About the author: Jost Zetzsche is an ATA-certified English-to-German translator and a localization and translation consultant. He co-founded International Writers' Group on the Oregon coast and sends out a free, biweekly technical newsletter for translators (see www.internationalwriters.com/toolkit).
Although PowerPoint is one of the formats that hardly any translator
can escape it is clearly the most tedious of the Office programs for
translation.
Reformatting Before Translation
One of the reasons PowerPoint files are so difficult to translate is
because of the people who primarily use it—marketing people—and
their lack of understanding of how to properly format a document (and I
won't even begin to write about their linguistic abilities).
For instance, in almost every PowerPoint presentation you will be
presented with issues such as hard returns for line breaks. So the rule
of thumb is: Before processing a PowerPoint presentation in a
computer-assisted translation tool, it is always a good idea to spend a
few minutes going through the document and cleaning up its gross
formatting sins. While the document may look poorly formatted after
many of the hard returns are gone from the middle of sentences, this
allows you to translate each sentence in one segment rather than twelve
different segments. And knowing that either you or your client will
have to re-format the document after it is translated anyway, you may
just as well mess up the formatting before you even start with the
translation!
CAT Support for PowerPoint
The support for PowerPoint files that computer-assisted translation
applications offer is "OK."
Déjà Vu had fairly poor PowerPoint support in
version 3, but it works well in version X.
SDLX 2005 works equally well with PowerPoint.
Trados used to translate PowerPoint files with the T-Windows for
PowerPoint, which has its own share of problems (such as not creating a
bilingual document), but it now (from version 6.5 on) supports
PowerPoint files right in the TagEditor which works much better.
MultiTrans has its own menu within PowerPoint and supports
PowerPoint files similarly to the way it supports Word files.
Wordfast (kind of) supports PowerPoint files through linking to
them from within Word.
Leaving the Original File Untouched
If you work with a CAT tool that imports a PPT file (Trados TagEditor,
SDLX, or Déjà Vu), it is very important that you change
neither the content nor the location nor the name of the original
source document. In the process of recreating the translated document,
these tools need the original document and all the non-textual
information that it contains. If you change any of the above or, in the
case of Trados, change the name of the target .ttx file, you will not
be able to properly export the document.
Dealing with Notes Text
One of the problems that CAT tools have with PPT files is that they
will have to deal with text on various levels. Obviously there is text
in the actual slides, but there is also the "Notes" text, containing
the notes for the presenter of the PowerPoint presentation.
Once you have ascertained whether your client needs that text to be
translated (one of the two questions that you need to ask before
starting to work on the translation—the other is: who does the
formatting?), you need to figure out how your CAT tools supports that.
Some tools process Notes text by default (Trados and SDLX) and in
others you can control it automatically (Déjà Vu X and
Wordfast) or manually (MultiTrans).
Word Counts and Other Statistics
Another odd thing about PowerPoint files are the statistics like the
word count. For one thing, word counts do not include text in any
embedded objects. Before quoting on a PowerPoint project, always make
sure that all text is actually translatable and not an embedded object
such as a graphic. You can check this by right-clicking on the slide.
If picture-related commands show up or the picture toolbar appears, you
are dealing with a graphic rather than text.
To count the directly translatable words within PowerPoint, you can
access the word count feature through File> Properties>
Statistics (and you should also be aware that the word count module in
PowerPoint XP and above differs from earlier versions, e.g., hyphenated
words are no longer counted as two words).
Of course, any CAT tool also offers word count features for PowerPoint
files using their own parameters for counting, whereas word count tools
like AnyCount or PractiCount & Invoice use PowerPoint's own word
count module.
Keyboard Shortcuts
My two favorite shortcuts in PowerPoint are Ctrl+M for a new slide and
Ctrl+D to duplicate the existing slide.
To view this list in and for languages other than English, here's what
you can do: The last four digits of this URL (1033) are the Microsoft
Locale ID. You can switch those to your locale and you'll have the list
displayed in your languages. If you don't know your locale code, check
the list on http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/reference/lcid-all.mspx
(the LCID Dec column).
It doesn't work with all languages, but with many it does and I love to
look through some of those beautifully written languages!
Font Replacement
If you are translating PowerPoint files with an application such as
T-Windows for PowerPoint from Trados, you need to check whether you
have installed all fonts that are used in the document before you start
with the translation. You can do this by opening the document and
selecting Format> Replace Fonts. If any of the fonts under Replace
displays a question mark, contact your client to either send you the
font or to tell you to change it to another font (this is a great way
to get some fancy fonts that you otherwise cannot get your hands on).
Paragraph Indents
I don't know how often this has thrown me for a loop: because
translated segments often tend to be longer than the original, segments
(such as bullet points) that were placed on a single line often flow
over to a second line, meaning that you may have to do some
reformatting. To adjust the indent of the first or second line or both,
you simply have to move the little markers on the ruler (to view the
ruler, select View> Ruler) rather than trying to do it with some
actual measurements as in Word under Format> Paragraph.
Changing the Spell-Check Language
One area that frustrates me in PPT is the poor support for a feature to
quickly change the language of a file for spell-checking purposes.
If all text within the file is contained within the text boxes that are
defined in the slide master (to view the slide master, select View>
Master> Slide Master), it is easy to change the language. In Normal
view (select View> Normal), you can select the Outline tab on the
very left side of the screen, select all the text that is displayed
there by pressing Ctrl+A, and then change the language by selecting
Tools> Language> [Language].
Unfortunately, any text that is not contained within the "official"
text boxes is not displayed in the Outline (and that is often the
majority of text). The only way to change the language for those text
boxes is by doing it individually for every box.
Flashing Up Your PowerPoint Presentation
While it is usually not in the task set of the translator to create
Flash files from a PowerPoint presentation, I did want to mention a
very inexpensive tool that allows you to do just that: iMediaCONVERT
(see www.imedialearn.com/imediaconvert),
formerly Netron, allows you to
create beautiful Flash files that can be easily delivered over the
Internet. And the main reason why I would like to mention this tool is
because to me it's a great example of a tool created by a relatively
small development team that is extremely responsive to its users. When
I first downloaded and worked with it, there were several shortcomings
(the images were fuzzy, the recorded sound was of poor quality, and the
transition times of the slides were not being converted properly). I
reported these to the developer and he made sure that each of these
were addressed, resulting in a wonderful product.
I would really like to encourage you to send specific feedback to the
development teams of software tools that you are using. Especially if
these are tools that originate from small companies, you will find that
the developers are more than eager to rewrite their tools so that they
fit your specific needs.
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