AXIOM Insights Podcast – Localizing Content For Your Learners

Scott Rutherford
Hello and welcome to the AXIOM Insights Learning and Development podcast. In this series, we focus on best practices for driving performance through learning, and today’s conversation focuses on what I would argue is the most fundamental part of learning, communication, more specifically, language. We’ll talk about ways that you can ensure that the learning experiences you’re developing are able to be understood and experienced as intended by your learners. And so I’m glad to have two guests who are experts on this topic. Nicholas Strozza is CEO of Interpro Translation Solutions and Maria Fagralius is a project manager, also with Interpro. Maria. Nick, great to see you. Thanks for being on the podcast.

Nicholas Strozza
Yeah, thanks for having us. Super excited to be a part of this and appreciate the opportunity.

Maria Fagrelius
Yeah, thank you so much.

Scott Rutherford
So let’s start out with just a definition of terms, because we’re talk about translation— I think most people understand translation, what that is and what that entails. But we also talk about localization as part of a translation of learning content, particularly help me understand what the difference is. What are we talking about with those two categories of work?

Nicholas Strozza
Sure. And it’s definitely a topic that comes up quite frequently where someone is looking for translation or localization, but they get the words intermixed.

Probably the simplest way to explain it is translation is more word for word, making sure that the words are accurately translated. Or localization. I like to refer to it as almost taking translation to the next level, adapting the messaging, changing some things that might not be in the source, for example, doing currency conversions or imagery or changing elements of people’s names or whatever it might be. So it’s almost like taking it again to a more adapted approach versus a simple more word for word translation, which accurately translates the words. But sometimes the messaging can get lost.

Scott Rutherford
Right. So that’s not only looking at the nuances of a regional version of a language, like, for example, Spanish or French, they have multiple different. You translate French very differently in Quebec than you would in Paris. So the terminology changes. But I like what you’re saying about and changing the. It’s almost like the cultural references.

Nicholas Strozza
Absolutely, absolutely. Maria, feel free to chime in, too.

Maria Fagrelius
Yeah. I think localization, like Nick was saying, is taking that cultural context and transferring into the wording, the style of the translation.

Scott Rutherford
So why is this important? I guess, and I know I’m, to use the phrase, preaching to the choir here, but why do you think it’s important? Where have you seen it have value to localize and not just translate?

Maria Fagrelius
I think it’s more than anything, better understanding and engagement of your audience because it’s known that learning grasp the information better if it’s presented in their native language.

Also, those familial cultural references help them understand it and motivate them to action. Like, for example, a very simple example can be the dates. Like in the United States, the month, the day.

So understanding that in a European setting, if you put the date and the month is better to understand when that event, for example, is going to happen.

Also, I think to be inclusive, to include the learner into the experience of learning and in your content, I think it’s very important to be accessible to them in their native language. Also very important.

Scott Rutherford
So part of it is to be understood, but also, I would assume part of it is you want to, you know, make the learner, the audience member, feel like the content is intended for them. So, so you’re taking out things which would be, I would say, dissonant things that would stand out as saying, oh, that’s wrong. The date being in the reverse format would seem, you know, if you, if you’re talking about the 10 February, and in the US, if you said ten-two, people would think you’re talking about October. So if that’s, that’s, that’s disruptive on a couple of levels and distracting, maybe that’s a better word to use, is eliminating distractions.

Nicholas Strozza
I definitely think so. And almost to chime in, essentially, the real goal of a perfect localization is where someone that speaks that language doesn’t know it was translated from English. It was intended for them. That’s like the ultimate goal that we’ll strive for. The other thing is mistranslations could really offend a learner or really hamper their learning abilities. If something. Sometimes they’re comical out there of really, really big companies that have made mistakes that could have been avoided if they just did translation or localization or took it a little more seriously. It tends to be an afterthought a lot, unfortunately.

But in general, like, you know, you can really, really adapt that messaging to someone in their language, and that can go a long way. It also makes them feel, you know, more like the company took the time to really do this right for them. So it almost can help anyone taking the training or customer feel. While this company really, you know, wants me to learn, they took the time to accurately translate this. It’s professional. It looks like something, you know, for my country or where I’m from. So, you know, again, those little things can kind of go a long way.

Maria Fagrelius
I think it shows, and it feels like you belong, and I think that is a very, you know, inclusive and accessibility term these days, that you belong to that company, that you belong to the learning experience.

Scott Rutherford
Well, that’s true too, because we talk a lot in learning development broadly about the contribution of learning to company culture and inclusiveness being a big part of that. And I don’t necessarily know if folks are thinking about language and connotations of language as being an element in inclusivity, but I suppose it is.

Maria Fagrelius
Indeed.

Scott Rutherford
So I know that we have an example, a clip to show, and Nick, I want to let you set this up, but this is an example of localization in practice.

Nicholas Strozza
Yes, absolutely.

Scott Rutherford
I’ll introduce this just to say that this podcast is video and audio. So those of you who are listening on the audio only side, I’ll say that this clip begins with a title that says, hackers don’t look like they do in the movies. They’re men and women of various ethnicities and speaking different languages.

To view the clip, though, go to https://axiomlearningsolutions.com/podcast. You can find the video version there if you’re listening on your audio only device. Or go to YouTube and just search for AXIOM Insights and you’ll see the video there. So, Nick, what are we going to be seeing here?

Nicholas Strozza
Sure, let me give you a little bit of context here. A client of ours is a company called Knowbefore, and they are the provider of the world’s largest security awareness training and simulated phishing platform. Knowbefore really takes localization seriously into the next level. They don’t just translate copy, they truly localize the content in their learning, such as character names, imagery, names of organizations and more. Very global.

So, in fact, I’d like, you know, we’d like to show you this video, and it really showcases an example of doing true localization. So, know, before they took the time and the investment to preview their training course for the social engineering red flags, or surf as they call it, to include actual actors speaking in their native language instead of just doing, you know, a voiceover or captions, you know, they really did it in a very unique way. So I’m really excited to be able to show you those.

Scott Rutherford
That’s great. Let’s take a look at the clip.

To view the video example with subtitles, visit https://youtu.be/CbKxDn7sAeY

Scott Rutherford
Again, if you’re listening to the audio feed only you’ve heard the audio side but haven’t seen the video side. https://axiomlearningsolutions.com/podcast or look for AXIOM Insights on YouTube and you’ll be able to see the video clip in its context as well. So you mentioned earlier, Nick, that you find that translation and localization is oftentimes an afterthought or comes later in the process.

I would infer accurately that you would advocate for thinking of it earlier on, this being like, I assume, of when it was embraced a little bit more holistically earlier on. At what stage should translation localization enter the picture? And how do you start approaching the need? How do you define the need for that early on in a learning project?

Nicholas Strozza
Sure, sure. Great points. And you know, I believe a lot of organizations, they might have a more visibility on needing to translate. You know, we bumped into a lot of situations where, you know, a client didn’t know that the learning had to be localized. They had a customer that is new in that country. It’s a new initiative for them versus organizations that they know everything needs to be translated so they are able to keep localization in mind at the design stage. So we’ve done some presentations with Society of Technical Communications, STC, and we got some good feedback there where it’s like, if you can write with localization in mind, it’s clean writing and learning anyways for the English. So I think, again, in general, there’s a lot of things someone who’s developing a learning program or training or an ILT or a VILT could keep in mind early on. And being able to pull a partner like us in at the early stages can help us. We can review the storyboard, give some suggestions.

Different things can kind of go a long way, like making sure there’s enough room on the screen, minimizing text and graphics if there’s voiceover, you know, minimizing the syncing points, if it’s in a tool like storyline, and then imagery, adapting the imagery to be more diverse, or allowing for budget to maybe place different imagery in or refilm or whatever it might be. Obviously, voiceover is always preferred, but might not be allowed by budget. We might have to do captions which could distract the viewer depending on what you’re showing on the screen. So there’s a lot of little elements that can come into play. And what’s fun about what we do is every language has different nuances. Spanish expands, Arabic’s right to left, simplified Chinese shrinks. So it’s like a lot of work does go into fully localizing, you know, a training or for a learner. But if we could be brought in earlier on, or if whoever’s developing content, if you think it might be translated and you don’t know, you know, try to think in terms of, this isn’t just for the us or English speaking audience.

Will this phrase translate? We bumped into a lot of different situations where different types of expressions that make sense here, knock it out of the park, or this is easy as pie, things like that. The “OK” sign [hand gesture]. These are things that do not translate very well or at all. You need to localize it. But the more of those marketing is really hard. Marketing type things is where we bump into the most challenges.

Scott Rutherford
Well, then idioms, when you’re talking about, I guess, casual, maybe less technical speech, the idioms that you were just give a few examples of. Yeah, they are problematic. And Maria, let me ask you, because I, so if you’re working with someone in the development of their content and you’re trying to counsel them, how, you know, how can, how can folks write the original, the first draft in English, for example, anticipating translation, what, what have you seen as things people should look out for? I guess idioms, idiomatic expressions, would be one of them.

Maria Fagrelius
For content, I think there will be the first step that you have to look before localization is where localization really starts in your content. And what I have used in the past is just flagging, just little flags. What it can be too us centric, that cannot be used in other countries or even in the United States if you are marketing, for example, Hispanics. So I think just little flags that it can be problematic. Content that can be like, for example, it’s very difficult to translate humorous because everybody has different. It’s all in your background, in your beliefs. So I think humor, I will avoid it totally because it’s very hard to translate, like Nick was saying, expressions. But I think the little flags, examples, just to make them resonate with your audience and that they are not us centric. They can be global. Just try to globalize your training or your e learning for a global audience.

Scott Rutherford
Right. And as you were saying, you’re approaching it with sort of the future use in mind when you’re developing content. And this is in some ways the same advice we give anybody who’s developing learning content is think with the end application in mind, and think in a modular sense. So the parts that will need to be swapped out for different audiences can be easily.

Maria Fagrelius
Yeah, I have an example of, it’s not e-learning. It was a poster that we localized for different regions around the world. It was a global compliance poster for gifts and entertainment. And it was just a poster. And they have about giving gifts and what is lawful to giving gifts and accepting gifts from vendors and customers. And we had to adapt that, not just the content to translate, but we adapted the colors of the poster or the images of the poster for other regions. I remember there was a globe in the middle. That was the United States of America and, you know, Latin America. So for our Chinese audience, we actually moved the globe around. So it will be the first thing that you see.

Like the gift was different for China or for Argentina. It was more like a bottle of wine. So just those little things like images, the colors is so important, so it resonates with the target audience.

Scott Rutherford
Yeah. And so the role of the translation firm then is you’re sort of, I would say, almost visually proofreading. In some ways. You’re looking for those perhaps dissonant details that whoever created the content might have not have seen the first time.

Nicholas Strozza
And I don’t think AI can pick that kind of stuff up quite yet.

So we work primarily within country linguists, depending on what the target market is, you know, Canada for French versus Europe, Brazil versus Europe supplied, mainland Chinese versus traditional, or Hong Kong. And because by default, our model set up with working with real human linguists immersed in the culture, they’re going to pick up things like that as part of the localization process or the final QA process, we always go through whatever it is, a one page memo, an e-learning course in 30 languages. We go through webpage, email, a text message, whatever we’re localizing, we always have a native speaker who does the final review. So it’s not just translation, it’s revision, proofreading, putting things together, and then final QA. And that’s the whole localization, you know, package with a bow. Right. But that’s where we’ll catch things because we of that element, which might be a good segue, I don’t know.

Scott Rutherford
And I did want to speak to the elephant in the room, which is translation, AI, technology, perhaps competition. You know, we’ve been able to put text in Google Translate for free for years.

So I wanted to get your thoughts, you know, what’s the, the best role and what’s the place of technology in translation? You know, whether in maybe talk, talk us through kind of what that looks like in practice.

Nicholas Strozza
Yes. I’m glad this was brought up. I wasn’t sure. I’m just kidding. So, yeah, it’s a pretty big buzzword, but I mean, just, just a quick, you know, background machine. Translation’s been around a really, really long time. It’s not like a new concept.

I think it goes back to like the mid 1950s, wherever they were testing some things through IBM, and it’s essentially just not there quite yet. Still, it could be serviceable depending on the type of content. Some languages are better than others. Where we’ve seen the best use case so far has been with voiceover recording. So AI voiceover recording, not text to speech. And it’s been getting better and better for certain languages, Spanish, French, it’s not there yet for a lot of the Asian languages, but that seemed to kind of been the first, dipping our toes in the shallow end based on what clients are looking for. But it is getting better. And I think the auto captioning, there’s some things that are speeding up the process.

It’s definitely something that we’re monitoring and continually testing. But again, the human element, we believe will always be a part of it, making sure that we do post editing, whatever it might be, making sure that a native speaker, a professional linguist, is reviewing it for accuracy.

The messaging is still going to get there, but a lot of the things we talked about already in this podcast, I don’t think AI is going to be able to catch these cultural nuances and catch and adapt. But Maria, you might have some thoughts too on those.

Maria Fagrelius
Yeah, I think the challenging thing with AI and MT is bias.

They train with all this data from the Internet that unfortunately contains biases. So just an example, like a nurse and a doctor, even if the data that they are trained is English, which is gender neutral, they still have those stereotypes. So when you translate that with AI, unfortunately, if you are using a language like Spanish or Italian, which is a gender language, the nurse is always going to be a female, the doctor is going to be always a male. So I think that is the most problematic thing right now with EI and MT, that those biases are there because the data that they feed into, they already have the bias. So that is why they learn. So the human factor to catch those kind of things is very important. So post editing, I think is right now, is the only solution to work with those systems, just to have a human to post edit, to watch for errors and biases.

Nicholas Strozza
And I think, again, that’s a super great point. Sorry, Maria.

Yeah, it’s a great point. And we’re seeing some misconceptions where potential clients are thinking that AI is going to be a lot cheaper.

We think that advantage is going to be more in the speed, and we think the influx of content being developed in English and source is going to lead to more needs for AI. Parse through and then post editing. But I think it will be less expensive. It won’t be as good, but it’s not going to be as less expensive than I think people are thinking. That’s been our conversation so far because of that post editing and needing to do it. You know, that massaging.

Maria Fagrelius
I’m looking forward to see what AI can bring us in the localization world because like, for example, MT [machine translation] is very limited with context. So MT, when you translate with MT, only sees one segment, one sentence. So it translates a sentence without context about what is around AI actually looks around the whole page or the whole, you know, e learning. So it’s starting to translate with all that context. So I’m just, I am looking forward to see how, you know, it develops in the future because it gives you the greater picture compared with MT, that only is like little sentences and put them together in a translation. So I’m looking forward to see what it comes up.

Scott Rutherford
So you have the machine translation as a tool. The AI is a perhaps more sophisticated version of that tool, but it sounds like what we’re talking about is. So it can perhaps reduce the amount of time required. I mean, certainly compared to manual, purely human translation.

So you could drive costs down, but it’s almost like the 80 20 rule applied here, because it can get you some ways toward the finish line. But that last mile or that last piece still needs, still needs a human to run quality control, it sounds like.

Nicholas Strozza
And we’ve seen instances where it’s just cheaper to translate it from scratch. So it depends, again, on the language, the subject matter.

So it’s a lot of factors. I mean, we’ll look at everything case by case and try to provide options or point whoever we’re talking to in the right direction. But again, I think your idea is right there. It’s almost like when someone’s remodeling their kitchen, it’s that extra 5, 10 percent at the end that can make a big difference.

It’s those final elements that it’s really important see a way that can be skipped.

Scott Rutherford
So, Maria, you mentioned a compliance poster as an example, and they got me thinking that a lot of web materials that people work with in learning and development have specific terms of art, whether it’s legal terms or whether it’s technical language.

So what’s the best approach then, when you have a project that has specific technical language that it’s accurately transferred to the final product after the translation localization.

How do you manage terms that, I mean, arguably, does the translator need to understand the terms of art? How does that work?

Maria Fagrelius
Well, I will recommend, first a glossary where, you know, you extract those key terms and you translate them into the language first with context. I think a glossary is the first step, so everybody is in the same terms of understanding those key terms and what they mean, and then you can translate them second, using subject matter experts, because not every translator is an expert of everything. So you always look as subject matter expert and you involve them from glossary creation and then provide context. I think it’s also very important to provide the translation team with that contents when translating those key terms. Like some guidance and some style guides are really good, too, to keep all the content in the same page. And I think my favorite of all, like everything, is collaboration. I think some clients have client reviewers, and they usually are experts in the content that they are translating. So, you know, like open communication before the translation partner, the translators, the client reviewers, I think is very important. So everybody is in the same page with the final localized product.

Nicholas Strozza
And just to add, languages are very, very preferential. So we do recommend if an organization has an in country or subject matter expert or native speaker to get involved early on because of those preferences. I’m really glad Maria brought up the glossary concept, because that’s something that, it’s almost like the foundation to building a house. It’s something that we should really do early on in the process, establish those key terms, and it will save a lot of time later on if you know. Well, instead of sneaker, I want shoe, the translation is accurate. There could be 17 ways to say popcorn in Spanish, depending on where you’re from. It’s all popcorn. But what are the preferences? What is the best translation that this specific client and their tone and their market needs?

Scott Rutherford
Well, Nick, Maria, it’s been a pleasure chatting with you.

How can someone get a hold of you if they would like to talk translation? Local localization?

Nicholas Strozza
Yeah, we’re super flexible and would love to have a follow up conversation with anybody or that might have a question or a sample quote or a pain point and what they’re currently doing with translation or localization definitely can reach out to us through our website, www.interproinc.com, or connect with us on LinkedIn. Happy to help, happy to get on a call and just be a good consultative partner for you.

Scott Rutherford
Great. Well, good to talk to you, and thanks for coming on the podcast.

Maria Fagrelius
Thank you for having us.

Nicholas Strozza
Yeah, this was fun. Thank you so much. Appreciate it.

Scott Rutherford
This has been the AXIOM Insights Learning and Development podcast. This podcast is a production of AXIOM learning solutions. AXIOM is a learning and development services firm with a network of learning professionals in the US and worldwide, supporting L and D teams with learning staff, augmentation and project support for instructional design, content management, content creation and more, including training, delivery and facilitation, both in person and virtually. To learn more about how AXIOM can help you and your team achieve your learning goals, visit axiomlearningsolutions.com. And thanks again for listening to the AXIOM Insights Podcast.