Why Your Font Was Replaced With Arial After Translating Google Slides

Why It Happens: Glyph Fallback

Every font has a specific set of characters (glyphs) it can display. When Google Slides encounters a character that isn't in the specified font, it falls back to a system font — usually Arial — for those characters.

This happens when you translate into a language that uses a script your font doesn't support. For example, Montserrat is a Latin-script font. It has glyphs for English, Spanish, French, German, and most European languages. But it doesn't have Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, or Hebrew glyphs. Translate into any of these languages, and Google Slides swaps to Arial (or Noto Sans) for the unsupported characters.

This Isn't a Translation Bug

It's important to understand: Slide Buddy preserves your font specification perfectly. If your slide says "Montserrat Bold 36px," the translated slide still says "Montserrat Bold 36px" in the API. The font property hasn't changed.

What's changed is that Google Slides can't render the translated characters in Montserrat, so it visually substitutes a font that can. This is a Google Slides rendering behavior, not something any translation tool can override.

You'd see the same fallback if you manually typed Chinese characters into a Montserrat text box — no translation tool involved.

Which Fonts Are Affected?

• Safe for most Latin languages (Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, etc.): Montserrat, Roboto, Open Sans, Lato, Raleway, Poppins, Inter — all have good Latin/Cyrillic/Greek coverage.
• Will fall back for CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean): Almost all Latin-focused fonts. Use Noto Sans CJK, Source Han Sans, or system CJK fonts.
• Will fall back for Arabic/Hebrew: Most Latin fonts. Use Noto Sans Arabic, Noto Sans Hebrew, or Cairo.
• Universal coverage: Noto Sans (Google's font family designed to cover all Unicode scripts).

How to Fix It

1. If you see Arial and want a better-looking CJK font: Select the text and change the font to Noto Sans SC (Simplified Chinese), Noto Sans JP (Japanese), or Noto Sans KR (Korean). These are professional fonts designed for their respective scripts.
2. If you want one font for the whole deck: Use Noto Sans as your base font before translating. It supports 100+ scripts and won't fall back.
3. If brand guidelines require a specific font: Keep your brand font for Latin-script translations (EN→ES, EN→FR, EN→DE). Accept that CJK/Arabic versions will use different fonts — this is standard practice in professional localization.

How to Prevent It

• Design with translation in mind. If you know the deck will be translated to CJK or RTL languages, start with Noto Sans.
• Separate brand and body fonts. Use your brand font for the title/logo (which you might keep in English anyway), and Noto Sans for body text that will be translated.
• Test before batch translating. Translate one slide to your target language first. Check if the font renders correctly. If it falls back, choose an alternative font before translating the whole deck.

FAQ