How to easily offer multiple languages within a single Gomo course

Gomo isn’t just about easy-to-use, responsive eLearning authoring—it’s a truly powerful platform that will help you realize your global eLearning ambitions. Gomo lets you build multiple language layers within every course you author, and it’s a feature that you won’t have to dig to find! Read on to discover how to add more languages to your courses, and start creating modules that speak to everyone.

You could say that one of Gomo’s core principles is that any single piece of eLearning content should be at its best whenever and wherever it’s accessed. This has always been true when it comes to devices—a link to your course will adjust to your laptop, your tablet, or your phone and truly shine on all of them. But the same “whenever, wherever” principle has also always been true when it comes to multi-language content.

How to add language layers to a Gomo course

Multi-language is an important feature in Gomo, so it’s only natural that it’s among the first options you see when building a new course. When you click on the “create a new course” option, you’ll be asked to provide a course name, description, default resource folder, and you’ll also be asked whether you want to start out with a single language or multiple languages.

Any Gomo course can be a multi-language course

Gomo’s course wizard is geared towards getting you up and running as quickly as possible—but your decisions are by no means final! Check out the “course settings menu” to add additional languages at any point.

Gomo has a long list of available languages with which you can create a separate language layer for your courses. Note that you can create separate layers for different dialects—allowing you to preserve the unique features of American and British Englishes, or account for the differences of the form of Spanish spoken in Europe versus those forms used in Latin America.

On the list of supported languages, you’ll also notice that Gomo has great support for various right-to-left reading languages such as Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew, and Urdu. When these languages are selected, Gomo will reflow all aspects of your visual layout—the menu will appear on the right instead of the left, completion indicators in your contents will appear on the opposite side of the button, and so on. All of this ensures that you won’t have to build a separate right-to-left version of your course—a significant time saver!

Whether you select multiple languages in the course wizard or add them later via course settings, this is essentially everything you need to do to prime Gomo for working with multiple languages. With one exception—don’t forget to add a language selector to your course! Check the “set up some extras” section in part three of course creation, or see “course structure” in the “course settings menu”.

2 approaches to translating your Gomo courses

There are two main ways that teams like to approach translation with Gomo. Some of our global customers find it easiest to just have people around the world log in to the platform, which is cloud-based and collaborative by nature, and make their edits directly.

Your other option is to use our single-click translation export feature. Clicking this will have Gomo generate everything you need in a format that you can send to your translation agency.

Should you use auto-translation?

Feedback from our global customers—and foreign-language speakers in general—is that auto-translation isn’t advanced enough for important eLearning content types. There could even be legal implications for incorrect wording in compliance content. Using professional, human translators will give your learners the best experience with minimal risk.

Approach 1: Give teams direct edit access to your courses

By sharing your Gomo course with different language speakers in your organization, you can have them work through each chunk of text in the editor, replacing text with an equivalent edit as they go.

This is easy for them to access once they’re logged in to Gomo. When your course is set up for multiple languages, check the upper right corner for a drop-down menu that allows you to select the language layer you wish to edit.

Gomo will pre-fill each layer with a duplicate of the content of your base language. Note that Gomo gives any area you haven’t yet edited a red overlay. This turns blue after you’ve edited it, helping you keep track of which text still needs your attention.

Though translating text will obviously be a big part of your localization effort, it’s also often appropriate to switch up the media in your course, such as your images. Accordingly, Gomo supports switching out image assets based on language selection—any edits you make in one language layer won’t overwrite those on another!

Approach 2: Single-click translation (with a translation agency)

If you need a higher standard of translation than is available within your business, Gomo can set you up with everything you need to work with a translation agency, essentially giving you a one-click translation process!

To take advantage of this feature, you’ll want to build your course in your base language (i.e. English) and make sure it’s all signed off and ready. Then, in the “Actions” menu, select “Translation Export (XLIFF)”. Gomo will work through all the topics and all of the screens in the course, extracting and tagging all the text and putting it into a series of XLIFF files within a ZIP archive.

As an international standard for translation, you can send this ZIP of XLIFF files to any translation agency. They will then work through these files in an XLIFF editor and send back the full translation. Then simply go back to actions, choose “Translation Import (XLIFF)” and enjoy your fully translated course! So long as you make sure to not edit your base course between export and import, Gomo will know exactly where to pop every piece of translated text, giving you a ready-to-use course with the fewest clicks possible!

And it’s as simple as that

With Gomo, you don’t have to create two separate language courses and “glue them together” with a menu. The functionality for self-contained, multi-language courses is front and center in the editor, and your learners will even be able to switch between languages on the fly. So, why author multi-language eLearning courses any other way?