In 2006, the rebuilding Iraqi police recognized their need for a software system to serve a wide range of functions, including providing a “back office” infrastructure. In Iraq, unlike in the United States, the Ministry of the Interior (MoI) hires and manages the police throughout the country, so the system deployment would be on a vast scale.
The software would address basic human resources (HR) issues, such as tracking and recording who was hired, and how much pay they received. Additionally, the system would handle equipment inventory, and the collection and reporting of crime statistics for the entire country.
Ideal Innovations, Inc (I-3) received the request to develop this software system to support the Iraqi Police. I-3 had already designed and developed several software systems for the Iraqi government. Several earlier projects in Iraq failed due to inadequate user training and support. I-3 was determined not to make those mistakes, so training was an important element from the beginning of the project.
I-3 utilized its Texas-based software development and training teams in conjunction with project management located in Washington, D.C., and a “forward” group situated in Baghdad’s Green Zone. The forward group hired local Iraqis to work in various positions, and to do translations.
“The biggest challenge was that we didn’t know what the system was going to look like, and we knew it was going to change a lot,” said Dr. Alex Kilpatrick, Vice President of OCONUS (Outside Continental U.S.) Operations for Ideal Innovations. Because of the imminent deadlines, the teams needed to develop both the software and the training nearly simultaneously, even though the requirements were vague. This meant there would be a fair amount of rework. It also made it difficult to schedule the training development, because of lag time that occurred when the training team had to wait for the software development team to finish designing different modules of the application.
The forward team in Iraq worked to collect requirements for the system from the client, and communicated with the entire team via weekly conference calls and e-mail. I-3 also created a Microsoft SharePoint portal to keep all project-related documents and resources in one place. The portal was an instrumental collaboration tool that permitted the teams in different locations and countries to share files. It also served as a back-up archive of the entire project.
In the earliest design stages of the software, the training team identified, and started to address, some of the issues that would be problematic for training development. There wasn’t good information about the computer skills of the target audience, and there was conflicting information about the infrastructure, such as how readily available computers and the Internet are to users.
Therefore, the team decided to create training materials in both a paper-based, instructor-led format, as well as a self-paced e-Learning format for distribution via CD or the Internet. Out of necessity, the team would create the training in English, the native language of the entire development team, before translating it into Arabic and Kurdish for distribution to the learner audience.
Arabic basics
There are 18 basic letters, augmented by dots, in the 28-letter Arabic alphabet. Written Arabic mostly leaves out vowels, except in religious texts or books for children and learners. Most Arabic written for adults assumes that readers will understand vowels from context.
The first thing most people notice about the Arabic alphabet is that it proceeds from right to left. Numbers, however, go from left to right.
At the beginning of the project, none of the instructional designers or training developers had experience with Arabic, or with working with any right-to-left languages.
“We didn’t expect language to be an issue, but it has been,” said Dr. Kilpatrick, “Getting Arabic on the screen wasn’t that difficult. We originally tried to translate isolated text, but we discovered in the QA (Quality Assurance) phase that subtlety and meaning were lost. This was true for both the software user interface and for the training modules. We translated strings of text correctly, but once the testers started to use the integrated application, we discovered that many of the error messages and instructions didn’t make sense in the context of the application. Also, the field validation was different for English and Arabic, and the development team spent unanticipated amounts of time writing code for two different sets of validation rules. Having the translators working with both the application and the training for the application together made both the application and the training better.”
“Flipping” the interface
The team had experience in designing and developing e-Learning in multiple languages, including work with the most-common romance languages. In earlier projects, an outsourced company usually provided the translations. Previous experience taught the team that translating training content was never a straightforward process, and that it was important to include client members who spoke the target language in the selection of translation companies.
In the normal process, the teams developed training in English, and then extracted the content into a table the translators could use. One column had the English text, broken up as needed, and the translation company put the translated text into a second column. A script automatically re-populated the content into a new instance of the interface to create the new version. (See Figure 1.)
Figure 1 The development team created the training in English first, for later translation.
For this project, we had to reverse the entire interface to display from right to left. The menu bar started at the upper right corner of the window, and the “next” button was on the left side of the navigation bar.
