Translate a PowerPoint presentation into Polish

What Polish changes on your slides

Polish is an inflected language: a word changes its ending depending on its role in the sentence. On slides, the risk lies in short, standalone labels. "Sales" as a column heading is Sprzedaż, but "sales growth" becomes wzrost sprzedaży. The engine translates the slide's text with its context, which helps, but one-word titles and table labels always deserve a second look.

Plurals take four forms, where English has two:

• 1 produkt (one)
• 3 produkty, 22 produkty (few)
• 5 produktów, 12 produktów (many)
• 1,5 produktu (other, used for decimals)

If you change a figure after translation, say "4 new markets" becomes "5", the noun must change too: 4 nowe rynki but 5 nowych rynków.

Polish text usually runs longer than English, with long words such as przedsiębiorstwo (enterprise) or odpowiedzialność (responsibility). A title that fitted on one line may wrap onto two. Polish also uses sentence case in headings: Plan sprzedaży na 2025 rok, not Title Case on every word, so capitals carried over from an English deck look wrong.

Fonts, numbers and Polish typography

Check the fonts first. The letters ą, ć, ę, ł, ń, ó, ś, ź, ż must exist in your theme fonts. Some brand or display fonts lack them, and PowerPoint then draws the missing letter in a fallback font, so a Ł appears in a different weight from the rest of the word. To test, type the Polish pangram Zażółć gęślą jaźń into a text box in each of your fonts before translating.

Polish conventions to check on the slides:

• Numbers: decimal comma and a space for thousands, 12 500,75.
• Currency: symbol after the amount, 1 200 zł or 1 200 PLN.
• Dates: 15.03.2025, or written out as 15 marca 2025, with the month in the genitive; months and weekdays are lower case.
• Quotation marks: „tak”, opening low, closing high.
• Careful typesetting avoids leaving a one-letter preposition or conjunction (w, z, i, o, a) at the end of a line; fix this in titles when proofreading.

On register, a deck for Polish clients or partners rarely addresses them informally: a call to action reads Prosimy o kontakt rather than Skontaktuj się.

What Manuce returns, and what it leaves untranslated

Manuce translates the text on every slide: titles, placeholders, text boxes, shapes, grouped shapes and tables. You get your original .pptx back: theme, images, shape positions, animations and transitions stay as they were, and only the text changes to Polish. A Word version, a PDF and plain text are supplied as well, so a Polish reviewer can work without PowerPoint.

What stays in the source language, for you to handle:

• speaker notes, not translated at present;
• text inside charts (axes, legends, data labels: a "Revenue" axis stays in English);
• SmartArt and slide masters (a footer defined in the master, for instance);
• text embedded in images.

Two formatting limits. A paragraph mixing several formats takes the formatting of its start, so a bold word mid-sentence loses its bold. Polish word order often differs anyway, so the word to emphasise is rarely in the same place. And text box sizes are not recalculated: longer Polish text can overflow a fixed box unless autofit is set in PowerPoint.

Manuce does not provide sworn translation by a tłumacz przysięgły; that is rarely needed for a presentation, but worth knowing if the deck goes into an official file.

Preparing the file and checking the Polish version

Before uploading:

• Confirm your fonts contain the Polish diacritics, or switch to one that does.
• Turn on autofit for tight boxes: titles, callouts, diagram labels.
• If a chart carries important text, move it into a text box, or plan to translate its labels by hand.
• Copy your speaker notes separately if the presenter needs them in Polish.

Once delivered, scan the deck in slide sorter view: overflowing boxes and titles that now wrap stand out quickly. Then check one-word labels, numbers followed by a noun (plural agreement), amounts in zł and dates. Finally, look for words that should be bold or coloured and reapply the formatting. The free sample, one paragraph of your own file translated before you pay, lets you judge the chosen level on your actual content.

In practice

1. Check that your theme fonts display ą, ł and ż, and turn on autofit for tight text boxes.
2. Upload the .pptx: the quote appears on the exact word count, with a free translated sample.
3. Choose a level, pay, and download the Polish .pptx with its Word, PDF and plain-text versions.
4. Proofread titles, plurals, amounts and dates, then translate charts, SmartArt and notes left in the source language.