Translation feature needs a review

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1

The translation functionality in the new Evolve needs some new/updated features to work practically in a production environment.

Background:

  1. All courses are created in English based on how Evolve works. However, I more often speak and create courses in Swedish. Some of these are later requested to be translated into English. This is not something I know in advance—it may come as a customer request after the course has already been launched. In such cases, it becomes logically inconsistent to translate the course into English when Evolve already assumes the course is in English.
  2. We use many images/iframes that contain text. When a course is translated via XLIFF, images/iframes/URLs are not handled in the translation. This means that the course, after translation, does not truly exist in multiple languages, since images/iframes must be inserted with a specific language. In practice, this means that when I translate a course into, for example, Finnish, it effectively becomes a separate course. As a result, the entire idea of supporting multiple languages within a single course is lost.

Proposed solutions (requests):

  1. Allow us to set a base language other than English.

  2. Solutions for issue #2 could include the following alternatives:

    2.1 (I’m not sure if this is feasible) Could image references (from the asset library), image URLs, and iframe URLs also be included in the XLIFF file?

    2.2 Allow inserted images to be language-dependent, so that an image/iframe component can have multiple URLs linked to different languages.

2

@Anders we released support for localised assets last week… however, that only covers images, audio, video & captions - we still need to come up with a solution that allows for localised iframe content.

As for ‘Allow us to set a base language other than English’ - we have had a couple of requests for this already and it is something we are considering. The challenge with this is that doing so means we would really need to add RTL language support for editing content - which is not particularly straightforward.

Whilst it’s not ideal, there is a workaround to create a Swedish-only course: create a new course and populate it with Swedish content. Then ‘translate’ it into Swedish by exporting a Swedish XLIFF, ‘translate’ just one of the strings[1] in the XLIFF file, then import it back in again. You will then have the option to select Swedish when publishing the course. I’ve just tried doing this and it seems to work fine, due to the way that Evolve will ‘fall back’ to using the ‘master language’ version of a string when no translated version exists.

  1. Pick something that is unlikely to change like the ‘Course Complete’ text ↩︎