A Second Brain, Now in Portuguese: The Journey of Localizing an Online Course
About 1.46 billion people speak English around the world – 18% of the global population.
That means if you have an online course with an important message, you can only reach about 1 in 5 people.
But what if you want to expand beyond that?
That’s our goal for the Building a Second Brain Foundation self-paced course.
Tiago’s initial intention was to make the course accessible in Brazil where his family is from. So we set out to translate it into Portuguese and ultimately launched it at the end of February 2024.
Here’s what we’ve learned in the process:
Is translation enough?
Translating simply means converting words from one language to another. But that’s not quite enough to truly convey the meaning and lessons of an online course to people in another culture. What’s needed is localization:
“Localization is the process of adapting a piece of content’s full meaning for a new region, including translation, associated imagery, and cultural elements that influence how your content will be perceived. ”
To ensure that we’d go beyond mere translation, we hired BASB Facilitator Felipe Fraga, a native Brazilian, to lead the project of localizing the course to his home country.
What options did we consider?
Since instructional videos are at the core of the BASB Foundation course, our main challenge was to translate these videos from English to Portuguese.
We considered three options to accomplish this:
1. Re-record all videos
Since Tiago is fluent in Portuguese this was a real option. We’d translate the script and then record everything from scratch.
Advantages: Re-recording the whole course would result in the most high-quality product.
Disadvantages: It’s the most labor-intensive option, taking up Tiago’s time to film the videos and our video editor’s time to assemble them into final products. Because this was supposed to be a “lightweight” test to see if we could launch the course in another language, we did not choose this option.
2. Hire a voice actor to record a voice-over
You can find native speakers on Fivrr and Upwork who add voice-overs to existing videos. It’s the same principle how Hollywood movies get dubbed into other languages.
Advantages: No need to re-record anything. Our video editor would simply replace the audio in the videos.
Disadvantages: It wouldn’t be Tiago’s voice in the videos and we would still have to translate the script and edit the videos.
3. Use AI to translate the videos
As we were considering our options, demos of the AI video tool HeyGen made waves online. Here’s one of the tweets that went viral. Essentially, the AI can automatically translate our videos, even syncing the lip movements to the new language.
Advantages: It would need minimal involvement from us (so we thought).
Disadvantages: We would only translate the audio in the videos, not the text shown in the demos on screen. But we could live with that!
Letting HeyGen’s AI translate our course sounded almost too good to be true. And it was because the process didn’t turn out as easy as it seemed.
Translating the videos with HeyGen’s AI
The following is based on the reflections of our Brazilian project manager who led the translation efforts together with our video editor.
While HeyGen indeed automatically translated the video, the quality of that first try wasn’t good enough to leave it as is.
These were some of the challenges we noticed:
HeyGen’s AI-generated translation sounded usually way too formal.
The tone of the generated audio was hard to guide. Questions were a challenge and the 'strong' word wasn’t always accentuated in longer sentences.
Very long sentences were difficult for the AI to translate and preserve the meaning.
Transitions between sentences weren’t always fluid and often felt weird.
The speed of the spoken words varied due to differences in sentence lengths after translation. If the translated text was longer than the original, Tiago would speak very fast. If the text was shorter, Tiago would speak too slowly and make weird pauses.
We were only able to catch these mistakes because a native speaker was reviewing the videos. Without his insights, we likely would have released a totally inferior product.
How to improve HeyGen’s output
We noticed that the first translation by HeyGen can be highly improved with a custom prompt that includes specific instructions and style preferences. For example:
Instructions:
When in doubt, if a word in English is imperative or infinitive, opt by the Portuguese translation as an imperative.
Avoid using oblique pronouns in Portuguese, such as: "-lhe", "-se", "-lo". Use them only if necessary.
Use simple expressions instead of formal expressions.
Specific translations:
Discoverability: "Descobrimento"
Checklist: "Checklist"
Resources: "Recursos"
Personal Knowledge Management: "Gestão de Conhecimento Pessoal"
Second Brain: "Segundo Cérebro"
Even with a custom prompt, the generated text was still far from being good enough so a complete review and edit of the AI-generated script was necessary.
The focus of the review by a native speaker should be to…
Trim the translated sentences roughly to the same length as the original sentences.
Make the text sound less formal and more conversational.
Catch any grammatical errors.
What did the final video translation process look like?
We recommend going through the entire process from start to finish with one video to fully understand how it works and how the translation will be reflected in the generated video. Here’s what this looked like:
HeyGen’s AI translates the video
Edit HeyGen’s text used to generate video
Watch the video
Make another round of edits to improve it
Watch the video
Make another round of edits (if necessary)
After this initial round, you can proceed to batch process the steps for the remaining videos, and even delegate some parts.
What else needs to be localized?
With the translated videos finally in hand, we were far from done, though. For the course to be truly localized, the entire purchasing and learning experience needed to be in Portuguese. That meant we had more translation to do:
Course curriculum and materials: Every video is accompanied by text within the lessons of the course as well as worksheets, quizzes, and surveys.
Marketing material: This included the sales and checkout page as well as any sales and welcome emails.
Where to launch the translated course?
The original BASB Foundation course is hosted on Circle – a popular course and community platform. However, Circle’s user interface is only available in English which would interfere with the whole localized experience we were trying to create.
That’s why we decided to launch the Portuguese course on a platform that’s native to Brazil. We chose their most popular online course platform, Hotmart (parent company of Teachable).
We priced the course at R$ 1.200 which is about USD $240 (half of what the course regularly sells for) to account for a lower purchasing power in Brazil.
Once the course was uploaded and ready to go on Hotmart, we launched it to a segment of our email list consisting of people located in Brazil and subscribers who had opted in for updates in Portuguese as well as our Brazilian Instagram channel.
Was it worth it?
That depends on what you measure. From a financial perspective, the translated course hasn’t broken even yet. From a learning perspective, we’ve learned a great deal about launching a course in a different language and country. And from a personal perspective for Tiago, he has made his big idea more accessible to the people in Brazil.
What’s next? With the launch of the BASB book in Latin America this March, we’re taking steps to translate the course into Spanish.
