The need to translate an online store on Shopify is indisputable. All users feel more comfortable browsing a store in their native language. But you can’t tackle the translation in just any way. You need the texts to be legible and attractive; they can’t contain forced or unnatural-sounding expressions. SEO must also be considered when translating.
Keys points when translating an online store on Shopify
These are the most important things to consider to successfully translate ecommerce on Shopify. We will analyze each one in detail:
- Translating all the texts in the store, which means organizing the process efficiently.
- Choosing the best machine translation plugin.
- Including proofreading by a professional translator, at least for the most important texts (product catalog, emails and Shopify checkout page).
What should you translate in your Shopify store?
All Shopify stores contain three levels of text: the content created by the ecommerce platform itself (the features), the text from the theme designer (usability) and the messages from you as the store owner (product descriptions, pages, correspondence with customers, etc.).It’s important that you know how to assign each text to the right category, because they're treated differently:
- The platform's own texts: you only have to activate the chosen language because Shopify has already done the translation.
- The Shopify template texts you've chosen as your theme: they also have a translation that you can activate, although you should review and correct it to make sure it sounds natural.
- Your own content: these are the elements that differentiate your business from those of your competitors, so it’s in your best interest to concentrate the most effort on them when translating your Shopify online store.
Does machine translation on Shopify pay off?
There are many entrepreneurs who opt for Shopify ecommerce translation plugins. Obviously, their great advantage is the price, because they are very affordable and some of them are even free. Their quality leaves much to be desired–they still sound fake, which is not very attractive to potential consumers.
The most recommended plugins for translating Shopify are:
- Translation Lab: the best free option for translating a Shopify store. The downside is that it doesn't include an automatic translator or text import/export, which means that the process is slow and complex.
- WeGlot: a modern, easy-to-use plugin. It’s got one of the best quality-to-price ratios.
- Langify: the most professional option for translating Shopify. It’s the most used because it enables text exports for translation outside the platform and optimizes SEO resources. However, it doesn’t have automatic translation.
If you are truly concerned about the quality and efficiency of the results when translating your Shopify online store, we at Linguaserve recommend that you always include the supervision of specialized translators. This is the added touch that will make the difference between an exclusive page and a website without its own identity, which customers will be sure to notice.
