Effective translation of Moodle courses for CABI Academy

The challenge

CABI (CAB International) operates an e-learning platform, the CABI Academy, targeting a global audience with thousands of registered users.

The courses, initially developed with Articulate Storyline and later uploaded to Moodle, had already been translated into Spanish internally. However, the organization faced an unexpected obstacle: native Moodle content –tests, labels, instructions, links between activities– had remained in English.

A solution was needed to extract, translate and re-import these elements in a secure and scalable way. Without copying and pasting everything by hand.

The solution

Qabiria adopted a custom procedure, publicly documented, to localize Moodle courses:

• we received the backup files of the courses
• we extracted the contents into readable and processable XML format
• we translated them with a team of linguists specializing in e-learning
• and finally we reconverted them to the original format, ready to be imported back to Moodle.

The workflow

Our intervention eliminated the need for manual changes in the Moodle backend, reducing errors, time and cost.

The general flow of the conversion, translation, and reconversion process is explained in detail in the blog post cited earlier, “How to translate a Moodle course.” A repeatable approach, also designed for future courses.

During the project, Qabiria also took charge of training CABI’s in-house staff about the best way to access the content to be translated with OmegaT, so that they could independently carry out the translation of other courses or the revision of existing ones.

Results

• Full localization of the 20 or so Moodle courses in Spanish and French
• Professional translation of quizzes and labels
• Reduction of manual tasks
• Enhanced user experience for non-English speaking participants