Presentations

Although not frequently acknowledged, the PowerPoint presentation has been identified as a specific text type by both technical writing and translation schol­ars (Myers 2000; Rosenberg 2005). For professional translators, presentations crop up with surprising frequency and apart from the technical challenges of translating these files, they can present problems which are more significant than their friendly, multi-coloured, animated and graphics-filled appearance would suggest.

PowerPoint files, when properly constructed, will consist of text, graphics, figures and animations, which all work together to convey a message, or to support the speaker in conveying a message verbally. The constraints of space, time and legibility mean that most good presentations will be highly summarized and consist largely of bullet points - only bad presentations are crammed with paragraphs of text like a printed document. While this is good for the audience and the presenter, it is potentially bad news for the translator because there may be a lot of potentially ambiguous sentences in a presentation.

If you have ever seen handouts from a presentation you will know that most of the time, the slides only make complete sense if you have heard the presenta­tion; on their own, they are not completely clear. In an ideal situation, you would be able to ask the client for clarification or, even better, for speaker's notes or the full version of the paper, but this is not always possible.

When translating these files, translators need to keep an eye on how long their translations are. Since presentations consist of text boxes which do not automatically resize, a translation which is longer than the original ST text will automatically be displayed in a smaller font. This is quite helpful, but if you add a lot of text, the font may become too small to be seen clearly when projected onto a screen. In the worst-case scenario, your ever-expanding translation may spill over the edge of the page, and this can clutter the presentation, harm the readability of the presentation and make the speaker look unprofessional. In case you were thinking that you can simply add a new slide...don't! At least not without checking with the client first because there may be limits on the number of slides they can use, or there may be timing or simply design issues.

• Finding texts on the Internet

Using a combination of searches on the different language versions of websites, you can find parallel texts on the same topic in your target language. Parallel texts are similar texts on the same topic in your tar­get language which can help you find target language equivalents for terms in the source text or give you a better insight into the style used in typical documents. For this reason, it is usually best when they are not translations. In the majority of cases they are much more useful than consulting a dictionary because they show how terms are used in context and they are often more up-to-date. To find parallel texts you firstly need to think carefully about your search keywords. Then think about things like which format the text is likely to be published in as it can help narrow your search. Documents like presentations are often published in PowerPoint (.ppt) or HTML format while case studies, reports and user guides are typically published on the web in PDF format. You can use Google to search only for those files which are in specific formats. To do this, type "filetype:" alongside your search terms. This has the added advantage of helping to narrow down your search and weed out some of the lower quality examples: filetype:pdf "case study".