The first step in creating multi-lingual content is to convert your Project to a Parent. After your Project has been converted, you will be able to use various methods to translate it and release to your learners as a Multi-Language course.
A Parent is the source from which your translated Projects (called Variations) are created. It acts as a control for those Variations, updating them in kind whenever it is edited. For example, if you add a new element to a page in the Parent, that new element will automatically be added to all its Variations. This is useful for keeping your different language versions consistent with each other without the effort of individually updating them.
To learn more, see Understanding the behaviour and relationship of Parents and Variations.
Before you begin
We recommend that you bring your Project as close to the final draft as possible before converting it to a Parent and beginning the translation process. This can help you avoid time-consuming and complex re-translation work in the future—it‘s much less challenging to translate a final draft than a work-in-progress.
Converting a Project into a Parent and vice versa will delete its releases. Deleting a release also deletes any data it has collected so far. Your learners will no longer be able to use a release if it has been deleted.
Creating a Parent
You can create a Parent by converting a regular Project. You can do this either from Variations Manager or the Configure page. Both methods are identical and can be used interchangeably.
From Variations Manager
- Open the Project you’d like to convert and go to Variations Manager
- Select Convert to a Parent Course
- Confirm that you‘d like to convert it by clicking Convert to Parent Course in the dialog
Your Project has been converted and you‘re ready to begin translating.
From the Configure page
- Open your Project and click Configure in the secondary toolbar
- Click Convert
Converting a Parent Course back to a Project
You can convert a Parent back to a regular Project if you no longer need to use it as a Parent by following the steps outlined in From the Configure page.
If you‘ve already created Variations from the Parent, you will need to delete them before you are able to convert the Parent back to a regular Project.
Next Steps
Now that you‘ve converted your Project to a Parent, you can use any of several different methods to translate it. No one method is inherently better than the other but we recommend using Auto-Translate to significantly reduce translation time.
Here are some useful resources to get you started.