Translate a PowerPoint presentation into Hindi

Devanagari on a slide

Hindi runs left to right, so your slide layout does not need mirroring. The challenge lies elsewhere: Devanagari joins the letters of a word with a horizontal headline and merges consonants into conjuncts. The word प्रस्तुति (presentation) is not a string of characters set side by side; the font has to assemble them, a process called shaping.

• The theme font. A decorative Latin typeface has no Devanagari glyphs. PowerPoint will then substitute another font, or show empty boxes on a machine that lacks one. Office themes keep a separate font for complex scripts; that is the one to set, for instance Nirmala UI on Windows, Kohinoor Devanagari on a Mac, or the free Noto Sans Devanagari.
• Line height. Some vowel signs rise above the headline (ि, े), others drop below the baseline (ु, ू). A tight fixed line spacing tuned for English can clip them, especially in titles.
• Punctuation. A Hindi sentence ends with the danda ।, not a full stop. Commas, question marks and brackets are the Latin ones.

Lines break at spaces, without hyphenation: a long word such as उत्तरदायित्व moves whole to the next line, so a bullet that fitted on two lines may need three.

Numbers, English terms and register

• Digits. Business documents in India mostly use the digits 0 to 9. Devanagari numerals (२०२५) exist but are less common in corporate material, so check which ones appear in your translation.
• Large numbers. India groups figures in lakhs (100,000) and crores (10 million): 1,500,000 is commonly written 15,00,000, or 15 lakh. A headline of 2.5 million may become 25 लाख; make sure figures in titles and charts still match.
• English terms. Business Hindi keeps many English words, sometimes in Latin script (KPI, cloud), sometimes transliterated (डैशबोर्ड). If a product name or acronym must stay exactly as it is, check it in the free sample and then in the delivered translation.
• Register. When addressing clients or senior management, the audience is addressed with the polite आप.
• Plurals and agreement. Hindi has two plural forms: 1 फ़ाइल, 3 फ़ाइलें. Verbs also agree in gender, so a slide built as a template to fill in by hand (__ attendees registered) will need its agreement adjusted once you add the number.

What Manuce returns, and what it does not do

Manuce translates the text on every slide: titles, placeholders, text boxes, shapes, grouped shapes and tables. You get your original .pptx back with only the text changed; theme, images, shape positions, animations and transitions are those of your file. You also receive a Word version, a PDF and plain text, handy when a Hindi-speaking reviewer does not have PowerPoint.

What stays as it is:

• speaker notes are not translated at present;
• text in charts, SmartArt, slide masters and text embedded in images stays in the source language, so an Indian audience may see untranslated axis labels beside a Devanagari title;
• a paragraph mixing several formats takes the formatting of its opening; as Hindi puts the verb at the end of the sentence, the word you emphasised has moved anyway;
• text box sizes are not recalculated; only the autofit set in PowerPoint applies.

Hindi carries a surcharge (a ×1.6 coefficient on the per-word price). Manuce does not provide certified or sworn translation.

Preparing the file before upload

1. Set a Devanagari font in the theme, not slide by slide, so every box inherits it.
2. Leave room in titles: replace fixed line spacing with single or more, and turn on autofit for narrow boxes.
3. Move text out of images and charts if the audience must read it in Hindi: a caption in a text box is translated, a chart label is not.
4. Copy useful speaker notes into a separate document if the presenter needs them in Hindi.
5. List words in bold or colour mid-sentence, so you can reapply the emphasis to the right Hindi word.

Checking the result without reading Hindi

• Open the .pptx on the computer that will run the presentation. Empty boxes mean a missing font; a dotted circle ◌ next to a vowel sign means broken shaping.
• Compare it with the delivered PDF, which shows the intended rendering. A slide that differs from the PDF points to a font problem on that machine.
• Scan the titles for clipped upper or lower signs and text spilling out of its box.
• Look for leftover source text in charts, SmartArt and footers coming from the master.
• Ask a Hindi speaker to read the key slides, especially those with figures, before the session.

In practice

1. Set a Devanagari font in the theme and relax any fixed line spacing.
2. Upload the .pptx and read the free Hindi sample.
3. Choose a level, pay, then download the .pptx, Word file, PDF and plain text.
4. Open the file on the presenting computer and compare it with the PDF.
5. Handle charts, SmartArt and notes separately if needed.