Just as working from home was already a popular alternative to office working even before the coronavirus pandemic, distance learning has also become an increasingly popular choice at universities. And this kind of e-learning will continue to play an important role in the future, as it allows domestic and international students to follow lectures and seminars without having to be physically present. As an educational institution, this means the whole world is open to you—provided that you offer your teaching materials in various languages.
Content in the students’ mother tongue is easier for them to understand and they will engage with it more effectively. There is therefore a growing need among educational establishments to translate scripts, scientific materials, and video subtitles, but also to offer multilingual interactive learning environments and educational games.
The following use cases illustrate some of the translation services that could help you to make the switch to distance learning at universities.
Case 1: Interactive lectures — translating webinars and videos
A German university wants to use webinars and videos as an engaging and resource-saving way of delivering recurring learning content. For the content to be accessible to international students, it has to be either subtitled or dubbed into other languages. So which option is better and when?
Both options give you the same added value: By having the subtitles or the whole video translated, you can make the same material available to a wider audience in various languages.
The first steps are the same for both subtitling and dubbing. Our native speaker translators start by transcribing the content—if no transcription is available. They then translate the text and, for subtitling, insert time codes. If necessary, they then adapt the length of the text sequence because our eyes take in information more slowly than our ears. Cultural differences are also addressed and localized during the subtitling and the dubbing processes.
Subtitling is less time-consuming and is thus a lower-cost alternative to dubbing. It can also be useful in other contexts, besides providing linguistic assistance. Subtitling makes content more accessible to people with hearing impairments, and people are much more likely to watch subtitled videos all the way to the end—and more intensely—than videos without subtitles. This also benefits your search engine optimization.
Dubbing educational videos makes even more sense when the original is text-heavy and you don’t want to compromise on the text length. Dubbed videos are also easier for viewers to follow, as they don’t have to be actively reading at the same time. We will find the right voiceover artist for you to create the perfect listening experience for the students and teachers at your institution.
Case 2: Internationalizing lecture and course materials
A university wants to offer its masters programs in sciences in both German and English, which means all the lecture materials need to be translated. Accurate, professional translation is even more essential when it comes to sensitive science subjects such as medicine, biology, and chemistry.
Our professional translators have experience in science translations for universities and specialize in specific subject areas. They can help you to translate your scripts and to internationalize research papers, specialist literature, and study documents.
The specialist translators are familiar with both the subject-specific material and the cultural requirements of the target market. This ensures that the translated materials are not only technically flawless, but also localized—for example using Fahrenheit instead of Celsius for American English.
If required, the translated scientific and academic texts can be checked and signed off by an external reviewer. The result: high quality teaching material, perfectly adapted for the target market.
Case 3: University platforms and apps for students
Almost every German university has its own platforms and apps for students, but it’s no good having German content if your audience is international. In our third use case, a university wants to attract more students from Spanish-speaking countries, so it arranges for its software and app to be translated into Spanish.
We work with highly trained mother-tongue IT translators who have not only the language skills but also the necessary technological know-how.
Software localization involves translating content such as user interfaces, dashboards, dialog and chat fields, menus, databases, privacy notices, and footers. Translators have to respect space-related constraints on the length of text and use standard terminology for buttons to ensure a good user experience. Depending on target market and language, the content has to be localized, i.e. culturally adapted, to take account of aspects such as date formats and units of measurement, but also metadata for search engine optimization.
For app translation and app localization, our translators include menus, buttons, texts for the Playstore, descriptions for the various functions and features, and metadata that enables the app to be found in the Playstore. Length limits are even stricter for apps and of course these limits also have to be respected in the target language. Translators sometimes use localized term variants to avoid the text on the buttons being truncated.
With the Spanish version, our customer was able to offer its students a mother-tongue platform and app that they fully understand and are able to navigate effortlessly.
Which market are you aiming to break into with distance learning?
Switching to distance learning to attract students from a variety of language and cultural groups can be time-consuming, but it’s worth it. As a language service provider, ACT will be by your side, guiding you through every step of the educational translation process.
We can translate your scientific and academic texts and materials into more than 150 languages to help you reach international students and position yourself more effectively in other countries as an educational institution. So you can concentrate fully on your core business: educating tomorrow’s generation.
