CASE STUDY: Translating over 30 e-Learning courses into Spanish for SORENSON

PROJECT SUMMARY

Client: Sorenson
Service: Translation Project (Spanish)
Format: Multimedia content
Subject Matter: eLearning
Volume: 40 eLearning courses

Sorenson is not just one of our best clients, but one we deeply admire. The reason? Their mission is to help all deaf and hard-of-hearing people communicate. We have been working alongside Sorenson for quite some time now, but we were mostly involved in simple projects. However, at Idea Translations, we are passionate about embarking on challenging tasks. Sorenson approached us with an exciting new project: The launch of their service center in Puerto Rico, a project which involved more than 30 eLearning courses!

Our work consisted of the translation, voiceover and design of each of these courses into Spanish.

However, we were met by several challenges. The first, and most important one, was to “meet in the middle” with the client about their expectations in terms of deadlines. On the one hand, we had a deadline by which the client needed to have these courses ready. On the other hand, we needed to be sensitive about the time required to carry out such a project achieving optimal quality results (taking into account that eLearning courses are quite time-consuming for optimal results and that they were intended for sign language interpreters).

Nonetheless, we were able to overcome this first challenge thanks to the quick response of our PM Team, who swiftly organized the workload and, alongside the QA and DTP Teams, were able to move forward with these nearly 40 courses.

Once the project was underway, we faced a second challenge: how to achieve consistency regarding the instructions, and how to remain consistent throughout all courses. Considering that the project included many individual courses, multiple people were involved in their development. We received requests from several team members with sometimes opposing instructions, which posed a problem for project homogeneity in general and, consequently, slowed the process down.

At last, after several meetings with the client, we managed to outline general parameters that applied to all courses and to the project as a whole, allowing us to move forward. For a better organization, we created a glossary and a deadline spreadsheet that was shared with the client. These allowed us to speed up revisions, approve or suggest modifications in different project stages, implement suggested changes and keep moving forward in the process.

However, all these unforeseen events and challenges delayed the workflow. The deadline was ever-approaching and, given the status of the project, it seemed as if it was going to be very tough to meet it. But nothing has ever stopped us. We came even closer as a team, we recruited internal and external collaborators and we started our engines and moved forward, with more energy and motivation than ever before, thus managing to complete the project just in time.

The satisfaction upon completion was immense. The success was not only in terms of deadlines, but also in the quality obtained. Our Sorenson partners were satisfied and all set to train their team in Puerto Rico, to fulfill their valuable mission of helping deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals.

This was a great new challenge for the entire team at Idea Translations. Once again, we were able to overcome our obstacles by learning, growing and becoming stronger along the way.