Translate an investor pitch deck into Chinese (Simplified)

What changes when a pitch deck goes into Chinese

A pitch deck lives on numbers, and that is where Chinese differs most. Chinese does not group by thousands but by 万 (ten thousand) and 亿 (one hundred million). ARR of $2.5M becomes 250万美元, a $4B market becomes 40亿美元, an $8M raise becomes 800万美元. One zero too many or too few changes the order of magnitude, so every figure needs checking.

• No plural forms: Chinese has a single form (CLDR category "other"). "1 customer" and "40 customers" look the same, but a measure word is needed: 40家客户 for business customers, 12位员工 for people.
• Full-width punctuation: "Problem:" becomes 问题：, brackets become （）, commas ，. Percentages stay as 30%.
• Dates run from largest unit to smallest: "Q3 2025" becomes 2025年第三季度.
• Currency: always name it (美元, 欧元, 人民币); a bare symbol is ambiguous to a reader in mainland China.

Fundraising vocabulary in Chinese

Chinese investors know venture capital jargon well, often in a mixed form. Rounds are written 种子轮 (seed), 天使轮 (angel), A轮 or Pre-A轮. Valuation is 估值, with 投前估值 and 投后估值 for pre-money and post-money.

Acronyms follow two accepted habits: keeping ARR, CAC, LTV in Latin letters, or spelling them out as 年度经常性收入, 客户获取成本, 客户终身价值. Both read fine; what matters is that each acronym is treated the same way on every slide. Manuce does not take term lists, so if TAM or your product name must stay in Latin script, see how the free sample handles it, then check the delivered translation.

The expected register is concise and factual. Heavy hype words common in Western decks ("disruptive", "game-changing") read less convincingly in Chinese; trim them in the source if your deck leans on them.

Fonts and slide layout

Chinese text uses two to three times fewer characters, but each character is wider, so the space taken on a slide changes little. Titles usually fit their boxes; very short bullet points are more likely to leave gaps than to overflow.

The real trap is the font. A Latin typeface, of the kind start-ups often pick for their branding, has no Chinese characters. PowerPoint substitutes another font, sometimes an ugly one, or shows empty boxes on a machine without Chinese fonts. After delivery, apply a font that covers Simplified Chinese (Noto Sans SC or Source Han Sans, for instance) and export a PDF to lock the rendering before sending.

Chinese has no spaces between words, so line breaks can fall in the middle of a term. Check two-line titles and force the break if a word such as 投资人 gets split.

What Manuce delivers, and what it does not

You upload the deck as PowerPoint, PDF, Word or another accepted format; it comes back in the same format, layout included, translated by Métis, the engine specialised in finance. A typical deck of around 1,800 words (15 pages) is delivered within minutes and stays available in your client area. Chinese carries a language supplement (a ×1.6 coefficient on the per-word rate), already included in the quote.

• Traditional Chinese (Taiwan, Hong Kong) is a separate language at Manuce: for a Taiwanese or Hong Kong fund, select it on its own.
• A scanned PDF with no selectable text is not read. The same logic applies to a chart or cap table pasted as an image: its text cannot be translated as text.
• Manuce does not produce sworn or certified translations. A deck does not need one, but some due diligence documents may.
• Manuce translates your story; it does not choose a Chinese brand name for you.

Preparing the file and checking the result

Before uploading, send the PowerPoint file rather than an exported PDF where you can: text boxes are intact. Make sure charts are real objects with editable text, and write amounts with a clear unit ($2.5M rather than a bare 2.5 in a cell).

After delivery, check first:

• every amount converted into 万 or 亿, against the original;
• consistent acronyms and company name from slide to slide;
• font rendering on a computer other than your own;
• line breaks in titles and captions.

If the deck is going to investors, the Professional level, handled by the domain specialist, is the one designed for documents you will pass on.

In practice

1. Upload the PowerPoint file (or a PDF with selectable text) and choose Simplified Chinese.
2. Read the free sample: check an amount, an acronym and your product name.
3. Accept the quote, based on the exact word count, and pay.
4. Download the translated deck, apply a Chinese font and check figures and line breaks.