We love the eLearning translation and localisation tools available in Trivantis Lectora, but there are some common user mistakes and gotcha’s that might cost you lots of development time.
Here are three tips for translations in Lectora in that can make life so much easier.
1. Change the colour of white fonts in the exported RTF
Any text in a white font will be invisible (because of the white background in the RTF) and translators are liable to miss them.
When you export to the RTF, open it up and use search and replace to change the font colour to something that’s unused, such as neon yellow or green. On return of the translated RTF, you can use search and replace to change the colour back to white.
2. Search and replace ‘%20’ with ‘ ‘ in the translated RTF
When translators work with the RTF files you export, they use editors such as Microsoft Word which can mess up hidden data in the document they pass back to you. Trouble is you often cannot see the problem, and on exporting you come across a mass of broken links.
One common occurrence is space characters in hidden (but critical) fields being replaced with ‘%20’. By using a document management tool (such as Powergrep) to search and replace all occurrences of ‘%20’ with spaces BEFORE you import has saved us hours of time.
3. Scan the RTF for common translation problems, do not wait to solve problems in Lectora
Remember, it is much quicker to isolate problems BEFORE importing (point 2 above is a copper-bottomed example).
Common problems include:
- Translated variables – Seems to occur a lot – search for VAR instances and if necessary, copy over the VAR declarations from the pre-translated RTF.
- Links corrupted or split – We found scanning for ‘%22’ in the RTF was reliable for highlighting problem links
- Broken tables – This seems to occur when images are included in table cells…unfortunately there seems to be no easy fix… However, this is a known Lectora bug.
If you are looking to manage elearning translation or localisation in Lectora then hopefully these tips will help. Best of luck!