Tacoma-Pierce County Public Health

Business challenge:

In the City of Tacoma and in Pierce County, Washington, all food workers must take a test to become licensed before they can work with food in a public location. The Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department offers a course to familiarize workers with the test material. The course includes animations, and users can hover a mouse over these animations to see and hear explanatory text. The department decided to update this English-only online course—and to offer it in eight languages.

Because of our expertise in producing audio recordings and in managing localization projects, Resources Online was chosen for this project. The challenges for Resources Online included:

• Localizing the more than 500 text segments in the original U.S. English script into seven additional languages.
• Recording the voice-overs for each text segment in all eight languages and vetting the quality of the recordings.
• Synchronizing animations to accommodate differences in the length of the localized text blocks and in timing for the audio.
• Project managing file control and change management challenges.

Challenge met.

Resources Online used their expertise in audio recording and project management for localization projects to successfully meet the challenges of this project. Our team:

• Hired voice actors (for eight languages) and control people to make sure the translated versions of the course were easy to follow and to understand.
• Recorded more than 500 MP3 audio segments for each language version, timing them accurately to synchronize with Flash animations.
• Resolved technical issues, including font incompatibilities between specific languages.
• Project managed the audio and text segments, developing keys for keeping them together.
• Project managed change requests and re-recordings from stakeholders.