and make your clients and viewers happy

 

You’ve made a series of animated e-learning or educational videos. Now you’re ready to bring them to the world, in as many languages as you can: French… Spanish… Chinese… Arabic… Russian…

But wait! Your videos have a lot of text. You’ve spent many hours in AfterEffects making the words dance. And now you have to change the language.

Now what?

Let’s rewind to the beginning of the project. To simplify both localization and accessibility, here are some design choices to consider before you create your animation:

Animation still with text at bottom of screen. Text is blurred.

Text at the bottom will conflict with subtitles

1. Leave room for captions or subtitles. Make sure there is no text in the bottom 20% of the screen, so that your text animations and supers don’t conflict with the subtitles. 

2. Limit on-screen text that varies from the voiceover. Once you add subtitles, that creates an awful lot of text for the viewer to read and absorb.

 

 

Animation still with too much text. Text is blurred.

Too much text makes the video hard to version

3. Keep it simple. On-screen text can be super-helpful in telling your story, but keep in mind that many other languages – e.g. French, German and Spanish – are far wordier than English. If you have a lot of text in English, what’s it going to look like in other languages? If you need to use a lot of text, break it up into smaller blocks – don’t fill the screen with it.

 

 

Animation still: office with racially diverse workers.

Your video should reflect your global audience

4. Don’t forget diversity. Want your animated training videos to travel? Include characters that look like the audiences you are targeting.

Take these factors into account, and your videos will be a lot easier to translate and market around the world.

 

 

 

Need to localize your e-learning content? Let’s discuss! We’re always happy to provide a free quote.