Translate a PowerPoint presentation into Danish

What Danish changes on your slides

Danish writes compound nouns as a single word, much like German. "Customer satisfaction survey" becomes kundetilfredshedsundersøgelse; "sales strategy" becomes salgsstrategi. On a slide, that has two consequences.

• Very long words in narrow boxes: a column header or shape label that fitted on one line in the source can end up as a single word wider than its box. PowerPoint then breaks it wherever space runs out, with no hyphen.
• No splitting to save space: writing salgs strategi as two words is an error in Danish (known as særskrivning). Widen the box or reduce the font size instead.

Register shifts too. Danish business communication routinely uses the informal du: a call-to-action slide such as "We'd love your feedback" naturally becomes Giv os din feedback. The formal De now sounds stiff. And Danish headings use sentence case, so a source deck in English Title Case ("Our Key Results 2024") will come out as Vores vigtigste resultater 2024, with one capital.

Danish numbers, dates and punctuation

Slides are full of key figures, and that is where Danish conventions show most:

• Numbers: decimal comma and full stop for thousands, 1.250.000 and 12,5. A financial table taken from English (1,250,000.00) needs checking line by line, as the two systems are mirror images.
• Percentages and currency: 12,5 % with a space; the krone is written kr. after the amount or DKK before it.
• Dates and times: 15. marts 2025, with months and weekdays in lower case; times are written kl. 9.30. A full stop also marks ordinals: 3. kvartal for Q3.
• Quotation marks: Danish often uses »quote«, chevrons pointing inwards, or plain straight quotes.

Danish has just two plural forms (one and other): 1 medarbejder, 12 medarbejdere. Where a slide pairs a figure with a noun ("4 projects in progress"), check the agreement, especially if someone edited the figure by hand afterwards.

Æ, ø, å and your fonts

Danish uses the Latin alphabet plus æ, ø and å, which appear constantly: Årsrapport, Mål for næste år, Økonomi. Standard fonts include them. The risk lies in brand or display fonts set in the theme: if one of these letters is missing, PowerPoint substitutes another font for that character alone, and the heading looks patched.

Open the delivered .pptx on a machine with your fonts installed and look closely at large headings. The PDF included in the delivery also shows the rendering your Danish audience will see.

What Manuce returns, and what it leaves as it is

You get your original .pptx back with only the text changed: theme, images, shape positions, animations and transitions stay as they were. Titles, placeholders, text boxes, shapes (including grouped shapes) and tables are translated. A Word version, a PDF and plain text come as well, handy when a Danish colleague without PowerPoint is reviewing the wording.

What Manuce does not do at present:

• speaker notes are not translated;
• text in charts, SmartArt, slide masters and text embedded in images stays in the source language, so a bar chart labelled "Revenue" will still say so;
• a paragraph mixing several formats (one bold word mid-sentence) takes the formatting of its first characters; since Danish word order differs, that bold word would need moving anyway;
• text box sizes are not recalculated: any autofit set in PowerPoint applies, otherwise a long compound may overflow.

Manuce does not provide sworn or certified translation. Danish is a surcharged language (×1.25 coefficient on the per-word rate).

Preparing the file and checking the result

Before uploading:

• identify charts and SmartArt whose text must be in Danish: you will edit them separately, or convert them to plain shapes where possible;
• move important text out of images (a title on a photo, an annotated screenshot) into a text box;
• turn on autofit for narrow boxes (labels, table headers) so they can absorb compound words.

Use the free sample to judge register (du or De) and how product names or acronyms are handled: if they must stay unchanged, check this in the sample and then in the translation. After delivery, run through the deck in slideshow mode: overflow, Danish number formats, bold words to reposition, and speaker notes to translate yourself if you present from them.

In practice

1. Upload your .pptx and get a quote based on the exact word count.
2. Choose a level and read the free sample translated into Danish.
3. Pay, then download the translated .pptx, Word version, PDF and plain text a few minutes later.
4. Review in slideshow mode: overflow, number formats, and charts or notes left in the source language.