File Types for Elearning Translation Services

As a category of professional translation services, translation of elearning materials is an important one. This week we’re wrapping up an elearning translation project for a regular client so we’re reminded of how translation services in this area have grown, and will likely continue to grow. In the age of viruses that have the effect of closing schools and traditional learning modalities, online learning in some form or another is likely to be with us for the long run.

Elearning materials can be contained in a number of different file formats. The easiest file format to work with is probably MS Word since text is directly editable. The same is true for text contained within cells of an Excel files. PowerPoint files are another file format we regularly receive elearning text in.

 

There’s a way to handle and translate virtually any elearning material in any format and into the selected target language of choice.

 

Elearning text for translation sometimes comes to us as image files. In those cases some setup is usually required to bring the text into a format such as a bilingual table. Bilingual tables are two column files with source text (e.g., English) in the left column and a second column left blank for placing the corresponding translated text in the target language.

Elearning text can also come in the form of popular elearning authoring tools such as the application Articulate Storyline. Storyline translation projects can include formatting within the application or just the exported text (via a built in function) and the client then handles the importing of the translated text back into the elearning tool environment.

There’s a way to handle and translate virtually any elearning material in any format and into the selected target language of choice. Fundamentally it’s still text in a format, with an educational objective, that needs to be equivalently expressed in another language.