Translate a PowerPoint presentation into Arabic

What Arabic changes on a slide

Arabic reads right to left, whereas most decks are designed for left-to-right languages. An Arabic-speaking audience expects:

• titles aligned right, with bullets on the right of the text;
• timelines, "step 1 → step 2" arrows and sales funnels that progress from right to left;
• logos and slide numbers often mirrored compared with the original.

Manuce keeps the shape positions of your file: only the text changes. An arrow pointing right will still point right. If you are presenting in Morocco, Egypt or the Gulf, plan to mirror the slides where reading order carries meaning — processes, before/after comparisons, chronologies. Purely visual slides, such as a full-bleed photo with a title, usually need little rework.

Register matters too: a business presentation is normally written in Modern Standard Arabic, understood from the Atlantic to the Gulf. Dialects belong to speech and rarely appear on a slide.

Fonts, joined letters and legibility

Arabic letters join and change shape depending on their position in a word: an isolated ه looks quite different from the same letter mid-word (ـهـ). A font without Arabic glyphs cannot display them, so PowerPoint substitutes another font and your theme loses its consistency.

• Check your theme font. Fonts such as Arial, Tahoma or Segoe UI include Arabic; many Latin brand typefaces do not.
• Arabic has dots and strokes above and below the line, so at the same point size it looks smaller than Latin text. Very small type — captions, source lines at the foot of a slide — quickly becomes unreadable.
• Tight line spacing crushes diacritics; leave room.

Text box sizes are not recalculated. If a box has a fixed height and the Arabic sentence needs an extra line, it may overflow; whatever autofit setting you chose in PowerPoint will apply.

Digits, plurals, punctuation and Latin words

Slides are full of numbers, and Arabic has two digit systems: Western digits (2025), common across the Maghreb, and Eastern Arabic digits (٢٠٢٥), widely used in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. Choose according to your audience and make sure charts and tables match the body text.

Arabic plurals have six forms, and the noun changes with the number:

• مشروع واحد (one project), مشروعان (two projects);
• ٣ مشاريع (3 to 10), ١١ مشروعًا (11 to 99), ١٠٠ مشروع (100).

If you edit a figure after translation — "3 projects" becoming "12 projects" — the noun that follows must change as well.

Punctuation differs: comma ،, semicolon ؛, question mark ؟. Finally, a Latin product name or reference (Version 2.1, AX-200) inside an Arabic sentence can display in an unexpected order: proofread those passages on screen.

What Manuce delivers, and what it does not do

Manuce translates the text on every slide: titles, placeholders, text boxes, shapes, grouped shapes and tables. You receive:

• your original .pptx with the text replaced in place — theme, images, positions, animations and transitions are those of your file;
• a Word version, a PDF and plain text, handy for an Arabic-speaking colleague to review without PowerPoint.

What is not done at present:

• speaker notes are not translated, so an Arabic-speaking presenter will find them in the source language;
• text in charts, SmartArt, slide masters (a "Confidential" footer, a date) and text embedded in images stays in the source language;
• a paragraph mixing formats (one bold word mid-sentence) takes the formatting of its opening — Arabic word order rarely mirrors the source sentence anyway;
• the layout is not flipped right to left.

Manuce does not produce sworn or certified translations.

Preparing the file and checking it

Before uploading:

• set the theme font in the master to one that supports Arabic;
• move important text out of images and SmartArt into real text boxes, otherwise it will stay untranslated;
• turn on autofit for tight boxes.

After delivery, in PowerPoint:

1. check every paragraph is right-aligned and set to right-to-left direction, and fix any that are not;
2. mirror timelines, arrows and process diagrams;
3. translate chart labels, SmartArt and master footers by hand;
4. check digits (Western or Eastern) and Latin names inside sentences;
5. run the slideshow: animations are those of the original, and text that "flies in from the left" may be better entering from the right.

In practice

1. Upload your .pptx: the quote appears straight away, based on the exact word count.
2. Read the free sample, one paragraph translated into Arabic at your chosen level, before paying.
3. Download the translated .pptx plus the Word, PDF and plain-text versions from your client area.
4. In PowerPoint, check right-to-left direction, fonts and digits, and mirror any directional diagrams.
5. Translate charts, SmartArt, masters and speaker notes by hand if your audience needs them.