The e-learning industry grows every year, but the costs involved in translating a course often grow faster than the budget set aside for it. Any organisation that trains teams in several countries will recognise the pattern: the first version of the course is smooth and quick, the second version in another language takes noticeably longer, and by the time you reach language number six you start wondering why a simple update requires several people, a spreadsheet, and a headache.

Most of these problems come from one place: translation is treated as an afterthought. Once a course is locked, every small tweak after that point costs money. And if the course has already been built inside the authoring tool, your translators will see only a fraction of what needs reworking.

The irony is that avoiding these issues is not complicated. It simply requires decisions at the design stage that allow the course to travel across languages without turning into a production exercise. Below are the areas that influence both cost and time more than people expect, along with examples drawn from real projects rather than generic advice.

Decide early what actually needs translating

Many teams only export the on-screen text. Meanwhile, half of the meaning sits elsewhere: captions baked into images, feedback text in quiz widgets, narration that was written by someone who never produced a transcript, or UI labels stored in the LMS rather than in the SCORM package.

A translator can only work with what you give them. If an image contains text but no layered file exists, the only option is to rebuild the image in each language. Multiply that by 12 markets and you have a cost you never planned for.

A simple audit at the start avoids this. Check:

• Screens with embedded text
• Animated sequences with on-screen cues
• Narration written directly in the tool rather than as a script
• Quiz feedback stored in separate tabs or asset libraries
• Buttons, menus, and completion messages that belong to the LMS rather than the course

If you know where everything lives, you avoid the classic scenario of discovering three days before launch that half the strings were never translated because no one exported them.

Write in a way that survives translation

This is not about flattening your tone. It is about avoiding needless localisation work in each country. A few examples:

• Cultural references. A UK-centric safety course that talks about the A-roads or the British Fire Safety Order will not make sense in Denmark or Brazil. Translators can explain the reference, but the learner still loses the point.

• Colloquialisms. Informal phrasing works well in English, less so in languages that do not use direct equivalents.

• Ambiguous terminology. If your company uses the same term for two different processes, translators will guess wrong in at least one market.

This is why glossaries and examples matter. Not a long handbook. A simple list of key terms, the internal definition, and how they differ from near-synonyms. Translators then anchor the meaning rather than trying to infer it from scattered context.

Keep text light without turning the course into a comic strip

Word count matters because it multiplies across languages. If you translate into 15 languages, trimming even 200 words saves you thousands across the full run. The trick is to remove the right words, not to strip the course of clarity.

You reduce volume without harming the course when you:

• Replace a long explanation with a clear visual (not a decorative one, but an instructional one).
• Use video sequences where the action carries the meaning rather than the narrator.
• Cut filler phrases that creep into internal drafts: “in order to”, “as mentioned previously”, “it is important to note that”, and so on.
• Remove micro-sentences that sit below a heading and simply repeat it.

These cuts make the course better for learners as well. Shorter lines convert into faster comprehension.

Scripts save money. Always.

The quickest way to inflate a multilingual budget is to record a video without a script. It feels efficient when you are racing to get the English version out, but the cost comes later, right when you can least afford delays.

Without a script, the translation team must transcribe the audio before they can begin. Transcription is slow. And if the narrator spoke off the cuff, the text is rarely clean. You pay for the pauses, the rewrites, and the salvage work.

A script rewrites the economics of the whole process.

Why scripts change the game

A script gives every market the same baseline to work from. It also protects timing. English speakers tend to race ahead. Learners reading in German or French often need more seconds on screen to absorb the same idea. Without a script, you only discover this during post-production, when the animation has already been locked.

Scripts create room for:

• Accurate timings across languages
• Cleaner subtitle layout
• Voice-over consistency
• Faster quality checks

There is no romantic benefit to improvisation when the course must function across 10 or 15 markets. A script gives your team control over meaning, pacing, and cost.

Avoid text inside images unless you enjoy rework

Anyone who has translated a course with text baked into images knows the pain. You cannot lift the text. You cannot edit it. You must rebuild the image, layer by layer, for every single language.

A simple change to a sentence becomes a design project. And if a market requests a late update, you repeat the exercise. It is the kind of problem that feels small in the English version and enormous everywhere else.

When images can still work

Not all visuals cause trouble. Layered files are fine. Clean vector files are fine. The problem is flat assets with baked text. If you must place text visually, place it outside the image as on-screen text. Learners will not notice the difference, but your designers will.

The hidden cost

Once text is baked in, the timeline slows. One tiny change turns into seven steps:

1. Extract image
2. Rebuild design
3. Insert translation
4. Export
5. Replace asset
6. Republish
7. Re-test

Multiply that by each language. That is where the budget goes.

Build the layout with expansion in mind

Language expansion is not a theoretical concern. It happens on every project. German expands. Arabic changes line rhythm. Japanese reshapes the page. If your layout cannot absorb this, the translation becomes an engineering task rather than a linguistic one.

Three areas where expansion hurts the most

1. UI components

Buttons, tabs, feedback boxes, quiz elements. These are often built to fit English lengths. When a string grows, the layout breaks. Designers then nudge everything by hand. This eats time, especially on responsive courses.

2. Dense screens

Screens overloaded with paragraphs leave no room for movement. When the text grows, the designer must shrink font sizes, reduce line spacing or redesign the entire slide. None of that work adds value for learners. It is pure recovery work.

3. Narration and timing

Your narrator in English takes eight seconds. The same sentence in Spanish needs eleven. If the animation is tightly choreographed, there is nowhere for the voice to breathe. If subtitles are too long, they sit on screen too briefly, forcing learners to chase the line.

Layouts with breathing room avoid all these problems.

Integrate your LMS with your translation setup

Once you translate a course more than once, manual exporting stops being manageable. It works for a small pilot and then collapses under the weight of routine updates. A single missing file can stall an entire release.

An LMS, in case your team uses the tool daily without naming it explicitly, is your learning management system. It is the platform that stores your course files, tracks learner progress, handles enrolments, and pushes modules out to different teams or countries. It also happens to be the place where translation workflows either run smoothly or fall apart.

Integration between your LMS and your translation environment fixes this. Not because it is clever technology, but because it eliminates the steps humans always get wrong under pressure.

What integration actually changes

• You stop exporting SCORM packages by hand.
• You stop sending the wrong file version.
• You stop rebuilding navigation for every market.
• You stop chasing missing strings hidden in odd folders.

The LMS pushes the correct course elements to the translation team. The translated versions return in a structure your LMS recognises without rework. You gain control without drowning in admin.

Real-world impact

A team running quarterly compliance updates for 14 markets can recover weeks of time each cycle. Not through automation theatrics. Through the removal of all the avoidable friction that normally slows e-learning teams down.

Pulling the threads together

The cost of translating e-learning seldom comes from the translation itself. It comes from the design decisions made long before the linguists begin. A course that looks elegant in English may behave like a puzzle when translated.

When you:

• Write from a script
• Keep text out of images
• Allow space for expansion
• Integrate your LMS

you remove the unpredictable parts of the workflow. What is left is translation, review, and final checks. Straightforward steps that scale cleanly.

E-learning is always more effective when learners can absorb it in their own language. The easier you make the multilingual process, the faster those courses reach the people who need them.

If you want guidance on setting up a smoother workflow, reviewing your current materials, or integrating your LMS with a translation tool, our team can walk you through the options and build a setup that fits the way you work.

Get in touch and we will show you how to reduce cost without compromising on clarity or learner experience.