Translate an investor pitch deck into Italian

Figures in an Italian deck: formats and traps

A pitch deck stands on a handful of key figures: the raise, the valuation, revenue, market size. Italian writes them differently, and an Italian investor notices straight away.

• Separators: the comma is the decimal mark and the full stop separates thousands. Write 1.500.000 € and 2,5 milioni di euro, never 1,500,000.
• "di" after milione and miliardo: 1 milione di euro, 3 milioni di utenti. Leaving out di is a giveaway of careless translation.
• Billion: the English billion is miliardo. The Italian word bilione means something else entirely, a classic error on market-size slides (TAM, SAM, SOM).
• Abbreviations: on charts, mln and mld replace "M" and "bn".
• Plurals: Italian has the CLDR categories one, many and other. In practice, 1 cliente but 12 clienti, and the form changes for large round numbers too (un milione, due milioni).

Month names are lower case (gennaio 2025), and quarters appear as T1 2025, although Q1 is widely used in the Italian start-up scene.

Register and vocabulary for Italian investors

Italian business writing is more formal than the breezy English of many decks. Where a slide addresses the reader directly, the polite form is Lei for one person, or voi when speaking to a fund as an organisation. What matters is consistency: a closing call to action in Ci contatti should not sit alongside a Contattateci three slides earlier.

Much funding vocabulary is borrowed from English in Italy: startup, round, seed, business angel, exit and pre-money are used as they are. Other terms have a common Italian equivalent: revenue becomes fatturato, gross margin margine lordo, use of funds utilizzo dei fondi. Acronyms such as ARR, CAC or LTV usually stay in English.

Two typographic points matter on slide titles:

• Italian does not use title case: Il nostro modello di business, not Il Nostro Modello Di Business;
• in capitals, "is" must be written È, not E', a frequent slip in all-caps headings.

Company forms stay in their own language: a Ltd or a GmbH does not become an S.r.l.

What Manuce delivers, and what it does not

Your deck is handled by Métis, Manuce's engine specialised in finance, trained on the language of fundraising, accounts and valuations. You receive:

• the Italian deck in its original format: PowerPoint back as PowerPoint, PDF back as PDF, layout included;
• the translation within minutes for a typical deck of around fifteen slides (about 1,800 words);
• your files kept in your client area, handy when you update the deck between meetings.

Supporting files follow the same route: a financial model in Excel, a memo in Word or a summary in Markdown are accepted, as are plain text, HTML, RTF and CSV.

What Manuce does not do:

• it cannot read a scanned PDF (an image with no selectable text). For the same reason, a chart pasted as a picture or a screenshot of a table holds no text to translate;
• it does not produce sworn or certified translations. If an Italian fund or notary later asks for a certified version of your articles of association or shareholders' agreement, you will need a sworn translator;
• it does not take glossaries or terminology instructions: for a term you want kept in English, check it in the free sample and then in the delivered file.

Layout: what moves when the deck becomes Italian

Coming from English, Italian text runs noticeably longer, because it adds articles and prepositions: Go-to-market strategy becomes Strategia di ingresso nel mercato. Coming from French or Spanish, the length is much closer.

The places to watch are always the same:

• single-line titles fitted to the millimetre, which may wrap onto two lines;
• icons with two or three words beside them (Team often stays Team, but Traction becomes Trazione or Risultati);
• chart labels and axes, where mln replaces "M";
• brand display fonts: make sure they include à è é ì ò ù and their capitals, otherwise the software swaps in another font mid-word.

Preparing the file and checking the Italian version

Before uploading:

• upload the final version: any later edit must be made by hand in both languages;
• prefer PowerPoint to PDF if you expect to adjust slides afterwards;
• rebuild image-only charts as real charts or text boxes so their labels get translated.

After delivery, check methodically:

1. compare every figure with the original: raise, valuation, years, percentages, separators, and every miliardo;
2. reread the ask slide: the amount and the utilizzo dei fondi must be unambiguous;
3. scan all-caps titles for a stray E';
4. have an Italian speaker read the deck if it is going into a decisive meeting.

For a deck sent to funds, the Professional level is designed for documents ready to share; Premium adds a cross-review.

In practice

1. Export the final deck as PowerPoint, or as a PDF with selectable text.
2. Upload it, choose Italian and a level: the quote appears, based on the exact word count.
3. Read the free sample and check the tone and terms such as "seed" or "ARR".
4. Pay, then download the Italian deck in its original format within minutes.
5. Check figures, long titles and accented capitals before sending it to investors.