Adobe Captivate 2017: An E-Learning Translation Review

In April, Adobe released the latest version of Adobe Captivate, its premiere course authoring software. Captivate is a powerful tool for e-Learning translation, featuring captions text output and importing for translation, as well as an assets library and integrated text-to-speech, which are particularly good for cost-effective translation. This new release doesn’t disappoint, adding a couple of exciting features for localization professionals.

This blog post will review Adobe Captivate 2017, listing its three main improvements for translation and localization.

[Average read time: 4 minutes]

New & improved features for e-Learning translation

Let’s jump right in.

Responsive content and fluid text boxes

This is the main improvement in Adobe Captivate 2017, and the one that Adobe is pushing the most. Captivate 2017 supports responsive content; that is to say, content that can re-size and shift layouts for a variety of viewing situations, all the way from HD monitors to mobile screens. The same course can reflow for mobile applications, effectively. One of the main features of this thew new fluid text boxes, which re-size depending on the amount of content in them and the requirements of the viewing platform.

In the following screen capture, you can see this feature at work – note that the screen is re-sized to preview on an iPhone 6 (in yellow highlight):

This is exciting for localization for one big reason – it should lower the DTP formatting required for courses with re-imported, translated captions. Why? Because one of the main tasks of DTP formatting is re-sizing and re-flowing captions boxes for text expansion, which can be quite dramatic in some languages, especially if the translations use parentheticals. Fluid text boxes that can re-flow and re-size automatically should remove the need for a lot of this work. We’ll update this post as we do more projects with fluid text boxes.

Adobe Typekit and font language filters

Captivate 2017 integrates Adobe Typekit – Adobe’s online, subscription-based font library – directly into the software, free-of-charge. The idea of Tykpekit is to provide a large font library to online applications for a recurring fee. And of course, fonts in the library are optimized for web viewing.

So why is this exciting for localization? Because Typekit includes language support it its font filters, as you can see in the following screen shot:

Developers can pick course fonts that will support all of their target localization languages, for example – however, note that this can be tricky, since few fonts support the full Unicode set. For example, there are 317 families above for all the Latin-character languages selected. Once we select Russian (in a Cyrillic alphabet), the number of font families goes down to 71.

Note also that many languages aren’t on the list, including Asian double-byte languages (Chinese, Korean), Asian languages like Thai and Hindi, or African languages like Somali and Amharic. Hopefully Adobe will be adding that soon, even if the number of fonts per language is small. Finally, the font filters have a special tab just for Japanese fonts – about 35 families total, and sorted by various attributes.

Captions

This is possibly the most disappointing part of Captivate 2017. After Storyline rolled out its full captions format compatibility, we expected Captivate to follow suit. Sadly, Adobe just added a few new feature upgrades to its current captioning system.

The Captivate captions feature, which has been part of the software now for a few releases, isn’t bad. It provides a relatively easy-to-use interface for adding captions to slides – check out our previous post on adding captions to courses for e-Learning translation.  For this iteration, Captivate added user controls for title position and opacity – you can see them in the following screen capture:

Finally, it allows users to set the captions formats per slide – great since slides usually have different text flows. However, it’d be ideal if Captivate could integrate standard captioning and subtitling formats like SRT, SCC, or TTML – this would be a much more cost-effective option, especially for courses with large amounts of voice-over audio. Finally, it’s good to keep in mind that Captivate supports embedding YouTube videos in slides, supporting any captions options as well.

What about text-to-speech?

One of the great things about Captivate is its integration of text-to-speech (TTS) directly into the program. Unfortunately, there are no new TTS features or voices in this release, though the VO generation panel has been streamlined a little.

The verdict

While the new captioning features are underwhelming, and the lack of text-to-speech improvements is a bit frustrating, otherwise the new features of Adobe Captivate 2017 are pretty exciting, especially the integration with Typekit. This feature should give e-Learning course developers much more oversight of which fonts are used in the localized versions of their content – especially significant for non-Latin languages, in which developers had almost no input font-wise. We’ve yet to see exactly how much the fluid text boxes will affect DTP formatting, but are excited to try them out. The verdict, in short: these new features are welcome additions to an already-great e-Learning localization program.