eLearning has become an important part of many people's lives, especially since the pandemic. eLearning platforms have become increasingly popular as a means of acquiring new skills, knowledge, and certifications from anywhere in the world. This global appeal means that if you want to make your eLearning platform international, certain factors need to be considered when translating and converting your courses successfully into other languages.

What Is eLearning Localization and Why Is It Important?

eLearning localization is more than just a direct translation of words. It's about transforming your courses and platform so that everything about it suits your target audience in terms of their language, social constructs, and culture. eLearning localization helps bridge cultural differences in your courses while helping students acquire and retain knowledge more efficiently and effectively.

What Should Be Localized?

Unlike document translation, there is a lot to consider when localizing your eLearning platform. Here are some major aspects that should be addressed:

  • User experience elements (e.g. navigation buttons)
  • Idioms and abbreviations (if used, though best avoided to start with)
  • Units of measurement, dates, and currency
  • Graphical User Interface (GUI) and formatting (e.g. date formats)
  • Tone of audio narration
  • Audio and video
  • Graphics, images, photos, and symbols
  • Fonts
  • All written text and content

7 Key Planning Steps for eLearning Localization

Step 1 – Plan for Localization Early

Often an afterthought, the need for localization should be identified and planned right from the creation stages, as pre-planning makes the localization process run a lot more smoothly. When creating your eLearning courses, here are a few ways to make them more localization-friendly:

  • Avoid using humor and idioms as these can be difficult to translate into other languages.
  • Test your font's compatibility to ensure that it is compatible with your other target languages as it may not be supported.
  • Consider the use of neutral humanoid images wherever possible, making the character images relatable no matter what region or culture.
  • If possible, keep multimedia minimal and keep graphics simple.

Step 2 – Know Your Target Audience

It is essential to know the audience you are seeking to reach in every area that you want to localize in. Researching is required to learn about a region's language nuances, cultural preferences, tone, and even spelling variations. This can affect everything from color and image choices, your selection of eLearning voice-overs, and how you approach culturally sensitive topics. Hiring eLearning localization services is an easy way to ensure you nail this step.

Step 3 – Account for Text Expansion and Contraction

As each language is unique, one of the major features you need to pay attention to when localizing is the expansion and contraction that occurs when transcribing certain languages. This is important because it can affect the general layout of your course and its graphical elements. This is especially important when translating Chinese Mandarin to English, as text may contract by up to 20–50%. The opposite happens when translating from German to English — text expands anywhere from 10–30%. If you have audio and video content, these issues also apply.

Step 4 – Adapt Graphics and Other Visuals

While some symbols and images are universally understood, some may need to be reworked for successful media localization. Items that often get missed include navigation buttons, speech bubbles, progress bars, animations, and color selections. Take a look at the color white, for example, and how differently it is viewed depending on the culture. In the West, the color white can signify purity and cleanliness, but in many Asian countries, the color white can be associated with death and bad omens. These seemingly small aspects can be the defining features that draw the line between a successfully localized eLearning platform and one that is not.

Step 5 – Focus on Language AND Design

eLearning translation is sometimes the easiest part of a localization strategy, but one of the defining features of localization is that it needs to be all-encompassing to reach the native audience of an area. Design features and choices need to be considered when building eLearning courses. For example, if your original course video was created for the UK market and you've translated all the text and audio content for the Latin American market, but the video graphics remain unchanged, the course will still feel foreign to Latin American learners.

Step 6 – Select the Right Voice-Over Approach

Audio narration is a critical component of most eLearning courses. When localizing, you have several options: full dubbing (replacing the original narration with a recording in the target language), subtitling (adding translated text while keeping the original audio), or a hybrid approach. The right choice depends on your budget, content type, and target market expectations. Always use professional, native-speaking voice-over artists who understand the tone and register appropriate for your content.

Step 7 – Test with Native Speakers Before Launch

Before rolling out your localized content, test it with a sample of native speakers from your target market. Ask them to complete the course and provide feedback on language, cultural appropriateness, and overall experience. This "linguistic and cultural QA" step is essential for catching issues that even the best translators might miss. It's far better to discover problems in testing than after your course has been deployed to thousands of learners.

How Into23 Can Help

At Into23, we specialize in the localization of eLearning content across all major authoring tools and LMS platforms. Our team of expert linguists and eLearning specialists can help you adapt your training programs for global audiences, ensuring that your content is not just translated, but truly localized for maximum impact. We support all major eLearning standards including SCORM, xAPI, and cmi5, and offer end-to-end services from text translation and audio localization to cultural adaptation and QA testing.