Localizing Articulate Rise

Overview – eLearning Translation

Rise, from Articulate, is a new breed of responsive, fast and impressively beautiful online courses. It enables authors to not only put content on multiple types of screens [PC to Mobile] but also integrates with Storyline and other interactive elements to generate a “dang-good looking page”–all from a web interface. Until now, a major problem with Rise software has been the lack of internationalization support–if you wanted to translate the course in Chinese or French, be ready to copy and paste every part of it. If you wanted Arabic there was no way to do it. Global eLearning is proud to present a different localization service for Rise courses–without copy-paste. We are able to access the back-end code and that means you can do in hours what normally takes weeks of time, ultimately making your eLearning Translation more efficient!

Rise Above HTML, With React!

First, a little background on why Rise is different than most “web-pages”. The Rise authoring environment uses modern front end web techniques to generate a complex reactive web-page. Part of the “snappy” feel is that many of the page components are coded into a complex framework called React. That framework uses a full-fledged programming language with event handlers, a virtualized DOM and collections to produce a unique experience. The result is that you get a very polished APP-like feel with no lag or delay. The React programming language allows the designer to create elaborate interactions, pre-load them, and then fire them off when appropriate. React and HTML5 also handle almost every language and script. This means your online course is effectively an APP. The magic of Rise is that there is absolutely no complex coding required from the user since the authoring tool takes care of the complexities in the background. However, the complexities are where the content is; therefore, the content is what needs to be translated.

“The complexities are where the content is; therefore, the content is what needs to be translated and localized.”

Global eLearning Goes Behind the Curtain

We have developed a multi-step process that takes into account modern web frameworks and their complexities to produce localized content from Rise (see Figure 1). There are a number of content collections that are obfuscated in the back-end code; these items were never intended for end-users to work with, so a specialist in dynamic web coding is required. The alternative is to copy/paste each line of text in a painfully inefficient and error-prone process.

Figure 1: Sample HTML code that is localized

If you step back and look at the typical e-Learning localization effort, you have linguistic complexities, interactions, evaluations, embedded audio and video media, games, animations, and many elements that can be mixed with the various potential for cultural as well as instructional miscues.

Global eLearning has worked in hundreds of Storyline courses where these challenges were efficiently resolved. The major difference is that Storyline has a built-in export function. When Rise uses some parts of Storyline those embed seamlessly; unfortunately it doesn’t work for the majority of the content displayed in a Rise course. Global eLearning is your Rise translation export function.

Outcome

Using our specialized process Global eLearning can extract all text, labels, and elements into a text format. This is translated outside the Rise system and then re-imported to the existing code-base and original SCORM package. Instead of spending hundreds of hours copying and pasting elements in an online editor, we engineer the files offline. The end result is the same look-and-feel as RISE but there is no connection to the online workspace. Engineering an offline course takes approximately 3-5 hours, including the necessary code Quality Assurance.

Global eLearning takes the important additional step of publishing the course in an LMS for a live in-person review by a native language speaker. Editing a previously published course is as simple as editing a text file–we maintain a bilingual database for each sentence and can apply updates with little effort. Global eLearning is able to provide a fast efficient process for Rise localization currently unavailable in Articulate software or by any other service provider on Earth. Contact us today!

For more information on this subject matter, and any other eLearning Localization or Translation, view our content library today!

Gilbert Segura