By Sarah-Claire Jordan
To compete in this new globalized world of business that we have these days, a company needs to truly go above and beyond what is expected of them. Lately, that means doing quite a bit more to try and entice customers and clients than simply having a perfectly designed website, flawless customer service, and years of experience. It means giving your customers and prospective clients all of the information they could possibly want in order to make an informed decision about whether or not to use a product or service.
This is where e-learning and translation step in and play a rather interesting role. More and more companies are deciding to create e-learning content to share on their websites and in social media as a way to offer tutorials and demos of products and services for anyone to see. This is an excellent marketing tactic, as it lets the prospective customer or client learn more about the product or service without having to search for the information themselves. The only real issue is how to handle creating e-learning content in different languages.
There are a few different tools and platforms that can be used to create, translate, and share e-learning content, such as Articulate Storyline, among others. These tools make it simple to create content in one language, take the text and translate it with any CAT tool, and then use the translated text without changing the format or layout of the original content. Of course, for some languages, format and layout changes will have to be made, but that shouldn’t be an issue either.
Though not exactly a feature of e-learning content tools and platforms, less customer service issues is a result of creating tutorials and demos for the general public. If these demos and tutorials are in many different languages, this reduces the burden of customer service staff who might spend time resolving issues that the e-learning content clarifies. This only works, however, if the content is properly translated in the first place, but if it is, customer service ends up being something companies don’t have to invest as much time and money in.
One more benefit of utilizing multilingual e-learning is that it makes international or overseas training so much easier. This takes some strain off of the human resources departments of overseas branches, who might only have English material to work with and have a staff of people who have varying levels of English as a second language. Having training material, such as videos, powerpoint presentations, and more, already translated and localized in the native language of the overseas staff means training can be shorter, more informative and helpful, and even more economical.
Not everyone is going to get on board right away with the e-learning boom, but it’s becoming more and more popular, and probably will continue to grow in popularity as time goes on. The platforms out there allowing for easy content creation and localization are making e-learning and translation the hot new things for companies to try in terms of marketing.