Online courseware is a very effective methods for trainings, setting up exams, and device simulations for the medical and healthcare industry. You can choose from web-based or Adobe Flash based courseware and companies may develop them internally or outsource to third party companies such as Simbionix.

The effort it takes to localize these online courseware varies depending on the internationalization level of the courses. Especially for Flash based courseware, the development can be done very efficiently or very challenging and increase costs significantly. The most efficient method would be to externalize all of the source content in XML files rather than embedding them directly into the Flash files. In very challenging projects, the source content is embedded inside the Flash files or inside non-editable graphics which are embedded inside the Flash files, and it takes considerable amount of time to extract, translate, and place the translated content back into the courseware.

Typically companies tend to choose in between the most efficient and challenging process, by having courseware components which have externalized source content in XML as well as additional content embedded inside the Flash or graphics files.

Because of the above reasons, Flash based online courseware could take considerably more time from start to completion compared to conventional localization of web sites or documentation. Typically the translation cost is relatively small and the Engineering effort is the majority of the cost. Additionally for conventional projects, In-Country Review of the translation is typically left towards the end of the project. However for online courseware localization projects, it is suggested to complete the In-Country Review of the translation prior to the actual Flash localization tasks in order to avoid re-work (additional costs) of the Engineering tasks.