How to translate Google Slides™ (3 ways, free and fast)

Before you start: translate a copy

Two of the three ways below change the file you work on. Keep the original safe first:

1. Open the presentation.
2. Choose File → Make a copy → Entire presentation.
3. Name the copy after the target language, for example “Back-to-school night — ES”.

You end up with the original and a translated version side by side, which is also the easiest way to review the result slide by slide.

Way 1 — Google Translate

1a. Copy and paste, box by box

The approach everyone starts with. It costs nothing and needs no install.

1. Open translate.google.com in a second tab and pick the source and target languages.
2. In Slides, click into a text box, select its text (Ctrl+A / ⌘A inside the box) and copy it.
3. Paste it into Google Translate, copy the translation and paste it back over the original text.
4. Repeat for every text box, table cell and speaker note on every slide.

Pros: free, works for any language Google Translate supports, nothing to install or approve.
Cons: slow — a 20-slide deck can mean well over a hundred copy-paste rounds. Pasting replaces mixed styling inside a box (one bold word, a coloured link), so you reapply it by hand. Text in tables, grouped shapes and notes is easy to miss.

1b. Upload the whole deck to Google Translate as a .pptx

Google Translate on a computer also translates whole files. According to Google’s own help page (checked 16 October 2026), it accepts .docx, .pdf, .pptx and .xlsx files up to 10 MB, and text inside images is not translated.

1. In Slides, choose File → Download → Microsoft PowerPoint (.pptx).
2. On translate.google.com, open the Documents tab, pick the languages and upload the .pptx.
3. Click Translate, then Download translation.
4. Upload the translated file to Google Drive™ and open it with Google Slides (or use File → Open → Upload in Slides).

Pros: free, the whole deck in one go.
Cons: the deck makes a round trip through PowerPoint format, so fonts, themes and some effects may not come back exactly as they were — check every slide. Google’s help page doesn’t describe how layout or speaker notes are handled, so look at both. Image-heavy decks can exceed the 10 MB limit. Document translation isn’t available on phones.

Way 2 — Google Docs “Translate document”

This is where the “Google has a translate feature” memory comes from: Google Docs has Tools → Translate document, which saves a translated copy of a document in your Drive. Google Slides has no equivalent menu item, so for a presentation you have to move the text through a Doc:

1. Get the slide text into a Google Doc: copy it in slide by slide, or download the deck as File → Download → Plain text (.txt) and open that file with Google Docs. Add the speaker notes too if you need them.
2. In the Doc, choose Tools → Translate document, type a name for the new copy, pick the target language and click Translate.
3. A translated copy opens in a new tab. Copy each passage from it back into the matching text box on the matching slide.

Pros: free; the whole text is translated in one step; you get a clean translated Doc that is easy to send to a colleague or a native speaker for review before anything goes onto the slides.
Cons: the Doc doesn’t know which sentence belongs to which text box, so putting the text back is the same manual work as Way 1a, and slide formatting has to be reapplied. It translates the entire document, not a part of it.

Way 3 — a translation add-on

Add-ons from the Google Workspace™ Marketplace open in a sidebar inside Slides and translate the deck for you. There are several; we compare them in Google Slides translation add-ons compared. Here is how it works with ours, Translate Slides with AI:

1. Install it from the Google Workspace Marketplace.
2. Open the copy you made and choose Extensions → Translate Slides with AI → Open translator.
3. Leave From on Auto-detect (or pick the source language) and choose the language in To.
4. Tick Also translate speaker notes if you want them. Leave the other two boxes unticked to translate the whole deck, or tick Translate only the current slide or Translate only the selected text or frame for a smaller job.
5. Optionally, add instructions in Prompt / context — a tone, a glossary, brand names to leave in English.
6. Click Translate deck. The slides are rewritten in place.

Pros: one run for the whole deck, including tables, grouped shapes and (optionally) speaker notes. Bold, colours, fonts and links stay on the right words, and the AI is told to keep translations close to the original length so boxes don’t overflow. No API key or second account.
Cons: it overwrites the file you run it on — that’s why you translate a copy. Text inside pictures, logos and chart images is not translated. The free plan covers 100 slides per calendar month; a longer deck stops at the limit until the 1st or until you upgrade. One run translates into one language. To translate, the slide text is sent to an outside AI service (OpenRouter), so read our privacy policy before running confidential material through it. And like any machine translation, important slides deserve a read by a fluent speaker.

Translate Slides with AITranslates the whole deck, one slide or a selection inside Google Slides, formatting kept · 100 slides free every month

Install free

Which way to pick

^* Very heavily styled text boxes fall back to the box’s main style.

Rule of thumb: one or two slides — copy-paste. A deck you want back quickly and for free — try the .pptx upload and check the result. Wording that needs sign-off — the Docs route. A deck you translate often, or where layout matters — an add-on.

Speaker notes, formatting and text overflow

Speaker notes

Notes are the part people forget until they are presenting. With copy-paste, open View → Show speaker notes and treat each note as one more text box. In our add-on, notes are a single checkbox. If you present bilingually, keep the original notes in the untranslated copy and present from whichever version you need.

Keeping formatting

Formatting breaks where text is replaced as a block. Copy-paste and the Docs route both replace whole boxes, so a bold word or a link in the middle of a sentence has to be put back by hand. Before translating, it helps to simplify: one style per box where you can, and links on their own line.

Text overflow after translation

Translated text is often longer than English. A commonly cited estimate is that Spanish runs roughly 20–30% longer than the English source, and German labels and headings are known for growing too — a two-word English title can turn into one very long compound word. What helps:

• Check every slide in grid view (View → Grid view) and zoom into any slide where text touches the edge.
• Let boxes shrink text: select a text box, open Format options → Text fitting and choose “Shrink text on overflow”.
• Shorten the source before translating: shorter English produces shorter Spanish.
• Ask for brevity: our add-on already tells the AI to stay close to the original length; you can add “keep headings short” in Prompt / context.