Translation difficulties and their overcoming

Professionally translating a presentation into another language is not an easy task, but thanks to advancements in AI, it is quite solvable today.

In the modern globalized and multicultural world, covered by a dense network of various communication channels, the issue of mutual understanding is more acute than ever. And even if, for now, it is not possible to fully understand the interlocutor at the mental level, at least you can speak to him in his native language. Modern automatic translation systems, which, thanks to achievements in the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning, have made a grand leap in terms of efficiency in the last couple of years, are very helpful in this. Of course, the situation is still far from ideal, but every month automated systems are getting better and better at working not only with text but also with context, providing invaluable assistance to everyone who has to prepare presentations for a multilingual audience.

Where to start? The most obvious option is Google Translate, as it is the most popular online translation service today, supporting over a hundred languages. It doesn’t need a special introduction, we just note that in addition to texts, it allows you to translate documents in docx, pdf, pptx, xlsx formats, inscriptions on images, and even entire websites.

You can make an effective translation directly in Microsoft PowerPoint. Today it is the most popular program in the world for creating presentations. Therefore, it is not surprising that developers are embedding more and more features into it. In particular, new versions have a built-in machine translation option, supporting more than 60 languages. According to the company’s statements, special AI algorithms provide accurate and natural translation (in practice, not all users agree with this). Moreover, the program can translate presentation subtitles in real-time, which is also very convenient.

Microsoft PowerPoint allows you to conduct presentations in 60+ languages

The translation is ready, but is everything there correct? If you are not a native speaker, it can be difficult to catch the nuances of certain words and phrases. Therefore, it will not be superfluous to check and, possibly, improve the translated text using special tools. DeepL Write, an online service developed by the German company DeepL SE, does a good job with this task. The program will help edit the translation so that it sounds more natural and correct, will offer options for replacing words, restructuring phrases, etc. At this stage, DeepL Write works only with English and German texts. There is also an online translator DeepL Translate, which, thanks to AI capabilities, provides accurate and high-quality translation in about 30 languages (the list is expanding). The service translates not only texts but also entire documents in docx and pdf formats, websites, and pptx presentations. However, some users complain that the program does not translate large documents as quickly as they would like.

It happens that the translated and even edited with the help of AI text does not fully satisfy the author. In this case, the written can be paraphrased, for example, using the QuillBot service. This powerful AI-based tool allows you to rebuild both individual phrases and entire texts so that they best correspond to a certain style – business, academic, epistolary, creative, etc. The transformed text retains the original meaning but has a different word formation and sentence structure. However, so far QuilliBot effectively paraphrases only English texts, although it can do translations in more than 20 languages.

There are situations when the capabilities of online services are not enough for a quality translation. In this case, it is easy to find a professional translator on freelancer websites. Among the most popular specialized platforms of this kind are Stepes and ProZ – both services are focused on translation and content localization, and here you can find an expert of almost any profile.

The online platform Stepes will help you find a suitable translator for your presentation if AI has not coped with the task.

Now, when your presentation is ready and edited, it’s time to present it to your target audience. This can be done with Pitch Avatar, literally in a few mouse clicks – just upload the presentation, create a link, send it to the recipients, and you will get new powerful opportunities for lead generation and content delivery to your clients.

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