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Most efficient way to translate PowerPoints which are chock-full of images?
Thread poster: FreelanceBass
FreelanceBass
FreelanceBass
United States
Local time: 10:07
Japanese to English
Dec 15, 2018

Hi,

I just received a translation request from a client - the document is a PowerPoint, and at least 80% of said PowerPoint is made up of images. I always use MemoQ for my projects, but from what I understand images are a no-go. So it seems I'll have to do things the old-fashioned route.

Is there a "best" way to go about translating this sort of document efficiently? All that's coming to mind right now is to paste over the text in images with my own opaque text boxes...
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Hi,

I just received a translation request from a client - the document is a PowerPoint, and at least 80% of said PowerPoint is made up of images. I always use MemoQ for my projects, but from what I understand images are a no-go. So it seems I'll have to do things the old-fashioned route.

Is there a "best" way to go about translating this sort of document efficiently? All that's coming to mind right now is to paste over the text in images with my own opaque text boxes... but this seems rather cumbersome and the finished product won't look great. I'm sure they'll employ an editor to pretty things up after I'm done, but I do want to impress them and I don't want what I turn in to be looking like a kindergarten project. But again, I also want to be making money and my pay is dependent on my translation speed.

So - how do you guys translate image-heavy PowerPoints? Is there a way to do so in which I won't eventually be pulling my hair out halfway through?

Thanks in advance!

- FLB
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Tom in London
Tom in London
United Kingdom
Local time: 14:07
Member (2008)
Italian to English
Help Dec 17, 2018

I don't know if this helps:

I spend a few minutes copy/pasting all the text from the PPT into a Word file. This also makes the word count easier.

Then I translate the Word file.

Then I copy/paste all the bits from the Word file back into a copy of the PPT. Some font/font size adjustment may be necessary.

This is the quickest and easiest way I've found.


neilmac
 
Tony M
Tony M
France
Local time: 15:07
Member
French to English
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The little utility 'Werecat' is your friend! Dec 17, 2018

A fantastic little program that runs as an add-in to MS Word — no longer supported, but readily downloadable from the 'Net, then you just install it within the 'Start' > 'Templates' folder in Word. It was originally designed to facilitate translation using Wordfast, but does not actually require any specific CAT tool to do its job.

It extracts all the text from every editable shape etc. and creates a Word .DOC file which you can translate any way you like — and then it popse eve
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A fantastic little program that runs as an add-in to MS Word — no longer supported, but readily downloadable from the 'Net, then you just install it within the 'Start' > 'Templates' folder in Word. It was originally designed to facilitate translation using Wordfast, but does not actually require any specific CAT tool to do its job.

It extracts all the text from every editable shape etc. and creates a Word .DOC file which you can translate any way you like — and then it popse everything back into palce again for you, like magic!

The one thing to be VERY careful of is not to add or delete any hard returns! If you do, it will crash out of putting the text back, though once you've found and corrected the problem (i.e. at the point where it stops), you can then start again and it will be OK. If for some reason there is a hard return that you NEED to delete (e.g. a spurious one that messes up segmentation), then simply delete it in the segment and then be sure to add an extra one at the end of the segment, which you can highlight so as to be able to delete it later if necessary.

Of course, it can't pull text out of uneditable graphics, so if there are a lot of those, be careful! I got caught out recently, where the initial word count on which I quoted didn't allow for the uneditables, which in fact nearly amounted to +50%!! It does soemtimes come unstuck on things that aretheoretically "editable" , but for some reason you can't seem to get into — again, before quoting, it's worth checking carefully to see if there are any instances of this in your PPT / DOC.

Just one thing: the Werecat-created file not surprisingly has tags in it, which will of course falsify the word count if you do it in Word — so the best things is to do a proper analysis in whatever CAT tool you are using, which will generally ignore the tags, or at worst, only count them as a single word each time.

If you are NOT using a CAT tool, then you can simply create a scratch copy of the file just for the purposes of counting the words, then search-&-replace all instances of the 'untranslatable' style, replacing them with nothing, and hey presto! you'll be able to count the actual words.

Sadly, it seems to be harder to find Werecat on the 'Net these days, though i'm sure it's lurking there somewhere! You might try searching for it in the ProZ.com forums, as it's certainly been mentoned before, and someone might have posted a download link.

There are other utilities that do the same thing, in fact, I believe MS Word even includes one; but I've never found anything that works quite as well. Especially the ability to put the text back seamlessly after translation!
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Tom in London
Tom in London
United Kingdom
Local time: 14:07
Member (2008)
Italian to English
The Same Thing Dec 17, 2018

Tony M wrote:

There are other utilities that do the same thing, in fact, I believe MS Word even includes one


Where is it in Word?


 
Kay-Viktor Stegemann
Kay-Viktor Stegemann
Germany
Local time: 15:07
English to German
In memoriam
Text as images? Dec 17, 2018

@FreelanceBass, do you want to say that the text to translate is contained in the images?

@Tony M, do you want to say that the Werecat utility is able to extract text from graphics? (And what is an "uneditable" graphic, I always thought that all image files are editable somehow)


 
Tony M
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Extracting text from editable / uneditable graphics Dec 17, 2018

Kay-Viktor Stegemann wrote:

@Tony M, do you want to say that the Werecat utility is able to extract text from graphics?


It depends what one is referring to by 'graphics'! In the specific context of a PPT, many of the 'graphical' elements are in fact simply text boxes, autoshapes, charts etc. that you could manually edit withn P/P, and Werecat can indeed extract the text from these sorts of items.

(And what is an "uneditable" graphic, I always thought that all image files are editable somehow)

Possibly — but "somehow" is the operative word there! In the context of our PPT presentation, an 'uneditable' grpahic is one where the various constituent elements have been 'fused' together in such a way as to no longer be able to be edited separately — an example might be a photo or a scanned page from a book. In this case, the only way to recover the text would be to use some kind of OCR programme; in most of the PPTs I handle, there are mercifully few of these, so I usually simply retype the source text, and then supply the translation, so that the customer's graphic artist can decide how they want to handle it.

[Edited at 2018-12-17 12:22 GMT]


 
Tony M
Tony M
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Sorry, no idea! Dec 17, 2018

Tom in London wrote:

Where is it in Word?


Sorry, Tom, I've no idea! It hadn't been added yet in the old version of Word I use, but I seem to remember last time I mentioned Werecat, some supercilious twit came crashing in to flame me by saying that what I was saying was rubbish, as you could already do this in Word anyway!


 
Giovanni Guarnieri MITI, MIL
Giovanni Guarnieri MITI, MIL  Identity Verified
United Kingdom
Local time: 14:07
Member (2004)
English to Italian
CAT tool Dec 17, 2018

Tom in London wrote:

I don't know if this helps:

I spend a few minutes copy/pasting all the text from the PPT into a Word file. This also makes the word count easier.

Then I translate the Word file.

Then I copy/paste all the bits from the Word file back into a copy of the PPT. Some font/font size adjustment may be necessary.

This is the quickest and easiest way I've found.



I know you don't like them but a CAT tool would save you a lot of time in these circumstances... open the file and translate it in the CAT tool and save as target and everything is in place. No laborious cutting and pasting. You just need to tweak it a bit to adjust the font/boxes...


Dan Lucas
 
Giovanni Guarnieri MITI, MIL
Giovanni Guarnieri MITI, MIL  Identity Verified
United Kingdom
Local time: 14:07
Member (2004)
English to Italian
I think... Dec 17, 2018

the OP is referring to non-editable graphics with text in it. I'm not aware of a solution for this...

IrinaN
 
Tony M
Tony M
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Would help if OP made their actual request clear Dec 17, 2018

Giovanni Guarnieri MITI, MIL wrote:

[I think...] the OP is referring to non-editable graphics with text in it. I'm not aware of a solution for this...


Indeed, the original post is unclear.

If it is indeed uneditable, then I suspect printing the entire presentation to PDF and then OCR-ing it might be the (fairly) quick and (very) dirty solution.


 
Tom in London
Tom in London
United Kingdom
Local time: 14:07
Member (2008)
Italian to English
Longer Dec 17, 2018

Giovanni Guarnieri MITI, MIL wrote:

.....a CAT tool would save you a lot of time in these circumstances... open the file and translate it in the CAT tool and save as target and everything is in place. No laborious cutting and pasting. You just need to tweak it a bit to adjust the font/boxes...


Giovanni, it would take me so long to learn the CAT tool that it would be counterproductive. I know this because I've tried. I'm waiting for a CAT tool that doesn't break down a text into segments, doesn't require a manual, and doesn't look as the GUI had been designed for Windows 95



So for me, it's quicker my way.

[Edited at 2018-12-17 13:57 GMT]


Cetacea
 
Giovanni Guarnieri MITI, MIL
Giovanni Guarnieri MITI, MIL  Identity Verified
United Kingdom
Local time: 14:07
Member (2004)
English to Italian
of course... Dec 17, 2018

Tom in London wrote:

[
Giovanni, it would take me so long to learn the CAT tool that it would be counterproductive. I know this because I've tried. I'm waiting for a CAT tool that doesn't break down a text into segments, doesn't require a manual, and doesn't look as the GUI had been designed for Windows 95



So for me, it's quicker my way.

[Edited at 2018-12-17 13:57 GMT]


there is the learning curve to take into account...


 
Elfi Liu
Elfi Liu  Identity Verified
Indonesia
Local time: 21:07
English to Indonesian
+ ...
Use Wordfast Pro3 Dec 18, 2018

Wordfast Pro3 supports PPT file, very easy to use.
There is no time limit to the trial version, but a limit to TM.
Worth trying.


 
FreelanceBass
FreelanceBass
United States
Local time: 10:07
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER
The images are indeed uneditable. Dec 21, 2018

Meaning that there are no text boxes, etc. to work with, it's just a fused image. Then again, maybe I'm missing something - i.e. maybe it just comes down to my inexperience in terms of editing, which is an area I need to work on. (I've had no issues editing PowerPoints before though)

I'm currently throwing the translations into side comments with their corresponding source material. I just don't have time to figure out a quicker way before the deadline hits, unless there's some sort
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Meaning that there are no text boxes, etc. to work with, it's just a fused image. Then again, maybe I'm missing something - i.e. maybe it just comes down to my inexperience in terms of editing, which is an area I need to work on. (I've had no issues editing PowerPoints before though)

I'm currently throwing the translations into side comments with their corresponding source material. I just don't have time to figure out a quicker way before the deadline hits, unless there's some sort of "quick fix" I'm missing.
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Tony M
Tony M
France
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Uneditable images — key information missing from original post! Dec 21, 2018

In that case, I think the quickest way would be to prinbt the whole PPT out to a PDF file, and then OCR that — it won't help you re-create the formatting of the PPT, but at least it will save you having to retype all the text by hand!

If you OCR it to 'plain text', it would then be fairly easy to format that into a 2-column document into which to type your translations.


Adam Warren
 
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Most efficient way to translate PowerPoints which are chock-full of images?






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