Note: This blog post was originally written in Japanese for our Japanese website. We use our machine translation platforms to translate and make automatic corrections, and then partially edit to fit the content in English.
As companies expand globally, training programs and materials increasingly need to work across multiple languages. Making sure employees from different countries and backgrounds can accurately understand the same content has become a critical challenge. This is true whether they speak Japanese, English, Chinese, or Spanish.
In this post, we introduce Articulate 360, a tool that's especially useful for localization. Articulate 360 is used worldwide in e-learning production, and its intuitive interface lets you build e-learning materials with images, video, quizzes, and branching scenarios.
Rise and Storyline, the two services available within Articulate, offer features that are particularly useful for translation and localization, making it efficient to deliver training materials in multiple languages. In this post, we'll introduce both tools from a translation perspective.
Articulate 360 is an e-learning authoring platform used by educators and designers around the world, adopted by more than 120,000 organizations globally.
No special programming knowledge is required. Anyone can create e-learning content that works across devices, including smartphones and tablets. With a wide range of templates and resources available, the platform supports both team collaboration and localization.
One of Rise 360's key features is that it lets you build training courses intuitively, right in your browser. Because the system lets you build content, including text, images, video, and quiz-style widgets, block by block, the layout generally stays intact.
One feature that's especially useful for localization is the ability to export an XLIFF file for translation. When you click the "Export XLIFF file" button in your e-learning course, all the text in the course material is extracted as a translation file. By importing that file into a translation tool, entering the translations, and re-importing it, your course is translated in no time.
Images and PDFs embedded in e-learning courses can also be downloaded, translated, and swapped back in. In addition, common UI elements such as "NEXT" and "START COURSE" can be translated in bulk for each language, making it easy to localize the entire course.
Since you can duplicate and update courses right in your browser, creating multiple language versions based on the English original goes smoothly. And delivering the finished translations is just as simple: you can transfer permissions within Rise and export the entire course set to various formats with a single click.
With Storyline 360, you can create interactive learning materials where the story branches based on learner input. You can build everything from simple content to complex scenarios with animations, making it approachable for beginners while still offering the advanced features experts need.
For localization, you can export text in bulk, in XLIFF or Word translation table format. Storyline supports the same efficient translation approach as Rise: export, translate externally, and re-import. You can also embed audio and subtitle files, and the Storyline desktop app gives you a high degree of flexibility per language, letting you edit subtitle text and breakpoints and adjust audio timing.
You can also import content you've created in Storyline into a Rise course.
Articulate 360 is a platform built for creating e-learning content with multilingual support in mind. In this post, we've covered Rise, which enables intuitive, template-based creation, and Storyline, which enables more advanced interactive content. It may not yet be as widely recognized as Microsoft Office, but it's an excellent choice for creating and translating in-house training materials and online courses.
If you're working with Articulate 360 and need a localization partner who knows the platform, we're here to help.
・The World's Best Creator Platform for Online Workplace Learning | Articulate
At Kawamura International, we have a proven track record translating e-learning courses built with Articulate into multiple languages, including Japanese, English, and more. We specialize in professional human translation across specialized fields such as IT, healthcare, law, and finance, and maintain consistent quality through statistical quality control methods. We're also certified under ISO 17100 and ISO 27001.
If you're looking to localize your e-learning content, we'd love to hear from you. Free estimates are available.