Instead of finding it challenging to justify and prioritize localization, enterprises are struggling more with how to integrate localization into their L&D strategies and ensure that they do in fact enhance learner engagement through localization. Their three biggest obstacles are incorporating appropriate cultural nuance (42%), the capacity to support localization at current staffing levels (39%), and a lack of in-house localization resource or expertise (36%).
Cultural nuance
Adapting learning content to reflect different cultural nuances gets to the heart of what localization is all about. Localization goes beyond 'mere' translation, requiring that it be more than just an accurate representation of bare meaning – it should also capture the intention and impact of the source content. This might, for example, require examples to be changed to resonate in a different cultural context, non-literal language to be thoughtfully reworked, or a different tone adopted to align with learner expectations.
And that's just the words. Training materials, especially for online learning, are often a mix of formats and fundamentally interactive. Localization requires the visuals (static or moving) to be adapted to different cultural realities, and sometimes the format or structure of the materials as well, to cater to different learning preferences. Failing to localize properly in all of these ways means that the content will resonate less with learners, who will therefore be less likely to engage with and understand it properly. All of which undermines the effectiveness of the training and the value it can deliver.
Among the challenges of localizing learning content, cultural adaptation – a much wider objective than translation – stands out. This challenge is so fundamental that I'm going to cover how to address it in two separate blogs to come – watch this space!
L&D capacity and localization resource/expertise
Faced with issues of L&D capacity or localization resource, enterprises are outsourcing some or all of their training localization work. Just over a quarter of the survey respondents manage localization entirely by outsourcing and more than half use some level of outsourcing.
Most of the enterprises surveyed are also using machine translation, either with or without human review and refinement. Besides its speed and cost benefits, it can also help to address resource issues, but the trick is knowing when it's suitable for use without human review, when it's suitable but only with human review, and when it isn't suitable at all. We'll explore this further in one of our later blogs addressing the issue of cultural nuance.