Translate an Investor Pitch Deck in PowerPoint into English

British or American English: it affects the finance vocabulary too

A London fund and a Silicon Valley fund do not read quite the same English. The difference goes beyond spelling (organisation or organization, programme or program) into financial terms. Revenue works everywhere, but turnover is still common in the UK and can confuse a US investor; an ordinary share in London is common stock in New York.

Check which variant the free sample produces on a paragraph of your own deck. If your target investors are on the other side of the Atlantic, the adjustments come down to a handful of words and the way amounts are written, which you can fix during review. What matters most is not mixing the two variants in one file: an analyst notices it quickly.

Figures, currencies and fundraising terms

A pitch deck is mostly numbers, and if your source language uses decimal commas (French, German, Spanish, Italian and many others), their conventions change in English:

• Separators: 1 250 000 or 1.250.000 becomes 1,250,000; 3,5 % becomes 3.5%, with no space before the sign.
• Currency: the symbol moves in front. 2 M€ is €2m in British usage and €2M in American usage; 500 k€ becomes €500k.
• Dates: 03/04/2025 means 3 April in London and 4 March in New York. In a fundraising timeline, Q2 2025 or April 2025 avoids the ambiguity.
• Plurals: English has only two forms (one, other) and anything that is not exactly 1 takes the plural, so 1.5 margin points is 1.5 percentage points.
• Round terminology: seed round, Series A, pre-money valuation, cash runway, use of funds.

Be careful with instruments specific to your home jurisdiction: a French BSA AIR or a German convertible loan is not exactly a US SAFE. If the distinction matters, add a short explanation to the source slide rather than relying on a loose equivalent.

What Manuce returns, and what it does not do

The deck is handled by Métis, the finance specialist engine. It translates the text on every slide: titles, placeholders, text boxes, shapes, grouped shapes and tables, which covers a cap table or use-of-funds breakdown built as a PowerPoint table. You receive your original .pptx: theme, images, shape positions, animations and transitions stay as they were; only the text changes. A Word version, a PDF and plain text are delivered too, so you can review without PowerPoint or share a working copy. A typical fifteen-slide deck is translated within minutes.

What stays in the original language today:

• speaker notes, often the script of your spoken pitch;
• text inside charts (axes, legends, labels on your revenue curve or TAM/SAM/SOM), SmartArt and slide masters, such as a Strictly confidential footer written in your language;
• text embedded in images, such as a product screenshot.

A paragraph mixing several formats takes the formatting of its first characters: in a sentence like "we reached €2m ARR", the bold on the figure is lost. Manuce does not produce sworn or certified translations; a deck does not need one, but some due diligence documents may.

Preparing the deck before upload

• List your charts and SmartArt: note which ones will need their labels redone in English after delivery, or replace key labels with text boxes, which are translated.
• Isolate highlighted figures: if an amount is bold or coloured mid-sentence, move it into its own text box so it keeps its formatting.
• Check the slide master: confidentiality notices, slide numbering labels or a tagline fixed in the master will stay untranslated.
• Plan the spoken pitch: speaker notes are not translated, so prepare your English script separately.

Length usually works in your favour: English tends to run 10 to 15% shorter than French and other Romance languages, so overflow is rare. Text box sizes are not recalculated, though, and a shortened title can leave visible white space on a busy slide; any autofit setting you made in PowerPoint still applies.

Checks before sending to investors

1. Cross-check every amount in the English deck against your financial model: a 1,5 left with its comma reads as one thousand five hundred to a hurried English-speaking reader.
2. Confirm that company, product and brand names are unchanged, first in the free sample, then in the delivered file.
3. Open each chart and translate axes and legends by hand, then the master footer.
4. Make the English variant and number format consistent across all slides.
5. Once these edits are done, export your own final PDF: the PDF delivered reflects the file before your corrections.

In practice

1. Check charts, SmartArt, the slide master and bold figures in your .pptx.
2. Upload the file; the quote appears, based on the exact word count.
3. Read the free sample: English variant, round terminology, number format.
4. Pay, then download the translated .pptx plus Word, PDF and plain text.
5. Fix charts and master text by hand, then export your final PDF.