@Daniel Challenging problem! My team has been trying to find best practices (that work within our limitations) for a long time. We current support English, Spanish, Portuguese, but I suspect we’ll be adding French and German within the near future.

We tried the translation house process (way too expensive, slow, and frankly, wrong), in house native speakers (some are good, but many are too colloquial in their work choice, grammar, etc.), and even Google Translate.
 

Driven mostly by costs and timelines, we’ve settled on having our Instructional Designers (IDD) use online tools. For voice over, we use Maestra. We did some trials for the different voice offerings, and decided on ones we felt were most authentic. For strict text translation, we use Deep L. For tools that required a license, we purchased one license and use a “I’m logging in now” “I’m done” messaging system so that we have only one user at a time (to comply with license agreement).

After the IDD completes the machine translation, we use in-house native speakers (where available) to review and help us with some of the topic-specific vocabulary.

Regards,

KMallette/Viasat, Inc.

We have to be able to give a certificate of proof that the translation is what the original was. For this we have to go to an external vendor and it is quite costly so it becomes a ‘if you would like your courses translated we charge back to your area, can you manage the cost?” type proposition, which limits it to just things that really provide value in translation vs. nice to haves. It is costly.

Also, the update and management cycle is infinitely more complex as a result which is always annoying.