I am creating a course consisting of 24 lessons, supposed to be published in six different language versions. Each lesson also has voice over. As the default text caption backgrounds in Captivate are not editable, I have placed most of the on screen text in Smart Shapes. The voice over is available in slide notes.

So, none of these are available for export and import. The export for translation option only exports captions and closed captions. Theoretically, I could use closed captions for the voice text. But then you need a sound file. thus, we’ve got a Catch 22. No closed caption without a sound file, and no sound file whitout text to read from. Obviously a case of the hen and the egg. I could, of course, create empty sound files for each slide, but we’re talking 700+ slides, and the time this would take will take the profit out of the project.

I know I can include Slide Notes in the print option, but then I will have to copy paste all translations back into the language versions. Besides, I really think it should be an option to print Slide Notes only, instead of one page per slide.

Text in Smart Shapes are not exportable at all, allthough it’s included in the search and replace function. This means that I have to do the translation inside Captivate.

I really think Adobe has a long way to go to make language versioning more convenient. Several other authoring tools has made this very easy, so I have a hard time understanding why it’s such a struggle in Adobe Captivate.