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PowerPoint Localization and Internationalization

Microsoft PowerPoint (Wikipedia) is a popular presentation program. Soluling Desktop and Soluling Cloud can translate PowerPoint presentations. Soluling reads the original presentation, lets you translate its text, and creates a localized presentation for each language. The localized presentations have the same slides, layout, and formatting as the original.

• What Soluling localizes
• Localization process
• Samples
• Configuring PowerPoint localization

The end of the document contains links to get the full source code of the samples. After reading this document, we recommend reading a tutorial about how to use Soluling.

What Soluling localizes

Soluling localizes PowerPoint presentations in the Office Open XML format (.pptx) that PowerPoint 2007 and later use. If you have a presentation in the old binary format (.ppt), open it in PowerPoint and save it as .pptx first.

Soluling always scans the text of the slides. Formatted text, such as a sentence that contains a bold or italic word, is kept as one string so that the translator can translate the whole sentence. In addition, you can choose to scan:

Select these items on the Options sheet. If a presentation contains images that contain text or are otherwise culture-specific, you can also localize the images by turning on the image data type. See the Image and Sport samples.

Keep in mind that translations are often longer than the original text. After building, open the localized presentations and check that the text fits in the text boxes. If it doesn't, either shorten the translation or turn on PowerPoint's Shrink text on overflow option for the text box in the original presentation.

Localization process

You can localize a presentation either in Soluling Desktop or in Soluling Cloud.

Desktop process

1. Start Soluling. Drag the presentation (e.g., Simple.pptx) on Soluling or click the New from File or Files button and select the file.
2. Project Wizard appears. Select the items you want to scan in addition to the slide text, and click Next.
3. Select the original language and the target languages, for example, Finnish, and complete the wizard.
4. Translate the project.
5. Choose Home | Build All to build the localized presentations. By default, Soluling creates them in language-specific subdirectories, for example, fi\Simple.pptx.

Cloud process

With Soluling Cloud, you translate the presentation in your browser: upload the file, translate it in Translate, and download the localized presentations. You need a Soluling account. See the available Cloud plans.

Create a project

1. Sign in at www.soluling.com and open Cloud > Dashboard for Projects, Users and Terminology.
2. Click Add a new project, then Select files and pick your presentation (e.g., Simple.pptx), or drag and drop the file onto the page. Click Create.
3. On the next page, check the project's Name. It defaults to the file's name.
4. Set the Original language to the language of your presentation, for example, English.
5. Under Target languages, check the languages you want to translate to, for example, Finnish, Japanese, and Swedish.
6. Check that the Source type is PowerPoint file (.pptx).
7. Click Create. The project appears on the dashboard, and its status changes to Ready once the file has been processed.

Translate the project

Click the project's green Translate button on the dashboard. Translate opens the project, and you can type the translations into the grid. Machine translation suggestions, translation memory, and spell checking are available there. You do not have to finish every language before moving on to the next step.

Formatting inside a string, such as bold text and links, is shown as protected tags.

Get the localized presentations

1. In Translate's top bar, click the project's name. It opens the project's Manage page, the same page that the project's Manage button on the dashboard opens.
2. If you have translated something since the localized files were last built, the page says Localized files need to be built. Click Build localized files and wait until it finishes.
3. The Files section lists the presentation with a download button for each target language. Download the localized presentations and open them in PowerPoint to check the layout.

Update the project

When you change the original presentation, upload it again, translate what is new or changed, and download the localized presentations again. On the dashboard, click the project's Update file button (the upload arrow), select the new presentation or drop it onto the page, and click Update. Existing translations are kept, so you only translate the text that was added or changed.

If you want to scan notes, comments, or slide masters, or localize images, create the project in Soluling Desktop, where you can set these options, and upload it to Soluling Cloud. See the Cloud tutorial.

Samples

GitHub and <data-dir>\Samples\PowerPoint contain the following PowerPoint samples:

The localized presentations are in the fi, ja, and sv subdirectories.

Configuring PowerPoint localization

You can configure how to localize your PowerPoint file by selecting the item in the project tree, right-clicking, and choosing the Options menu. A source dialog appears that lets you edit the options. This source uses the following option sheets.

• File
• Options
• Output

Read more about other document files such as DITA, Help+Manual, HTML, HTML Help, LaTeX, Word, PowerPoint, Markdown, RTF, and PDF files.