You’re probably excited about translating your store for new markets, but where do you start?
We’re here to show you how to translate a Shopify store in a way that’s easy, fast, and cost-effective.
This step-by-step guide will walk you through the entire process, from installing a Shopify translation app to publishing a fully localized, SEO-friendly, multilingual store.
🧠 Actionable insights
By the end, you’ll know exactly how to efficiently handle translations, maintain your brand voice, and engage global customers—without getting lost in technical details.
Three main ways to translate your Shopify store
You can translate your ecommerce store by:
- Using Shopify translation apps
- Using Google translate or DeepL to copy and paste translations
- Hiring freelancers or agencies to translate your Shopify store
- Building an in-house translation team
Obviously, you can also combine these methods. The best path for translating your Shopify store depends on many factors.
You will need to evaluate your budget, the number of target languages, the complexity of your content, the speed at which you want to launch, and whether you need ongoing translations or just one-time support.
Figuring out your Shopify translation needs
Below, you can find a list of questions to ask yourself before you jump into your Shopify translation project:
- What is my budget for translation and localization?
- How many languages do I need to translate my store into? Will I start with one or two languages, or aim for a broader international presence?
- How quickly do I need the translations completed?
- How complex is my store’s content? Does my store have simple product listings, or does it include more complex technical or legal content?
- Do I need ongoing translations and updates, or just a one-time translation of my store pages?
- Am I okay with automatic translations, or do I need manual editing for accuracy and local relevance?
- What internal resources do I have for managing the translation process?
Once you answer these questions, you’ll have a clear understanding of the best translation option for your store.
In this article, we’ll focus on the first method–translating your Shopify store with an app.
📚Further reading
Don’t want to use a Shopify translation app? Learn more about the best ways to hire language service providers and whether it’s smart to manage translations in-house.
Translate your Shopify store using an app
Shopify translation apps can auto-translate your store’s content. You can either use Shopify’s native translation app (Shopify Translate & Adapt), or third-party apps that integrate with your store.
Typically, you’ll have an option to manually refine the translations. These apps make it simple to integrate multilingual options without changing the core structure of your store.
First, choose the right Shopify translation app
Most apps integrate into Shopify with little to no coding. They offer a user-friendly dashboard to manage languages, and include features that support multilingual SEO, language switchers, and content updates. This will help you earn high rankings in local search engines.
The main differences are in the level of control. Some Shopify translation apps focus more on the most efficient way to auto-translate your content, while others emphasize manual customization.
Another important difference reflects in the depth of features, such as glossary management and team collaboration, the ability to export or import translation files, and more. Also, some apps don’t support translating key pages such as the checkout.
Let’s see what the step-by-step process would look like. To help you get a better idea of the process, we’ll use the example of Lokalise Flow, the most accurate no-code Shopify translation app.
Step 1: Connect the app to your Shopify store
The setup process of user-friendly translation apps is usually simple and designed for non-technical Shopify store owners. It shouldn’t take more than a few clicks to integrate the app with your store.
After installation, the app typically asks for permissions to access your store’s content, such as product descriptions, policies, and metadata. This is how the app makes sure it can fetch all the content that needs to be translated. Then, you can:
- Select the target languages
- Set up subdomains or subdirectories (e.g., es.yourstore.com or yourstore.com/es) for each new language
Here’s how what this looks like in Lokalise Flow:
Lokalise Flow offers an easy way to translate your Shopify store
As you can see, setting up a project is very easy. You can start with a single target language and add more later, if you want.
🪄The magic of Lokalise Flow
As an ecommerce website translation app, Lokalise Flow lets you connect your Shopify store and pick languages in under 5 minutes without coding. Just follow the prompts, and your store will be linked in a jiffy.
Step 2: Create a style guide and glossary to properly translate your store pages
Before diving into translations, you need to create a style guide and glossary. This is how you’ll ensure consistent, high-quality translations that align with your brand’s voice:
- A style guide outlines the tone and writing style you want to maintain across all languages. This is what helps both translators and machine learning tools understand how to shape the translated content.
- A glossary defines important terms specific to your business, such as product names or industry jargon, and clarifies if these should remain untranslated or be translated consistently.
It’s important to note that not all Shopify translation apps give you an option to add a style guide and glossary. However, having this option is extremely helpful. It’s how you can make sure that AI-powered translations are accurate, consistent, and that they take relevant context into account.
The setup wizard of Lokalise Flow prompts you to add your style guide and glossary upon installation:
Lokalise Flow allows you to create a new style guide before translating content for your Shopify store
As you can see, you’ll be able to select the appropriate target audience for your content, choose a tone of voice, define the level of formality, and determine your writing style.
The same goes for your glossary. After creating a project, you just click “Create a new glossary” and then “Add term manually” to get started. After that, you’ll be presented with a dialogue window where you can start building your glossary:
Lokalise Flow allows you to easily build and manage glossaries for your multilingual Shopify stores
You can edit or remove the term from the glossary later if needed. It’s very easy to manage terms across different languages, all in one place.
🪄The magic of Lokalise Flow
Lokalise Flow makes it easy to upload a personalized style guide and glossary across 137 languages, ensuring your Shopify store content is always relevant and on-brand.
Step 3: Translate and publish your multilingual content
Once your style guide and glossary are in place, it’s time to translate your Shopify store automatically.
Shopify translation apps like Lokalise Flow translate all elements of your store. This includes descriptions of your products, collections, dynamic content, and even third-party app-generated text. This makes the launch of your international ecommerce a lot easier.
It’s important to mention that the translation process shouldn’t impact your site’s layout. Your design and structure must stay intact, regardless of the language. This is how you’ll maintain a seamless, culturally relevant user experience across different regions.
Let’s see how this works in Lokalise Flow.
As we saw in the previous step, you had an option to add a style guide and glossary to your project. Now is the time to let the AI know what it should do with that input:
Lokalise Flow translates your Shopify content in just a few minutes
After you select the option you want, you can click on “Start AI translation”.
Lokalise Flow usually takes 2-5 minutes to sync your content with Shopify. Once synchronization is complete, AI translation will begin.
When the Content Manager (the Lokalise Flow dashboard) shows that statuses are set to “Translating”, it’s safe to close your browser. You can return to the project once everything is translated.
Lokalise Flow translates your Shopify content automatically
After the translations are done, you’ll receive a notification. You can then review them, edit them, and publish them.
Additionally, Lokalise Flow compares translations from multiple AI engines, like OpenAI GPT-4, Google, DeepL, to give you the most accurate machine translations. In other words, you can rest assured all your resources will be properly translated from your native language into target languages.
🪄The magic of Lokalise Flow
Lokalise’s ecommerce website translation app offers a customizable language switcher to help your customers view your website in their preferred language. This feature allows for an easy switch between the different languages your store supports.
How fast can you launch a multilingual Shopify store
It can take anywhere between 5 minutes and a couple of weeks to launch a multilingual store with a translation app. It really depends on the complexity of your store, your quality assurance process, and the extent of manual edits.
The thing is, AI translations have evolved a lot, but they are highly dependent on the input. The more precise your style guide and glossary, the better the quality of your Shopify translation will be.
How much does it cost to translate a Shopify store
So, how much would it cost you to translate your Shopify store with an app? The answer is–it depends.
Some translation apps are as cheap as €15/month if you want to translate to just one language, up to 10,000 translated words. But if you have a big store with a lot of content, and you want to create a multilingual store with many different published languages, it will cost you more.
We have some good news, though.
Translate your Shopify store with just a few clicks
If you’d like to try out Lokalise Flow, you can join our Beta program. All you need to do is sign up, and you’ll get an email with a direct link to install our app, free translations for 6 months, and direct support from our product team.
Our vision is to help Shopify admins easily translate their stores and expand their reach internationally. So far, we’ve helped brands like Starbucks, Amazon, Cornershop by Uber, and other companies across 180+ countries grow globally, with an authentic local feel.
But don’t take our word for it. See what The Favoured, a concept online store, had to say about using Lokalise Flow:
“I’ve tried other translation apps, but Lokalise Flow is definitely the best. Setting it up in my store was super simple, and the language switcher is a total game-changer. I have noticed more traffic in the local languages which has helped me enormously (not to mention save time in attempting to translate much of the content!).”
Try Lokalise Flow — free for 6 months and no credit card required.
