When we create courses for global audience, oftentimes we come across a need for localized version of the course. The common workflow is to create the course in one language and then duplicate the course and then change the language for text/graphics/audio. This is the easiest way to localize content, but is an inefficient workflow for course maintenance, where you need to make the same edits in each version of the course.

To overcome this problem, Adobe Captivate provides you a way to create a single course with multiple language options. This can be done by using Advanced Actions and Variables.

Here’s an example of a course with multiple language options. Take a look…

If you know how to use advanced actions and variables in Adobe Captivate, it’s very easy to create such a course. The logic used here is that each language is associated with a variable. The default value of these variables is zero. When a learner clicks the button related to a particulate language, the value of the variable changes to one and he/she is taken to the next slide. On entering the next slide, Captivate checks for the value of the variable and shows/hides the captions accordingly.

Here are the detailed steps:

1. Create the screen layout and add the common screen elements for the course.
2. Add the buttons/click boxes related to each language on the first screen.
3. Add text related to each language on the screen and label the text captions appropriately.
4. Uncheck Visible for all the text captions.
5. Select the text captions on the screen, right-click and select Align > Align and resize to the same size. This will place all the text captions on top of each other.
6. Repeat this step for the rest of the screens.
7. Click Project > Variables.
8. Add a variable for each language and set their value to 0.
9. Then define the advanced actions. Click Project > Advanced Actions.
10. Define standard actions for each language button where if the learner clicks on a button, the variable value related to the button should change to 1.
11. Now define a conditional action which will check the value of variables and display the captions accordingly. The limitation with Advanced Actions is that you can show an object on a slide only if it is present on that particular slide. But we will use it for our advantage by creating just one conditional action for all the slides. 🙂
12. The conditional action should check if the variable values are equal to one and show all text captions for that particular language else hide all.
13.  Select the English button on the slide. Set the On Success action to Execute Advanced Actions and select English as script.
14. Select the French button on the slide. Set the On Success action to Execute Advanced Actions and select French as script.
15. Select the Spanish button on the slide. Set the On Success action to Execute Advanced Actions and select Spanish as script.
16. In the Filmstrip view, select slide 3, 4, and 5. Set the On Success action to Execute Advanced Actions and select Language as script.

Feel comfortable working if you have an example in front of you? Here’s the link to download the example project.

Happy captivating! 🙂