What could possibly go wrong?

My client planned to translate three elearning lessons to Arabic. They said they would provide me with the translations in a few months. Previously, I managed the translation of these same courses to French and Spanish. I believed that they understood the process. I explained that translating elearning content is complicated, especially for Arabic. I asked for the completed translated transcripts to create the quote. I explained that we could put the translation into the translation memory that we already started for Arabic, reducing the overall cost of translation. I explained the difficulties of working with right-to-left text along with the Arabic alphabet.

A few months later, I was sent the transcript for the first lesson, translated to Arabic. My client’s “transcript” refers to the MS Word document created when you publish to MS Word from Articulate Storyline. Anyone who uses Storyline knows that this produces un-editable screenshots of the slide, with editable Note texts below the screenshots. It also produces the layers if you select that option. This course did not have layers or quizzes in it.

I sent this document along with the original English Storyline file to the vendor I use. They prepared the quote, sent it to me, I added in my costs, and sent this quote to the client.

The first question was, “Why is there a translation cost? We already translated the course.” Fortunately, I had my original email on this subject. I resent it to the client.

A few weeks later, we began translation. After receiving the translated Storyline file from the TM vendor, I published it to MS Word, added any hidden elements, and sent it for review. The reviewer, an Arabic translator, asked to meet to discuss the review process. Great! It is nice to work out the details early on.

Not so great, the reviewer did not understand that the course was elearning from the document she originally translated. In Arabic, the verbs tenses used are affected by gender and number. The translation also depends on whether it is written or spoken. Since she did not understand that some of the Notes text were actually narration, the initial translation was done incorrectly.

Because the client did not fully understand the translation process, and we had very little contact until they were ready to proceed, the reviewer had to go through her original translations again. I sent the revised materials to the TM vendor, and the course was re-translated and re-integrated. On the bright-side, we caught this with the first course, and applied this lesson learned to the subsequent courses.