How to Translate a PowerPoint Presentation in 3 Simple Ways

Want to translate a PowerPoint presentation?

Follow this straightforward guide to learn how to:

• translate a professional presentation and retain formatting
• translate a personal presentation with PowerPoint’s built-in translator
• translate a personal presentation with Google Translate

How to translate PowerPoint files and retain formatting

If you need to translate presentations regularly or in bulk, conventional tools won’t cut it. Using them, you will have to either translate one text box at a time or bulk translate, messing up the formatting.

Instead, use a translation management system to:

• retain formatting
• retain layout
• save time
• ensure quality

Here’s how to translate the entire PowerPoint presentation while preserving formatting:

1. Sign up to Centus
2. In the Project dashboard, click New project

3. In the Imports section, upload your PPT presentation

4. In the Editor section, generate bulk translations with Google Translate, DeepL, or Microsoft Translate

Now your translators can refine automatically-translated content without translating the presentation from scratch. After they finish translating the file, you can assign it to editors to improve it further.

1. In the Contributors section, click Add people
2. Enter the editor’s name, email, and other details
3. Choose the editor’s role from the dropdown menu

When you are happy with the result, download your presentation with formatting and layout intact.

Ready to streamline your PowerPoint translation process? Try Centus now!

Have time for manual translation and formatting adjustments? Let’s explore alternative methods of PowerPoint translation.

How to translate PPT files using a built-in translator

Using the built-in PowerPoint translation feature, you’re restricted to translating slides one by one. This method requires considerable time and effort to translate the entire PowerPoint presentation. Still, for a free native tool, it’s quite functional.

Here is how to translate your presentation directly in PowerPoint:

1. In PowerPoint, go to the Review tab
2. Click Translate

3. Select the text fragment you want to translate
4. In the right-hand menu, click Insert

Repeat these steps for all text fragments in the presentation to translate the file.

How to translate slides with Google Translate

Google Translate offers another flexible way to translate slides. Its speed and accessibility make it perfect for individual use. However, the formatting issues and accuracy limitations of Google Translate make it unsuitable for business translation.

Let’s explore how to translate PowerPoint to Spanish using Google Translate:

1. In Google Translate, click the Documents tab

2. Drag and drop the PPT presentation
3. Choose your source and target languages
4. Click Translate

5. Click Download translation

While Google can quickly translate slides to Spanish, you’ll need to review all slides and fix their formatting.

Parting thoughts

No translation wheels were reinvented here. Slide translation is pretty straightforward, but the method you choose to go about it depends entirely on the type of content you have.

Need to translate business presentations regularly? Try Centus!
Want to translate a personal presentation? Follow the simple steps above.

That’s all from me. I hope you learned everything there is to know about PPT translation and are ready to explore our Google Slide translation and Excel translation guides.

Good luck!