Classrooms, Families and Teams

Slides Translator translates the deck you have open, one language per run. To keep the original, make a copy first and translate the copy. Here is how that fits the most common jobs.

A multilingual class

For newcomer, ESL, ELL and ESOL students who follow better in their home language.

1. Make the lesson in your own language, as you normally would
2. For each home language in the class, make a copy of the deck with Make a copy first in the sidebar, open Slides Translator in the copy and translate it
3. Share the copy with the students who need it, or show it next to the original

Tips:

• Keep names as they are. Add student names, the school name and subject words you want unchanged to the glossary, with Translate as left empty.
• Translate one slide during class. Set What to translate to Current slide for a quick handout or an instruction slide. It counts as 1 slide.
• Keep the original in English. Translate copies, so the English deck stays the one you edit. After a big change, make a fresh copy and translate again. See Keep the original.
• Ask a speaker to read it. A machine translation is a strong first draft. For anything that goes home to families, have a colleague or parent who speaks the language look through it.

Parents and families

A parent evening deck, a welcome presentation or a newsletter made in Google Slides, in the languages spoken at home.

• Make a copy per language, name each copy so families find the right one, for example Parent evening (ar), and translate it.
• Speaker notes come along, so whoever presents in that language has the notes too.
• Arabic, Hebrew and other right-to-left languages: Slides Translator writes the text but does not change the paragraph direction or alignment. Check those slides and set the direction in Google Slides where needed.

Presenting in another language

Translate the whole deck with its speaker notes, then rehearse from it. Product names, slogans and terms you always say the same way go in the glossary, so they come out the same on every slide.

Global teams

Hand a sales, training or all-hands deck to colleagues in another country.

• Put product, feature and team names in the glossary with Translate as empty, so they stay in English.
• Add your company's own translations of key phrases, so every deck uses the same words.
• The glossary is saved with the deck, so a colleague who opens Slides Translator on the same presentation uses the same terms.

After translating

Words in another language are often longer. Fonts and font sizes stay as they were, so a long translation can run past the edge of its text box. Look through the deck and fix those slides. See Is the formatting kept?.