How do translated courses work in Brightspace?

Maureen.B.923

Currently, our Brightspace environment and all our courses are English-only. Someone recently asked for two courses to be translated into German.

How does Brightspace handle translated content? I see that we can import language packs ( https://community.d2l.com/brightspace/kb/articles/4231-import-or-export-a-language-pack ) - but that only affects the UI translation, correct?

• For translated courses, do you create two courses: One in English and one in German?
  • Has anyone presented the translated content differently? (E.g. all in one course?)
• If working with translators, is there a way to export a Brightspace course into an xml file for translations and re-import it?
• Any other tips as we embark on preliminary translation research?

Jeffrey.M.844

Hello @Maureen.B.923

You are correct that our language packs will only convert language that is defined by the product, namely the UI terms you're alluding to. Anything that requires user authoring (content, widgets, etc) would need to be translated separately.

Typically, translation of content can be done either

1. in-house, client side
2. outsourced to a third-party*

*note: you may wish to connect with your client sales executive (CSE) to see if D2L can provide these services for you. We do offer Learning Services, which can help you build out courses and offer advice on best practice.

In my experience, I've generally seen customers have separate courses — the number of courses determined by the number of languages they wish to offer the course in. Technically speaking, there are custom dev-heavy ways to have a single course where both the UI terms and course content responds to a change to the user's chosen language/locale, but this does not happen out-of-box. Out-of-box, again, only the UI components or terms mapped in our langauge packs respond.

If you're looking to be connected with another customer who might have taken it upon themselves to implement a custom solutions (i.e one course, multiple languages), I'd invite you to reach out to your Customer Success Manager, who may be able to help connect you with other customers who have done this already. Alternatively, I encourage those who might have done this themselves participate in this discussion :)

I hope that helps!

Jeffrey

Learning Administration Manager