Translate a PowerPoint presentation into Indonesian

How Indonesian behaves on a slide

Script is not the issue: Indonesian is written in plain Latin letters, left to right, with no diacritics, so whatever font your theme uses will render it. The challenges lie elsewhere.

• Long words. Indonesian builds words with prefixes and suffixes: "development" becomes pengembangan, "improve" meningkatkan, "accountability" pertanggungjawaban. A short bullet can wrap onto a second line and a one-line title may no longer fit.
• Head-first word order. The noun comes before what describes it: "Annual Sales Report" becomes Laporan Penjualan Tahunan. If your source is English, the word you put first for emphasis often ends up last.
• Title case. Indonesian style capitalises every word in a heading except short function words such as di, ke, dari, dan, yang, untuk: Strategi Pemasaran untuk Pasar Asia Tenggara. An all-lowercase slide title looks careless to an Indonesian reader.

Numbers, dates, plurals and tone

Decks tend to be full of figures, and Indonesian handles them differently from English:

• Separators: a full stop for thousands and a comma for decimals, 1.500,75, the reverse of 1,500.75.
• Money: rupiah amounts are written with Rp before the figure, and large numbers are read in juta (million) and miliar (billion), e.g. 2,5 miliar.
• Dates and times: day, month, year, with the month spelt out: 12 Maret 2025; times use a full stop, pukul 14.30.
• Plurals: a single grammatical category and no agreement. Plurality is shown by reduplication (produk-produk) or by context, and never after a number: tiga produk, not tiga produk-produk. A string such as {n} products simply becomes {n} produk.
• Tone: formal address uses Anda, always capitalised; an audience is commonly addressed as Bapak dan Ibu. The informal kamu is out of place in a business deck.

What Manuce returns, and what stays untranslated

Manuce translates the text in titles, placeholders, text boxes, shapes (including shapes inside groups) and tables. You get your original .pptx back: theme, images, shape positions, animations and transitions are those of your file, and only the text changes. You also receive a Word version, a PDF and plain text, handy for an Indonesian colleague who needs to review the wording without PowerPoint.

What remains in the source language:

• speaker notes, which are not translated at present;
• text in charts and SmartArt: axis labels and data labels also keep their original number format, so 1,500 will not become 1.500;
• text on slide masters (a shared footer, a confidentiality line) and text embedded in images.

Other limits: a paragraph mixing several formats takes the formatting of its beginning. Because Indonesian reorders the sentence, a bold figure in mid-sentence will lose its bold. Text box sizes are not recalculated; only the autofit setting you chose in PowerPoint applies. Manuce does not produce sworn translations either: if an Indonesian authority asks for a penerjemah tersumpah, you will need a sworn translator.

Preparing the deck before upload

• Turn on autofit for tight text boxes (titles, callouts, labels) so that long Indonesian words shrink the text rather than spill over.
• Move text out of images where you can: a tagline typed in a text box gets translated, the same tagline baked into a PNG does not.
• List your charts and SmartArt so you can relabel them yourself, using Indonesian separators.
• Copy essential speaker notes into a text box, or have them translated separately.
• Avoid isolated bold inside a sentence: give a key figure its own line or its own shape instead.

Checking the Indonesian version

Start with the free sample: one paragraph of your file translated at the level you choose. It is enough to judge the tone (Anda, not kamu) and to see whether a product name or acronym you want kept as is, such as KPI or ROI, comes through unchanged.

Once delivered, run the deck in Slide Show view, not just the editing view, and look for:

• titles that are cut off or have wrapped onto two lines;
• bullets overflowing the bottom of their box;
• heading capitalisation in line with Indonesian style;
• dates as 12 Maret 2025 and numbers as 1.500,75 in the translated text;
• charts, SmartArt and master footers still in the source language.

The PDF copy makes it easy to have an Indonesian reviewer sign off before the meeting.

In practice

1. Turn on autofit for tight text boxes and move key text out of images.
2. Upload the .pptx, choose Indonesian and read the free sample.
3. Download the translated .pptx with its Word, PDF and plain text copies.
4. Run the slide show: check overflow, title capitalisation and number formats.
5. Translate charts, SmartArt, master text and speaker notes by hand.