Captivate document translation and multilingual desktop publishing

Although Adobe Captivate is often classified as an eLearning product, it is also a desktop publishing application because it is integrated with Adobe FrameMaker through Adobe Technical Communication Suite. Captivate motion capture demos and videos can be imported into FrameMaker documents, and will display as "play on demand" multimedia content in PDF files derived from FrameMaker.

Captivate can help economize on translation costs by eliminating dozens of progressive screen captures or technical illustrations that describe a few steps in a technical process. Captivate can produce automatically labeled motion capture of software usage on screen. Automatic labels and captions of key software steps can be easily exported for translation, and automatically imported back into the target language Captivate file.

Training "videos" created in Captivate may be embedded in an anchored frame within a FrameMaker source file, with an accompanying image "poster." When PDF is generated from FrameMaker, a "play" icon will appear over the poster image, indicating to the reader that a motion capture video is available in that one location.

This technique can eliminate dozens, if not hundreds of progressive, "static" screen captures and replace them with one dynamic Captivate video. Typically, the anchored frame with the Captivate video will take up about the same amount of page space as a medium or large illustration. This will also significantly reduce page count and the number of assets that your translation company must deal with during your document translation project.

Best practices to optimize your Captivate documents for translation

There are many best practices to optimize your Captivate project files for document translation, but here are some of the top techniques to take advantage of:

  • Select color themes and font sizes that will work well with most target languages
  • If possible, in screen motion capture, avoid audio narration, which will eliminate the need for dubbing or voice over in target languages
  • Plan Captivate presentations and demos to fit within reasonable time periods to match attention span of target audience

Further resources on Captivate from GPI blogs

GPI has developed a series of best practices for Captivate projects to reduce translation costs. GPI can provide training and/or consulting with your workflow to ensure that your Captivate files are optimized for translation and localization. You will find some technical tips in our Captivate translation blog:

For more information go to our request a translation quote, or call us at +1 866-272-5874.