse	Juan Bave	Leandra Prenti

Table 2. Adaptations into English, Dutch and Spanish

 

English

[...] Here is the story of Albert Loser, an experienced sales representative with the John Spit company. This morning, Albert is welcoming a new representative to the team, Lea Prentice. [...]

As you can see, most languages could manage a slight adaptation, while the Spanish translator just replaced the French first names with local ones without finding good equivalents with the same level of humour.
 

Between the play on words and technical jargon contained in the eLearning modules, the best advice we can give is to always call on specialized translators or at least, to ask your customer for a bilingual glossary. In fact, in the sales course already mentioned, only a specialized translator would have spotted the technical jargon in the French acronym SONCAS, understood its meaning (Sécurité, Orgueil, Nouveauté, Confort, Argent et Sympathie) known that it's a psychological sales technique, and correctly translated it into English as SPICES (Security, Pride, Innovation, Comfort, Economy and Sympathy).

Jargon is usually an issue in the localization process, but one that can be easily solved with the creation of a glossary. At a more subtle level, the register should sometimes be adapted too. Indeed, it is more difficult to spot an English text created with a style and vocabulary typically from London and find the right way to translate and adapt it for Parisians. Moreover, if this English text has to be used as a pivot for a translation into several European and Asian languages, the best thing to do would probably be to rewrite it in a more neutral English with less cultural references and markers.
 

A typical English eLearning module about Human Resources describes different daily life or business life situations, sometimes as trivial as going to the pub after work. But when adapted for the Chinese market, this situation would loose much of its meaning as going to the pub is not understood as a kind of ritual in China as it is in England.

Along the same lines, a French business environment with individual offices may appear less natural than a big open-space to American or English office workers. Thus, the French sentence "Il ouvrit la porte du bureau de son collègue et passa la tête pour lui poser une rapide question" would translate better as "He stopped at his colleague's desk to ask him a quick question," rather than "He opened the door of his colleague's office to ask him a quick question," as the target audience may be more used to working in open plan spaces without personal offices.

The translation of American English content into Chinese is quite common nowadays. But when it comes to finding the right way to make American references understandable to Chinese learners, it’s quite another matter!

The television game show Let’s Make a Deal was used as a scene to illustrate a statistical analysis lesson in an HR and business-oriented e-learning course. A slight adaptation of the original sentence or some extra information is often sufficient for this kind of reference (Table 4), but the choice of whether to have a simple adaptation or to completely change the source text comes from the customer and, of course, depends on the target audience. The role of the localizer is, however, to spot these details that seem innocent at first sight but could raise questions from the learners and, therefore, slow down the learning process.

English source	If you have a little bit of grey hair, you may remember the old American TV game show, “Let’s Make a Deal.”
English adaptation for the Chinese market	In the 60s there used to be an old American TV game show called "Let's Make a Deal."

At the end of your eLearning Human Resource, Law or Marketing module, you might have included a list of references. But how could you deal with these references if they are too culturally marked, when the lists mostly contain names of, say, quintessentially European French specialists or mentors, whose books could only be found in France... and you are localizing the course for the United States?

Again, although a preliminary investigation will help you find out who the final user is, this question should be submitted to your customer. In the best case, you will be given a list of American references. Otherwise if you have carte blanche to adapt the content of the list, first check whether these authors and specialists are internationally renowned, in which case, their books may be translated and available in most bookstores. If not, a longer task is awaiting you, because you will have to find the authors, mentors and specialists of this field who are equally famous in the target county. What to do with quotations that you may find in a course? That is another story. Providing a translation of a quote is a perilous task, as you will have to find the official translation, and not try to make up a haphazard translation. Conversely, if the quotation is already a translation, you will have to find the original version.

A last example of issues to contend with for localizers is to find laws and treaties or administrative rules that are sometimes very specific to a country. As you may know, only the lucky French workers can benefit from RTT ("Réduction du temps de travail"), i.e. they only work 35 hours per week and can have half a day off each week and any time worked over this counts as time earned for holidays. But how to transmit the same idea to the UK audience in an HR vacation management course, without showing that the source text was French. The solution is to rewrite the sentence for the UK market, as this concept doesn't exist in the UK employment law, the possibilities being that: a) the employee has a contract indicating she doesn't work on Wednesday; b) the employee takes a day off every Wednesdays; c) or the employee works extra time during the week in order to have Wednesdays off.

French source	Le mercredi, une proportion importante de mères de famille sont en RTT.
English adaptation and translation	On Wednesdays, many mothers have time off in lieu.

 Table 7. French source sentence and English translation and adaptation.

For case c), a closer translation would, therefore, be "Many mothers work extra hours during the week in order to have Wednesdays off.” However, this raises another question, as this concept is not obvious in countries where schools don't close on Wednesdays, which is the case in France. So as you can see a little bit of local knowledge goes a long way.

These kinds of questions are obvious when you want to localize from French into English or Chinese, but they also have to be asked when you want to adapt the content even without translation for Switzerland, Canada, Belgium or other French-speaking countries, or let say across a variety of English-speaking countries if your course is aimed at an English-speaking audience.

Every fiscal, legal or accounting reference also has to be checked as the legal and accounting systems often vary from one country to another. We cannot stress enough the subtle difference between the corporation laws, the accounting systems, the different types of taxes, all the resulting acronyms and so on.

One good example is OEM or bundled software. While it’s usually illegal to sell OEM copies of a certain software without hardware, it is, in fact, legal to do that in Germany. In such a case, a generic user license agreement would be void in Germany. One major software company went to court over this several times, but lost each and every case. In Germany, a manufacturer may not determine how their product is sold. So, no matter how large “Not for resale” or “Only to be sold with hardware” is printed on the boxes, in Germany you can ignore it. This is, therefore, something to be kept in mind when translating the License Agreement for that country.

ELearning and Technology

The learner's attention is obviously something that all eLearning course developers struggle to keep. Thus, within the last few years, one can see all types of multimedia content thriving among eLearning courses, with interactivity being the key to success.

Today, a simple course with PowerPoint slides and a few simple quizzes as seen a few years ago will look out of date, and huge amounts of money are invested to make contents more interactive and entertaining. ELearning designers search for ever-more innovative technologies including the most advanced video or audio applications, and 3D animations with special effects. Formats as diverse as HTML, XML, Flash, Adobe Quizzmaker, Captivate and Articulate, Shockwave and so on have established themselves in the daily life of eLearning developers and, thus, of localizers.

The localizer's role goes far beyond translation. He or she must also be a skilled engineer who stays on top of the latest tools or technologies including dubbing, sub-titles or voice-overs. He should also be able to analyse all types of files and formats, and extract the content that will be processed by localization tools. The worst nightmare for any localization engineer is to receive a course that has not been created with localization in mind. This scenario is still not so rare today, as often text or content is embedded within Flash animations, images or even codes, plenty of variables remain within the content, audio scripts are mixed with other texts into storyboards, or even manual audio/video synchronization is needed. The localizer's role is, therefore, to be a real consultant who can give advice and hints to the content developer and guide him though the eLearning project, helping him to avoid classical pitfalls.

Thus, the three main steps when designing eLearning courses for an international audience are the following: 1) creation of the educational content by experts; 2) set-up of the multimedia environment that will contain the course using eLearning technologies, such as animations, video, audio; 3) localization of the eLearning modules keeping the target markets in mind.
Figure 1 shows the different steps of content creation and localization. This process is much the same in eLearning creation as in other typical content development projects, but it has to be rigorously applied in the eLearning field because multimedia supports can be very complex and diverse, especially now with the emergence of eLearning courses supported by iPhones.



Figure 1. Content creation and localization process

Figure 1 illustrates that the localization process arises shortly after the content creation phase. The localizer can, however, get involved in the content creation methodology and guide the content developer by providing a few simple rules:
- Creating a dedicated terminology or glossaries for a better consistency among writers, which can also be used by the final user.
- Creating a style guide with all the syntactic and structuring rules, so that translation with CAT tools is more efficient, and in order to ensure homogeneity. For instance, avoiding different variations of "You can click Enter to validate your choice," "To validate your choice, click Enter" and so on.
- Keeping in mind that the content will be internationalized. For instance, character encoding, bidirectional language support.
- Thinking twice before using too many cultural references.
- Targeting the future markets and defining rules for each target country.
- Not filling the screens too much as translation may involve text expansion.
- Making sure to separate the content from its media, so that it can be easily reused either in a manual, a descriptive brochure, a website or an online help. For instance, using Xliff, XML Chorus.

Respecting these first rules will not only facilitate the ease of content editing, pushing the designing, writing, and reviewing time down, but also make all content consistent through all media, avoid misunderstandings and simplify the information. Of course, this all helps to gain significant time benefits for localization process. To sum it all up, the right team for localizing eLearning modules must always have a skilled and efficient project manager; good native and specialized translators; audio studios; engineers; and a validation team.