Courses Available In Other Languages

Administration

We now offer all of our training courses in alternative languages.

About the Translations

Translating training content is a huge undertaking. We are only able to do this with the help of a high-quality machine translation tool, DeepL. The translation will not be as good as if we manually translated every page with human translators, but feedback we got from a team of beta testers told us that the translated courses were effective and that it is much better to learn in your preferred language even with the limitations of the machine translation.

1. While we have translated our courses, we have NOT translated our Learning Management System, EspritLMS.
2. The course material is mostly translated. However, many graphics with text in them are not translated. This includes tables that are presented using a graphic. As time allows, we will go back and start working on updating key graphics with text in them.  We have tens of thousands of graphics and don’t expect that we will ever have them all translated but we do plan to translate key graphics in each course.
3. We are using a high-quality machine translator called DeepL. It is far superior to Google Translate or other commonly known translators. The translation is being done “on-the-fly.” As you come to each page, it gets translated and we store that translation in a database so that the next time that page, in that language, is visited, it will load more quickly with the translated text.
4. The narration is done with a synthesized voice which can be turned off. The narration content is at the bottom of each screen and it can be read instead of listened to if the learner don’t like the sound of the synthesized voice.

Adding Languages to Your Subscription and Assigning Languages to Learners

Language support is available at no additional fee, but you must request it be added to your subscription. Here is the form to make that request.

Adding language support to your subscription applies to all courses that you offer to your learners It also applies to your entire subscription; it can’t be selectively applied to some Training Groups but not to others or to some learners and not others.

Once language support is added to your subscription, you have two options to assign language support to learners.

Do Nothing

With this approach, each learner will be able to select their preferred language when they take a course. This information gets stored to their User Profile so that the language preference is preselected for the next course that they take. These users can always switch back to English or another language on the course page.

Set the Preferred Language in the Users Profile

We don’t recommend taking the time to do this unless you want to require the learner to take the training in a particular language.  In this case, you would Edit the User Profile, Select a Language and check the Single Language box.

Here is information that we provide in our help documents for learners about taking the courses in alternative languages.

Should You Offer Translations to Your Learners?

We are being honest that these translations are not perfect. Given the cost and relatively low usage of courses in languages other than English, it is not possible for us to use a human translation approach. Some languages translate better than others, but we only offer languages that were approved by beta testers as adequate.

Were you able to learn more effectively with the training in your preferred language?

We surveyed our beta testers on many aspects of the translations and have been able to make significant improvements to the actual translations and to the language functionality available to learners as a result. But, the most important question we asked all beta testers is: Were you able to learn more effectively with the training in your preferred language?

For every language we offer, the answer to that question by the majority of beta testers was YES!

You know your learners better than we do. Before offering alternative languages to your learners, we suggest that you or someone else in your organization review a course in the language you wish to offer and then decide if it is right for your situation.