Images and Media folders

You can absolutely share resources between projects! (A fact I discovered far too late on my first project after replicating an image repository with almost 1GB of files 10 times...). I keep mine on a network drive dedicated to storage because I work across multiple VDIs, and I can access/edit images no matter which one I'm logged into.

You can do like you said, put the media in a central location, and when you bring them into Lectora, you only have to specify the location of the media. I've found that when starting a new project, Lectora seems to remember the last location I used to load images from.

As for publication, Lectora will include any images that were used in your slides - if you have, say, 100 unique images in your repository and you only use 20 unique images in your project, Lectora will only include those in the published files.

Based on your OP, it sounds like you've made 4 distinct projects, one for each language you are looking to support. If that's the case, you should know it is possible to make a single course that houses your multiple language content, instead of splitting it into distinct project files. That would greatly reduce your project file size as well!

Hi @zliquorman1276

Thanks for your advice about images, that is good to know, I'll try it out.

As far as my projects go, I have large files (20+ chapters), with text at the title level, as well as text in quiz question text entry boxes. I have to export this for each chapter for translation. I can't see how I can keep a single file, with multiple languages, if there are multiple files.

I would have to combine the translated work back into a single file. I know that there is an option on publish, to select a translation file for each language to be published, but I need to select 20+ translation files, and then I always need to edit the file after translation because the text moves things around. There is a significant difference from the size and appearance of Russian, Portuguese, English etc...

It would also mean, if I make any changes to the source, then I'd have to republish in every language, and that would be ok if there were not edits required to the output, but there are currently so many changes required after I import the translated text, I can't imagine this would save me time.

Maybe the translation feature is optimised for small projects. If you have further advice that I'm missing, I'd love to hear it.

Thanks again for your help.

Regards

amanda

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Combining the work into a single file that you load your multiple translations into is going to be the most efficient workflow, especially when you're working with large projects, and I'll explain why I think so:

Most, if not all of those issues you mentioned with having a single file can be avoided at the design-level. Trivantis provides decent advice on this, including video instruction, but I think the key takeaway is that when you're creating content, you would (ideally) be keeping in mind that where text-content is concerned, every language takes up a different amount of space on the page to say the same thing. Obviously you're already painfully aware of this, as when you translate your projects you've noticed how things get moved around on the page.

The best way to accommodate that is to plan your stage-space around the largest content you'll have. In other words, determine from whichever languages you're providing content for which takes up the most raw space, and plan your content around that (text box sizes, image spacing, etc.). That way, when you publish with other language translations, they'll only take up less space, never more, and your content won't get displaced by the subsequent translations. If you're unsure which of your languages are taking up the most space, you'll either have to experiment a little to find out, or just play it safe by adding plenty of padding to your text boxes/object spacing so there's room for expansion should a translation take up more space.

This should solve your problem of needing to make edits after publishing new translated content, which in turn will dramatically reduce the time required to support your additional languages!

As a side note: The issue of multi-language support becomes a little more complicated if you start adding custom HTML text content to your projects, but that's it's own issue and if you're doing that, chances are you probably already have an idea of how to accommodate that.

Thanks Zachary. Your comments makes sense, and when I design any new content, I'll keep those things in mind, along with everything I've learnt from my experience over the last couple of years. The problems I'm having now are due to maintenance of existing content, which is tightly designed with loads of text, and detailed instructions for software instruction.

Design is key, but often there are things you don't know at the design level, and you learn as you go along...

I have to agree with Zachary. When your doing multi-language projects make sure you take the difference of length in various languages into account. Then you can have 1 title with all languages. Did this before with projects with over 30 different languages. Imagine the workload. Now i got a project that also needs to be in Arabic. RTL texts... that makes things even more complicated.

Thanks Math, yep that's what I've learnt as well. I can't redesign the existing projects, but any future projects will need to be designed differently. It has highlighted the need to think differently about so many aspects of the design before building anything..