About

Founded in 1955 in North Carolina, USA, the Discovery Education Community is now an established global network of teachers and education professionals who are passionate about enhancing the learning experience of their students through the use of carefully designed digital and printed media.

Discovery Education are creators of topquality curated educational content enabling students to take advantage of text-to-speech, closed captioning, native language translation, differentiated reading levels and more.

Additionally, Discovery Education designed STEM Connect to meet today’s curriculum requirements and to motivate students to engage with traditionally ‘boring’ subjects such as science and math, preparing students for life post-graduation.

Challenge

In 2020 Discovery Education began the journey to localise their STEM curriculum content for infant to elementary age Chinese speaking school students.

They had already recognised that meeting the requirements of their target audience – children from kindergarten through to elementary, would demand more than just translation.

It would need an understanding of the vocabulary needed to keep children of this age engaged taking into account cultural difference, while still delivering the curriculum.

In addition to the printed content, the curriculum assets included a series of video clips, each of which would need to be localised; subtitles, plus songs and rhymes

Solution

Following an exploratory approach by Discovery Education, it was agreed that Prestige Network would create a tested resource able to deliver the localised content using vocabulary, style and ToV that would ensure that students would find the learning structure both fun and informative.

Following an in-depth evaluation of the content, the greatest challenge was likely to be the vocabulary to be used due to the age range of the students, with localisation of children’s songs and rhymes also being a very important consideration as the curriculum content had been originally written for English speaking students.

Key to the success of the project was our ability to plan the project in detail, ensuring that we could meet each milestone with no slippage.

To achieve this, we equipped our linguists with a comprehensive translation toolkit, consisting of:

• Approved terminology
• Style and ToV guides
• Reference materials
• Translation memory
• Briefing notes
• QA process.

In brief the 1st phase consisted of:

• 150,000 words of content made up from a mix of
digitally published content
• Video transcripts for subtitles
• Translation of Curriculum content
• Model lessons
• Studio slides
• Teacher notes
• Translation-Proofread-Edit all content
• Studio -DTP and formatting final content.

This was followed by a 2nd phase of similar size Each phase demanded accurate workflow management, in order to align our delivery of the localised content to Discovery’s integration process.translation quality, timelines and delivery criteria were met consistently throughout both phases of the project