Multilanguage presentation - external translation table?

[BikeSpark]

I'm developing a presentation with photos and flash animations and not
too much text. The presentation is in English but will be shown around
Europe and will have to be translated. I would like to ship one
presentation with language selection on the first slide.

Anyone got any ideas on how to programmatically replace all the text
with the text from a translation table? (e.g. Could I have assign a
variable name to each piece of text and populate these from an
external data file?)

(I'm not looking for automatic translation. I'm not asking how to
change Powerpoint's language settings.)

Thank you.

 

[Ute Simon]

I'm developing a presentation with photos and flash animations and not
too much text. The presentation is in English but will be shown around
Europe and will have to be translated. I would like to ship one
presentation with language selection on the first slide.

Anyone got any ideas on how to programmatically replace all the text
with the text from a translation table? (e.g. Could I have assign a
variable name to each piece of text and populate these from an
external data file?)

I would suggest using Custom Shows. For each of the text slides you should
have different versions in different languages. Determine the slides to show
for the different languages in some custom shows. On the first slide insert
some objects with hyperlinks (action settings) to these custom shows. This
would work without any macro and any separate table at all.

Kind regards,
Ute

 

[BikeSpark]

Thanks, Ute.
That's really the same as making a slide show in each language. If the
presentation changes (e.g. a new slide or a change to a chart) I have
to edit each show. It becomes unmanageable very quickly.

To avoid that I would rather have one slide show with an underlying
table of text for each slide. Imagine, for example, that the text is
contained in an Excel table. Each column would be a different
language. Each row a different text object. I put the text into the
English column and the translators work in the adjacent columns.

Programmers do this to facilitate localisation of software packages
for different regions. I suppose that even if I was able to "compile"
presentations in different languages it would be better as I would
only have one source file.

Any more ideas, anyone?

 

[Echo S]

I wonder if you could make use of PPTMerge?
http://www.rdpslides.com/pptools/merge/index.html

Or datapoint? http://www.take-off.as/datapoint/

 

[BikeSpark]

Thanks, Steve. I've had a look at that. I didn't really want to
generate a pile of translations - rather start the presentation and
select the language. However, messing around with VBA I can see that
if I automate the find and replace (as it appears you've done) the
original "fieldnames" are replaced. If the user then saves the file
you've lost the original with the fieldnames.

I'll think some more.