I’ve just been looking through “The Localization Industry Primer”, produced by LISA, the Localization Industry Standards Association. It’s a good read, and if you’ve anything to do with the global elearning business, you should read it.
I was reading it because I’m trying to clarify the difference between the current practice of “localization” in the elearning business, and what I think is necessary to produce genuinely effective elearning. LISA’s primer says that the ultimate aim of localization is to produce a product that looks like it was developed in the country of use.
Wow. Let’s be honest: most localised elearning, particularly in corporate environments, doesn’t get within a mile of that.
Here’s an un-scientific anecdote. I was involved in “localising” an American course a couple of years ago, on the subject of eCommerce. We were a British team, working in London, UK for a British client. We were incredibly thorough, changing not only US spellings and terminology (flavor, sidewalk), not only US examples and context (Sainsbury, not Wall Mart), but idiom, pace, graphical style, interface…And when we got to the end of it, we congratulated ourselves on a job well done, but came to the immediate conclusion that it still felt American. Why? A thousand reasons: linearity and sectionalism; the up-beat style (we’d tried to change it, but it was just too deeply ingrained in the content); the frequency of testing, and the sense that one answer was always the right one; the lack of self-doubt; the lack of our style of humour; reliance on text; lack of story; a kind of optimistic falseness – now that might have sounded offensive, and I’m sorry if it did. That’s easily done across cultures. These were, of course, just perceptions from our cultural viewpoint, but they were genuine, and they were what we, as professionals felt. And of course, US and British cultures are hardly the most distant.
But the point is, we had done all we could to change the surface features, but something about the “deep structure” was wrong. It just didn’t feel right. That’s another thing about cultural incongruity: it has a tendency to get under the radar; to confuse or disorientate without us knowing that it’s happening. LISA’s primer mentions this as well. It talks about the importance of designing from the ground up in anticipation of global deployment. It says: “Design Globally right from the start”. They call this "internationalization", which facilitates later localization.
Current approaches to localizing elearning take on the complex task of altering the surface features of elearning products. They adjust language, graphics, terminology, minor context and so on – and that’s a difficult and subtle job. But they ignore an even more complex task, and leave the deep structure alone. They don’t generally concern themselves with pedagogical approach, an understanding of culturally influenced views of knowledge, power and authority relationships, sense of identify, sense of time and pace, and so on.
The problem is that much of our most important learning is inextricably tied in with deeper issues like these.
This is what I’ve called elsewhere, the “tips ‘n tricks” approach, and the result is like a scruffy Englishman investing in an Italian designer suit, hoping that he’ll be passed off as a stylish Mediterranean: he looks good, but everyone will know there’s something wrong. (That was a piece of British self-deprecating mischief, by the way, and not intended to be offensive, nor taken literally).
One apparent advantage of current approaches to localisation is that they fit in with a process that we can recognise as instructional design. Instructional goals and strategies are produced, content is written, interfaces structured, and then relatively late in the process, localisation kicks in.
Producing elearning products that feel like they’re made in the country of use would use a quite different process. Once business needs – global business needs – have been determined, you would have to examine instructional goals to see how, at a high level, these would need to vary in different cultures to meet the business needs. You might have to make a decision at this point to produce quite different training objectives for different cultures, in order to get the same business result; or significantly varying content or learning strategies. Simply adding an extra task during your audience analysis phase won’t crack it. And of course, you would involve learners from those cultures to help you connect business goals with instructional strategies.
Next time you use, or think about buying, an elearning product, of whatever origin, ask yourself would this product have been made like this in my country? Would they even have bothered making it at all?
6:05:32 PM 
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