Translate a PowerPoint presentation into Finnish

What Finnish does to a slide

A Finnish translation usually has fewer words than the source, but each word is longer. Finnish does not say “customer satisfaction survey” in four words. It writes asiakastyytyväisyyskysely, as a single word. Likewise, “workforce planning” becomes henkilöstösuunnittelu and “sales targets” becomes myyntitavoitteet.

On a slide, this has three effects:

• PowerPoint only wraps at spaces and hyphens. A 25-letter compound in a narrow column, a table cell or a circular shape either spills out or breaks mid-word.
• One-line titles often run to two lines and push the body text down.
• Short labels suffer most (buttons, badges, timeline steps), because Finnish rarely has a ready-made short form.

The letters ä and ö are everywhere, and å appears in Swedish-language names. Mainstream fonts include them. A decorative or campaign-specific heading font may not, and PowerPoint will then show a fallback font that looks different.

Finnish grammar and conventions to check

Finnish has fifteen grammatical cases, so a word changes its ending depending on its role in the sentence. Slides built from fragments are where this causes problems:

• Stand-alone labels. “Results” is Tulokset as a heading, but tuloksissa in “in the results”. A label translated on its own may not fit the sentence next to it.
• Proper names inflect. Helsinki becomes Helsingissä (“in Helsinki”) and London becomes Lontooseen (“to London”). Acronyms and brand names take their ending after a colon: EU:ssa, ERP:n käyttöönotto.
• Numbers. The plural categories are simple (one, other). After any number above one, though, the noun stays singular, in the partitive case: 1 maa, 5 maata (“5 countries”). Do not expect a plural after a numeral.

Finnish typography also has its own conventions:

• Quotation marks are ”Tervetuloa”, with the same mark at both ends.
• Dates are written 3.6.2025, with no leading zeros, and times as 9.30.
• Months, weekdays, languages and nationalities take a lower-case initial: maanantai, englanti. English title case in headings should become sentence case.
• Amounts are written 1 250 000,50 €, with a decimal comma and the currency symbol after the number.

What Manuce returns, and what it leaves alone

Manuce translates the text in titles, placeholders, text boxes and shapes, including grouped shapes and tables. You receive your original .pptx with its theme, images, shape positions, animations and transitions unchanged. Only the text changes. You also get a Word version, a PDF and plain text, which are handy for a Finnish reviewer who does not use PowerPoint.

The following stays in the original language:

• speaker notes, which are not translated at present;
• text in charts, SmartArt and slide masters;
• text embedded in images.

Two limits matter more than usual for Finnish:

• Text box sizes are not recalculated. A long compound can overflow a fixed box. Any autofit setting already made in PowerPoint still applies.
• A paragraph keeps the formatting of its start. A bold word in mid-sentence loses its emphasis. Finnish word order differs anyway, so the highlighted word would no longer sit in the same place.

Finnish is a surcharge language: a ×1.25 coefficient applies to the per-word rate. Manuce does not produce sworn or certified translations.

Preparing the file

• Widen tight boxes. Find the columns, cells and shapes where a twenty-letter word would not fit. Widen them, or switch on text autofit.
• Test your fonts. Type äö into a heading with your font. If the letters look different from the rest, choose a font that includes them.
• Move key chart and SmartArt text into shapes. A SmartArt converted to shapes, or a legend rebuilt as a text box, will be translated.
• Set speaker notes aside. If the presenter will speak Finnish, copy the notes into a separate document and have it translated on its own.
• Write full sentences rather than fragments spread across boxes (“Sales:” in one box, a figure in another). Finnish inflects a complete sentence correctly.

Reviewing the Finnish version

Before you pay, the free extract shows one paragraph translated at your chosen level. Pick a passage with a product name, an acronym or a figure, so you can see how it is inflected. Once the translation is delivered, open the .pptx in slideshow mode and check each slide:

• titles now on two lines, words broken mid-way or spilling out of a shape;
• stand-alone labels that no longer agree with the text around them;
• brand names you want kept as they are, possibly with an ending added (PowerPointissa);
• dates, amounts and quotation marks in Finnish format;
• charts, SmartArt and images still in the source language.

In practice

1. Widen narrow text boxes and check that your fonts display ä and ö.
2. Upload the .pptx: the quote appears at once, based on the exact word count.
3. Read the free extract, choosing a passage with an acronym or a figure.
4. Download the translated .pptx, along with the Word, PDF and plain-text versions.
5. Run the slideshow and check for overflow and any untranslated charts or images.