Translate an investor pitch deck in PowerPoint into Chinese

What changes when a pitch deck goes into Simplified Chinese

A pitch deck is dense with numbers, acronyms and short punchy lines. Each of them follows different conventions in Chinese.

• Large numbers are counted in 万 (10,000) and 亿 (100 million). ‘$1.2M ARR’ is usually written 120万美元, a ‘£3bn market’ 30亿英镑, a €50M raise 5000万欧元. One extra zero on the market-size or funding-ask slide is enough to undermine the deck, so every figure needs rechecking.
• Fundraising vocabulary is well established: seed 种子轮, Series A A轮, fundraising 融资, valuation 估值, use of funds 资金用途. Acronyms such as ARR, CAC, LTV or SaaS are often left as they are for readers used to venture capital; check the choice made in the sample.
• No plurals, but measure words. Chinese has a single form (one CLDR category, ‘other’), yet ‘40 enterprise customers’ becomes 40家企业客户, with 家, the measure word for companies.
• Dates and quarters: ‘Q1 2025’ becomes 2025年第一季度.
• Full-width punctuation: ，。：； and the enumeration comma 、, with no spaces around them.

Layout and fonts: what moves on the slides

Chinese text uses two to three times fewer characters than English or French, but each character is wider, so the space taken changes little. Large overflows are rare; the surprises come from elsewhere.

• Line breaks change. With no spaces between words, a line can break between almost any two characters. A tagline such as 重新定义企业财务管理 may wrap onto two lines and leave one character stranded. Text box sizes are not recalculated; only the autofit setting already in PowerPoint applies.
• A Latin font has no Chinese characters. If your brand uses Montserrat or a custom typeface, PowerPoint will render the hanzi in a fallback font, which may differ from one investor’s computer to another. Set a font in your file that covers Simplified Chinese (Microsoft YaHei or Noto Sans SC, for instance), or send investors the PDF.
• Bold thickens characters quickly at small sizes: a 10-point cap table set entirely in bold becomes hard to read.

What Manuce delivers, and what it leaves out

The deck goes to Métis, the engine specialised in finance. It translates the text on every slide: titles, placeholders, text boxes, shapes, grouped shapes and tables (cap table, use of funds, competitor comparison). You receive your original .pptx with theme, images, shape positions, animations and transitions unchanged, plus a Word version, a PDF and plain text for reviewing without PowerPoint. Chinese carries a language supplement: a ×1.6 coefficient on the per-word rate.

What is not done, and matters for a pitch:

• Speaker notes are not translated: your meeting script stays in the source language.
• Charts, SmartArt, slide masters and text embedded in images stay in the source language: revenue chart axes, a SmartArt roadmap, a ‘Confidential’ footer on the master, product screenshots.
• A paragraph mixing formats takes the formatting of its start: in ‘revenue grew 3x in twelve months’, the bold on 3x is lost.
• This page covers Simplified Chinese only; for funds in Hong Kong or Taiwan, Traditional Chinese is a separate language.
• Manuce does not produce certified (sworn) translations: a deck does not need one, but articles of association or legal papers requested in due diligence may.

Preparing the file and checking before you send it

Before uploading:

• Put key chart labels (‘TAM’, ‘2026’, legends) in text boxes over the chart so they are translated.
• Convert essential SmartArt into plain shapes and move any text you need translated out of the slide master.
• Choose a font that supports Simplified Chinese.

In the free sample, look at your company name (kept in Latin letters or not), how acronyms are handled and how an amount is written.

After delivery:

1. Compare every figure with the original deck, redoing the 万/亿 conversion yourself.
2. Reapply bold to headline numbers.
3. Open the PDF to check character rendering and wrapped titles.
4. Have your notes and remaining chart text translated separately.

For a document going to investors, the Professional or Premium level is a better fit than Essential, which is meant for internal use.

In practice

1. Prepare the .pptx: a Chinese-capable font, chart labels in text boxes.
2. Upload the file and choose Simplified Chinese and a level: the quote appears at once.
3. Read the free sample: one amount, one acronym, your company name.
4. Pay, then download the .pptx, Word file, PDF and plain text.
5. Recheck figures, bold and the PDF rendering before sending.