PowerPoint document translation and multilingual desktop publishing

Since PowerPoint is so easy to learn and "fun" to use, its usage is widespread throughout most companies. GPI frequently translates PowerPoint slides for eLearning, corporate training and critical sales or conference presentations. Although PowerPoint is easy to master and highly flexible is you are creating slides for an English-only presentation, there are many potential pitfalls if you intend to translate your PowerPoint slides.

Language translation often produces text expansion (longer lines, more characters per word) in target languages. This can become an acute problem with PowerPoint files in document translation, because PowerPoint slides often have graphic elements (circles, triangles) which contain text. An 8-character word in English may expand to 16 or 18 characters in Dutch, causing text to extend beyond the limits of its graphic container.

Best practices to optimize your PowerPoint documents for translation

The following is a short list of some of the "trouble spots" that GPI frequently detects in source English PowerPoint (PPT) documents:

  • Boxed text (e.g. a bulleted list) that resembles a sample document, but nearly touches the bottom of the slide
  • Slide title text that is a large point size, all caps, and fills the single line it is intended to occupy. (No room for text expansion.)
  • Avoid text inside triangles, diamonds, and other shapes that come to a "point" and limit available text expansion
  • Avoid separate colors for bullets or numbers preceding a list
  • Avoid artwork used in place of bullets
  • Intelligent use of named slide masters will make it possible to create "global updates" to background text as well as colors and design elements for multiple PowerPoint slides

GPI has extensive experience translating and localizing long, complex PowerPoint files into many languages. One client requires over 28 target languages for PowerPoint. As a result, GPI has established proper margins, slide footers, white space and flexible graphic elements to be used in PowerPoint files intended for translation. GPI can fine tune your PowerPoint templates for optimum globalization, or train you to perform this service yourself.

Further resources on PowerPoint

GPI has developed a series of best practices for PowerPoint desktop publishing and translation. GPI can provide training and/or consulting with your workflow to ensure that your PowerPoint documents are optimized for translation and localization. GPI has extensive experience in translating PowerPoint files into Arabic and other bidirectional languages.

For more information go to our request a quote, or call us at +1 866-272-5874.