The client had a colossal task at hand: translate a multitude of texts on multiple subjects, including materials requiring transcription and voiceover, and deliver them in multiple file formats, all while working to a very tight deadline.
About the client
The company matches information about the energy industry and labour market with the needs and interests of job seekers, employers, and industry stakeholders to ensure Canada has the skilled workforce required for a thriving energy sector today and tomorrow.
Background/challenge
The company’s entire corporate content needed to be translated into French for multiple platforms:
- Website
- Digital training and course materials
- General communications, marketing and collateral materials
- Virtual reality documents
- Research material
- Labour market analyses/energy reports
- Podcasts and videos
Much of the work entailed special expertise, so the company turned to TRSB for its technical know-how and translation experience.
The training content came from two different suppliers—one that worked with Articulate, the other with Adobe Captivate—and so TRSB had to work with both formats. In fact, the client needed a turnkey MP3/MP4 solution involving InDesign and other file types too. All told, more than 50 hours of post-production work was entailed.
The video game content also posed a challenge as it contained many plays on words. This required the special attention of TRSB’s marketing specialists. A further 36 podcasts and videos required not only translation but also voiceover. TRSB provided a selection of voice options.
Outcome
TRSB set to work creating a multidisciplinary team of linguists, project managers, designers, and technical experts to tackle the project. We had to get quickly up to speed on the various file formats, to provide best quality and optimum advice. Working with the client’s training providers was key in developing solutions that kept the project on time and on budget:
- For Articulate Rise e-learning modules, TRSB’s technical team exported the copy for translation (415 pages in all, some of them interactive), prepped the files, reformatted them, and reimaged them in the Rise module.
- Rise also has an embedded storyline, so when we saw there was a narrated word of welcome and introductory paragraph, we suggested using text-to-speechto save time and reduce costs.
- For Captivate—another popular e-learning authoring tool for subtitled video—TRSB recreated the logos in French as required.
The result was turnkey convenience and total ease of content integration. Just for the training content, TRSB turned around some 120,000 words in mère days in nine different file formats. All files were sent back in final layout.
At project end, the client hired an independent consultant to review TRSB’s work and found no errors. Combining technical expertise with translation experience, TRSB delivered everything on time and on budget. The project is now moving on to a subsequent phase for which TRSB has provided quotations.
