We Can Do Quick and Cheap Translation

A large relief organization, that works in many under-developed nations, created a massive agricultural curriculum for training field agents in these countries. These field agents then help the local populace become better farmers and business managers. This course has over 100 individual lessons with a run-time of nearly 20 hours. Because of the nature of this type of business, they are often under-funded, rely on donations, are under-staffed, and have a continually changing staff.

The company’s core languages are English, French, and Spanish, but because they work in small villages, these languages are not always enough.

One day, I received an email from one of the project managers, “What would be a great innovation would be a way to take a Powerpoint and be able to re-record audio in different languages without much time and resources, then put that together for folks to save on their laptops. The folks would then go to groups and play the presentations in the appropriate language.…What do you think about a) being able to have a cheap and quick method to re-record audio over PowerPoints—even use the same slides that we have in our LMS; and b) how difficult would it be to then put this type of product on a mobile phone-if we need to do so?”

After recovering from near heart failure, I:

• Determined that the PowerPoints referred to were the elearning lessons developed in elearning courseware.
• Determined that even if the lessons were in PowerPoint, switching the audio would result in the audio not timing correctly with the slide elements. Menus, buttons, etc. would still be untranslated.
• Wondered who will translate the narrative? If there are several translators, will there be processes in place to make sure they are all using the same dialects and terminology?

This email stemmed from the fact that the translations to French cost over $100,000. The project manager, who was new, was trying to work with limited funds and keep costs down. Not only did this PM not understand the translation process but was looking for a quick and cheap way to do it. After all, how complicated could it be? My fear was that using the methodology suggested in the email would result in much higher costs in addition to other problems later on.