The translation tools in Lectora are excellent. I’ll tell you about how we’ve used them recently so I can explain what’s so good about them.
We were building courses for a well-known, international company, which would be rolled out to their service teams. The process we followed was to build the English version, get everything in them tested and approved, and then make copies of the course for the translations.
Lectora allows you to export the text from the course, and it is incredibly easy to do. You go to the 'Tools' section of the ribbon menu, click 'Translations', decide whether you want to export the text from one page or one chapter or one section or the whole course, click 'OK', and voilá.
It produces an RTF file, which we sent to the translation company we were working with. They would translate the text in that document and send it back to us. Then - repeating the above process but importing instead of exporting - we would re-integrate the text back into a copy of the course. That whole bit takes about 30 seconds, and there you have it, a version of your course in Spanish or Hungarian.
It's worthwhile checking through the course after you've done this - text takes up different amounts of space in different languages, and you want to make sure it doesn't overrun. But even with the time for testing, we can have 10 language versions of a 75 page course produced in less than 2 days.
Lectora makes this job so efficient and so simple, but of course everything comes with its own set of struggles.
The typeface we were using, Open Sans, was embedded in the course. In several languages - Czech, Polish and Hungarian for example - we discovered that some characters didn't exist in the fontset. As a result, these characters would display as the default typeface in whatever browser was being used - so random letters would be in a different typeface to the rest of the word.
The solution we came up with was to tell these courses to download the stylesheet from the web, rather than searching for it within the course. Problem solved.
If you're having struggles with translation, give us a call and we'll help you out!