Challenge: Alexa Little is the Executive Director of a nonprofit organization called 7000 Languages. Their goal is to provide ongoing support and keep native languages alive. Approximately 43% of the world’s languages are endangered. Their mission is to preserve the native indigenous languages of tribes throughout the world by providing free language learning courses. There may be 20 elders left in the community and those elders work with 7000 languages to preserve the language for future children. 7000 Languages is currently in 7 countries such as Asia, Europe, Alaska, and Africa. Serving so many countries brings challenges such as varying time zones, limited internet access, and language barriers. Many times the communities will have questions and Skype was their go-to tool; however, is unreliable because remote areas are without internet access. That’s where iorad comes in.
Process: Alexa & her team use the Desktop capture tool since most of the content is offline and not in a browser. She shares the links in Asana with her team. They have an Excel template that collects information to transfer into Transparent Language software. For their translation application to work correctly, the Excel information has to be formatted a certain way. They created a training manual for how to input into the Excel template. This teaches the proper structure & punctuation so the information will transfer into the Transparent software & be read via XML. This is the process they used to create the course content for their tribal communities.
Result: Alexa said that by using iorad she can “shift the needle back to normal” when it comes to work-life balance. “We work with language teams all over the world, so I rarely train people in person. I used to spend hours taking screenshots and putting together tutorials. Sometimes it was just faster to demo the process over Skype… except then the language team had nothing to refer to if they forgot a step. With iorad, I can make tutorials for even the most unusual tasks, and it’s so fast and easy. Now we have an entire training pipeline. Plus, if we’re working across time zones, they don’t have to wait for me to start work and answer their question… iorad is always working.” Plus iorad has drastically reduced troubleshooting because the data transfer from Excel to Transparent software is so accurate. The organization is more productive and saving more indigenous languages than ever before.
