Language versioning

When you have different versions of content for different languages, you need to choose between creating a course containing different language versions within that course, or creating a different course for each language version.

Language versioned courses

With a language-versioned course, you create a course in the first language and then you create different versions within the course by cloning all the slides and folders to the different language version folders.  

Advantages

• They're easy to understand and manage because everything is done within the course. 
• You have a better overview of how many have taken the overall course
• It's easier to manage learning objectives on the course because they are on the course level and therefore you have fewer 

Disadvantages

• Course progress is not fully supported and can be inaccurate. For example, if a participant changes between languages on their system, this can skew the data.  
• Course objectives need to be synced between the slides of a language and this can be complicated to manage.

Because of these pros and cons, this type of language versioning is recommended for portals and default user courses, where the user can be assigned the one version, structured and simple courses, where there are fewer slides and folders, and SCORM and xAPI, which typically don't have many learning objectives assigned to them and where you can choose the language at the start of the course.

Checklist for language-versioned courses

• Clear the Override User's Language Settings checkbox in the Course Editor.
• Make sure that all the course titles and descriptions in the course editor have language-versioned entries.
• Create as much content as possible before language versioning.
• If a course objective is shared between languages, make sure that on the learning objective in the Objectives Comparer type you choose Any. This is so course participants only need to meet one course objective for their language, not one for each language.
• If no course objectives are used, check settings for transfer score and status to course on relevant slides***.
• Don’t rely on course progress/pages seen for ***.
• Check that the course catalogs and learning plan assets use CourseDisplayTitle as variables but be aware that these can be longer in certain languages.
• Check each page + asset for labels that need to be translated.
  Note
  Contact Support if you need a “default empty” language versioning label.

Course per language

When you create a course by language, you create separate courses for each of the languages. 

Advantages

• It's easier to maintain course objectives and you have a greater overview of the course progress  
• The reporting is more precise - you can see the exact number of people who have taken the different versions of the course. 
• It's easier to follow up with certain users of a course in a certain language.
• You can control who has access to which language version

Disadvantages 

• When you enroll and management must set which language version a user has access to
• Reporting is only per language so you have to manually collate this information into a report
• Learning Objectives related to learning plans require extra settings and combined objectives

Because of these pros and cons, having separate courses for each languages is suitable for complex courses with multiple course objectives or courses and products where access to specific language versions is required. 

Checklist for courses per language

• Name courses relevantly and consistently so it's clear that the courses are language variants of the same course.
• Create a process for handling enrollments.
• Make sure to organize courses in course groups or categories.
• Create as much content as possible before language versioning.
• Check each page + assets labels that need to be translated.
  Note
  Contact Support if you need a “default empty” language versioning label.