We learned inE-LEARNING: THE BASICS, that internationalization is the planning and designing of an e-learning course with the goal of making the course adaptable to a variety of languages later on.  

The internationalization process includes the design of 4 main components:

1) Content    2) Screen

3) Media       4) Technical

Content Design

This is the process in which you create your course blueprint.  Make an outline of how the course content should be structured and organized.  Identify your target audience and the countries your course will reach.  Extract localizable content from the course material, after the course content itself has been designed.  Research into cultural and locale differences are needed.

Screen Design

In this process, you will determine the amount of screen space needed for each language you decide to adapt the course material to.  For every language, a sentence or concept will use characters or words that will take up more or less screen space than other languages.  Asian languages, for example, use characters that take up much less screen space than English words.  On the other hand, languages such as Spanish and German require more screen space. 

Media Design

This process focuses on the visual and auditory aspects of the course content.  Every culture has an innate set of rules in regards to what sorts of images and graphics are appropriate or inappropriate, and the media design process is meant to assure that the visual aspects of the course are suitable to each target culture.  This process also involves attention to the usage of symbols and icons, as they do not mean the same thing across all cultures. 

Technical Design

This process is the key part of making thelocalization process easier.  Technical design involves redesigning and adjusting the underlying technical components of the course to allow adaptation into different languages.    Technical design makes the process of extraction easier which in turn facilitates the inclusion oftranslated material.

The key is to develop your course blueprint as if you were developing a blueprint for the designing of our house. 

In our next blog, we will look into the process of localization-  the decorating & furnishing of our “house” to make it perfectly suited to the user.