Many automatic LMS translation systems face the same two challenges; they’re slow, and they’re expensive. Sluggish translation systems frustrate end-users and destroy your search rankings, while subscription-based translation systems incur spiralling costs as your user base grows.
Because of these issues, we custom-built a translation system for On Track Learning that would:
Google Translate is considered one of the world’s best translation products. And while it is available to use on a commercial basis using Google’s APIs, the cost of real-time translations for thousands of users can very quickly rack up. So we approached things slightly differently to avoid such costs.
Instead of translating page content in real-time as each user requests it, we built a system that would translate page content when the page was created or edited by our client. The LMS would store the translation, and then deliver the pre-translated text to each user. With this approach, when 1000 users requested the translated version, instead of using 1000 translation credits, we’d only use 1.
This approach also meant that users didn’t have to wait for the translation to complete - it was already translated in advance, which reduced page loads by 1-2 seconds.
To offer a localized LMS experience, it was important to translate the course content. However, we needed to translate user-interface elements too like menu buttons, course navigation and informational pages. This translation system handles both the content and the user interface, and we hope to extend functionality to translate video captions in the future too.
Supported by 133 different languages including Spanish, French, German and Arabic, the system opened up compliance course access to thousands of non-English speakers.
