Thoughts on Articulate’s New Localization Solution

The new Articulate Localization setup feels like a bit of a gas factory, a bunch of recycled features repackaged to let you duplicate Storyline or Rise content and review translations. It looks fancy, but it’s really just patching together what pretty much already exists.

They offer default AI translations, which honestly feels like picking a random Netflix movie and hoping that you will like it. Without any fine-tuning, the AI output usually needs a lot of cleanup.

They don’t support translation memories (TM) yet. And even when they do, based on what we've seen with clients using Crowdin and other tools, there’s a lot more to it than just having a TM. Most teams don’t fully grasp how to manage a master TM vs. a working TM, how to track the status of each segment (pretranslated, translated, reviewed, proofread), or how to clean/upload content properly into the TM, thus risking corrupting it. In other words, injecting poor translations, like raw AI output, into your TM and marking them as final and ready for reuse. I’ve seen cases where clients had, without understanding how, English-to-English entries in their TM, and thus totally derailing the translation process.

Right now, they’re only translating text. No audio, no video, no images. And once they go there, they’ll hit the same headaches we’ve dealt with for years: voice availability in multiple languages, accents, TTS mispronunciations, hallucinations… the usual suspects.

Also, if you want to back up your work, it saves one version per language.

In the end, what they offer ends up looking a lot like what we already do: one version per language. The difference? We actually know what we’re doing. We bring real experience with language workflows, AI tuning, quality review, reuse, and all the messy bits they haven’t figured out yet.

Bottom line: this isn’t just about cutting out the middleman and dropping in some AI. The benefit vs. risk, and the ROI, just isn’t convincing.

#localisation #elearning #translation #articulate #storyline #multimedia