How to Translate a Shopify Store and Keep Your Edits

Translating a Shopify store takes four moves in a fixed order: add the language in Settings > Languages, translate the content with Shopify's free Translate & Adapt app, give shoppers a way to switch, and publish. This guide walks them in that order and stops at each step that is hard to take back.

The question this guide spends the most time on is whether running automatic translation again wipes the corrections you made by hand. Shopify says it doesn't; we checked it in our own development store on November 9, 2026, and the results sit in their own section. Help Center pages, Shopify's changelog, the App Store listing and Google's documentation were read on November 4, 2026.

What You Need Before You Add a Language

Shopify lists its requirements and considerations for selling in multiple languages one by one. Four of them decide whether you can start today:

• Plan. You can sell in up to 20 languages on the Basic, Grow, Shopify or Advanced plan, and in up to 30 on Shopify Plus, including during a Plus trial. That ceiling applies to the languages you sell in, not only the ones a machine translates.
• Theme. Your active theme is compatible with selling in multiple languages and has a language selector. All the free themes from Shopify are compatible, though you might need to update your theme; for a third-party theme, check with its developer.
• URLs. Your store uses subfolders, such as example.com/de, or subdomains, such as de.example.com, for language-specific URLs.
• Markets. Without international domains, your language settings are the same for all of your active markets.

If you aren't sure your plan qualifies, our answer on the plan you need to sell in multiple languages lays the plans out.

Adding a language does less than its name suggests. It only adds Shopify's own translations to supported themes and checkouts, and the checkout includes translated content for 49 languages. A language you publish without your own translations shows only those defaults, and wherever a translation doesn't exist, your store displays the content in your default language.

Arabic, Hebrew and Urdu are among those checkout languages. Whether a right-to-left language works on your storefront is its own question, covered in our answer on right-to-left languages.

Six Choices That Are Hard to Undo

Most of translating a store can be redone: a translation can be edited, re-run, or exported and imported again. The rows below are the exceptions. The middle column is what Shopify's Help Center says happens, and the right-hand column is the step that keeps you out of trouble.

Which Setup Route Is Yours?

The table above answers which actions to avoid; this answers which order of steps fits your store. Three facts decide it: where your store is located, how many languages you want, and who writes the final wording. Two more questions add notes to your result.

How to Add a Language in Shopify

Two steps in the admin set a language up on your store: add it, then assign it to the domains your markets use. Both can happen today. Publishing is the step to delay until the content is translated, so it has its own section near the end of this guide.

Add the language in Settings > Languages

The steps, as Shopify's guide to adding a language gives them:

1. From your Shopify admin, go to Settings > Languages.
2. Click Add language.
3. In the Add language dialog, select a language from the drop-down menu, and then click Next.
4. Turn on each domain the language should be available on, then click Done.

In Shopify adminOpen in your store

1. Settings
2. Languages

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Shopify installs Translate & Adapt automatically when you add the language. In our development store on November 9, 2026, the domain switch in the last step was off by default, so a language added with a quick click on Done arrived with no domain, as in the frame above.

Assign it to the domains your markets use

Shopify's model fits in one sentence from its markets and languages guide: languages are assigned to domains, and each market uses a domain. If you skipped a domain in the dialog, the language's row shows no domain, and the same row's ⋯ menu carries Assign to domain; in our development store on November 9, 2026, that menu also held Publish, Preview, Set as domain default and Remove language.

If a market uses a subfolder, such as example.com/en-ca, Shopify says to manage that market's languages from its Domain / language customization instead.

Two rules limit what you can assign. You can assign an unpublished language only to a domain that already has a default language. And without international domains, which are available on the Basic plan or higher, every active market shares the same language settings.

On secondary markets, subfolders must combine the language code with a country code, as in /fr-ca or /en-eu, to show local languages and currencies. How a market's domain, subdomain or subfolder is set up in the first place is a Markets question, answered in the domains and languages section of our Shopify Markets guide.

Translate Your Content With Translate & Adapt

Open the app from Apps > Translate & Adapt. It does three jobs, taken in turn below with URL handles and notification emails between the second and the third: run automatic translation, keep it current, and hold the edits you make by hand.

Run automatic translation: the button sets your allowance

Shopify ties automatic translation to where your store is located. Stores in Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States can translate up to 8 languages automatically, in addition to the store's default language, with a button called Translate now. Everywhere else the button is Auto-translate and the cap is up to 2 languages.

The list is not the final test. Shopify's availability rules say that if the app displays Translate now for your store, your store can translate up to 8 languages and use Auto-sync. Open the app to see which button it shows for your store; in our development store on November 9, 2026, the button sat on the app's home page:

In Shopify adminOpen in your store

1. Apps
2. Translate & Adapt

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Here is how the cap plays out. Take a store outside those fourteen countries whose app shows Auto-translate, and which wants French, German and Japanese. Two of the three can be translated automatically. The third is added by hand, including a CSV import of your own translations, or with a third-party app from Shopify's collection of apps for store languages, the two ways past the cap Shopify names. All three sit well inside the ceiling of 20 languages on Basic through Advanced.

Which languages get the automatic slots is the decision to make before the first click, because the choice sticks:

Removing the language doesn't free the slot either: Shopify states that removing a language from your store doesn't reset your limit. So give the automatic slots to the languages with the most content to translate, and keep the rest for manual work.

Stores whose app shows Translate now have a shortcut: select Publish [language] after translation before running Translate now, and the language is published as soon as its translations are ready, before the review that Shopify asks for, described next.

Each run is one pass. Translate now translates the language one time, so you translate it again after you add or change content, unless Auto-sync is on. Before you publish what a run produced, Shopify asks you to review it for accuracy, and two things never come out of a run at all: your store's legal policies, which can't be translated automatically, and URL handles, covered below.

Keep it current: Auto-sync or another click

Shopify added Auto-sync for stores in twelve European countries in its October 9, 2026 changelog and for the United States and Canada on October 27, 2026. You turn Auto-sync on for each language, and Shopify then translates new and updated content automatically each week. The same updates renamed the button for those stores from Auto-translate to Translate now.

Three details decide your timing, as Shopify's Auto-sync rules set them out:

• Off by default. Auto-sync is off until you turn it on, and you turn it on for each language individually.
• Not immediate. The first translation happens at your store's next weekly Auto-sync time, which can be up to a week later. If the language isn't published, the first translation waits for the next weekly Auto-sync time after you publish it.
• No schedule on the Auto-translate route. Where Auto-sync isn't available, new automatic translations are added only when you click Auto-translate.

Translate URL handles yourself

Automatic translation doesn't include URL handles, so you add a translated handle manually for each language, in the same Translate & Adapt editor as the other fields; the editor frame in our test section shows the URL handle field below the title. Shopify's example: /en-ca/products/shoes can become /es-mx/products/zapatos, but the word products can't be translated. Shopify's language-management page shows a different example, /products/chair becoming /produkte/stuhl, so open a translated product on your storefront to see which form your store uses.

Handles also can't be customized for markets: a translated handle applies on all markets where that language is displayed.

Changing a handle after the language is live costs more than in your default language. If you change a product's handle, URL redirects for that product aren't supported for language-specific URLs. How a handle change plays out in your default language is covered in our answer on changing a product URL handle.

Checkout and notification emails

Checkout arrives translated by Shopify in 49 languages. Notification emails go out in the language a customer ordered in when translations are available for that notification; you add or edit them with Localize in Settings > Notifications, and Shopify can show a preview only after you save the notification translations. The language a customer's notifications arrive in can be changed by editing that customer's profile.

Does automatic translation overwrite your hand edits?

To edit by hand, open the language in Translate & Adapt, pick the resource and the field, type the translation and click Save. From a content page such as a product page you can jump straight in with More actions > Localize; content types without a More actions button, such as Policies, show a Localize button instead.

Then comes the question most merchants have about the app: will the next automatic run wipe what you wrote? Shopify's automatic-translation page answers it in one line:

The rest of that passage sets the rule's edges. A run adds translations for content that hasn't been translated yet and updates machine translations that are out of date. For some theme content, such as your theme's default text, it only adds missing translations and leaves existing ones alone.

Shopify's October 2026 changelog posts on Auto-sync repeat the promise: translations you wrote manually are never overwritten.

Read those sentences together and they have a practical edge. A translation you edited by hand is not an out-of-date machine translation, so when you later change the English original, no run updates it.

After editing source content, revisit the fields you translated by hand or imported by CSV. We tested this rule: see our test.

One documented switch that does replace existing translations is in CSV import: if you select Overwrite any existing translations, the translated content in your file replaces what is already in the store. Turning on an automated store policy on an existing store also replaces that policy's custom translations in languages that have an automated template. Shopify also counts a translation that a CSV import adds or replaces as a manual one, so automatic translation leaves it unchanged even when it's outdated.

Undoing is narrower than adding. None of the Help Center or changelog pages we read on November 4, 2026 gives steps for deleting all translations of one language at once, short of deleting the language itself, which removes them permanently; Shopify's app requirements page says only that you can delete translations inside the app before you uninstall it, or remove them with a CSV export and import after you uninstall it. The Export dialog in our test admin, on November 9, 2026, said its CSV file can only be used to add or update translations.

Uninstalling the app doesn't remove them: Shopify states that translations and content generated by Translate & Adapt aren't deleted when you uninstall it.

Our own test· November 9, 2026

Our Test: Do Hand Edits Survive Automatic Translation?

Key takeaway

We ran this on November 9, 2026, in one Shopify development store on the Basic plan, with German added through Settings > Languages, on one product's Title field. Our store shows the Auto-translate button, so this is the two-language route. Four results came back:

Hand edits against automatic runs, November 9, 2026

What we did	What came back	What it means for you
Ran Auto-translate on one product	In about a minute the title and product type were translated, both marked as AI translations, and the URL handle stayed untranslated. The dialog read: “Automatically translate all empty and outdated fields into German. This will not replace any manual translations you have added.”	Handles never come out of a run: write them yourself.
Rewrote the German title by hand, saved it, and ran Auto-translate on the product again	The hand-written title stayed, with no AI mark on it.	Re-running didn't cost the hand edit, as Shopify states.
Changed the English title, then ran Auto-translate on the product a third time	The hand-written German title stayed exactly as written, not updated to the new original, and the editor showed no outdated mark on the field.	After you edit source text, update the fields you translated by hand yourself, because nothing in the editor flagged ours.
Ran Auto-translate for the whole language from the app's home page	Other products were translated and the hand-written title was still unchanged. This dialog read: “Translate your store with AI translations from Shopify. The translations will not be visible to your customers until you publish them.” It didn't repeat the line about not replacing manual translations.	The store-wide run kept the hand edit too, so the shorter dialog didn't mean a different rule in our run.

Source: our development store on November 9, 2026; dialog text quoted as it appeared.

In Shopify adminOpen in your store

1. Apps
2. Translate & Adapt

Zoom

The editor didn't mark our frozen title, and we didn't check whether the Outdated export lists it, so keep your own list of fields you rewrite by hand. An export from Settings > Languages filtered by translation status lists outdated and untranslated content, as shown in the checking section.

Afterwards we removed German, after a dialog warning that deleting permanently removes all translations for the language, and uninstalled the app. We didn't test the Translate now button, Auto-sync, CSV import with Overwrite any existing translations, or a hand edit on any field other than a product title.

What Translate & Adapt Leaves to You

Shopify lists six types of content the app can't translate, and fourteen languages it can't translate into. The full list, and what closes each gap, is in our breakdown of what Translate & Adapt doesn't translate; the table below is the part that changes your setup steps.

The fourteen languages are Bengali, Cebuano, Corsican, Frisian, Haitian Creole, Hawaiian, Hmong, Latin, Nyanja (Chichewa), Odia (Oriya), Samoan, Scots Gaelic, Sesotho and Tagalog (Filipino). The app can't translate them, so their words come from you or from another app.

On collection filters, Shopify's own pages disagree. Its Translate & Adapt requirements list Collection filters among the content the app can't translate, while its Search & Discovery filters page says filter labels, values and groups can be translated into your store's other supported languages; we read both on November 4, 2026. Until they agree, look at each filter on your storefront in the new language before launch.

What shows up there, and what doesn't, is walked through in our answer on translating collection filters.

Image alt text sits outside that table. Shopify's July 2025 changelog says you can translate image alt text if you sell in different languages, and our answer on translating image alt text covers how.

Text typed into a Custom Liquid section has its own answer too: how to translate Custom Liquid on Shopify.

Let Shoppers Switch Languages

Shopify sets four conditions for a language to be available to customers. It must be:

• added to your store;
• assigned to the relevant markets;
• given translations;
• published.

Then shoppers need a way in. Most Shopify themes include built-in country and language selectors, typically in the header or footer; you switch them on in the theme editor and save. Where the switch sits in Horizon and Dawn, and what to do when a theme has none, is covered in our answer on adding a language selector.

In Shopify adminOpen in your store

1. Online Store
2. Themes
3. Customize

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Shopify can also send shoppers to their language automatically, but not by default: in new stores, automatic redirection is activated and automatic language detection is deactivated. Google's guidance leans the same way, advising you to avoid automatically redirecting users from one language version of a site to a different language version of a site. Shopify's own redirection applies to customers only; search engine crawlers are excluded.

What Adding a Language Does to SEO

When you publish a language, Shopify creates unique URLs for each translated page by adding the language code to them. Markets can use subfolders, subdomains or top-level domains, and Shopify's international SEO guide recommends subfolders for most stores: they're the easiest to set up and manage, need no additional domain registration, and share domain authority with your primary domain. That choice is about markets: for language-specific URLs, Shopify's requirements for selling in multiple languages name subfolders or subdomains.

Google's side of the question is about what you publish rather than how. A translated page doesn't count as duplicate content as long as its main content is translated:

Google also expects each language version to list itself and all the other versions, with return links both ways, or the annotations may be ignored. Shopify's automatic tags reach your pages through the content_for_header object your theme renders in the head of layout/theme.liquid.

The setting itself lives in Online Store > Preferences, under Social sharing image and SEO, as Automatic hreflang tags. Shopify turns it on for every store and warns that turning it off can negatively affect your store's SEO; our answer on turning off automatic hreflang tags covers when that makes sense.

In Shopify adminOpen in your store

1. Online Store
2. Preferences

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Check What Shoppers Actually See

Shopify defines three translation statuses in Settings > Languages:

• Translated: the content has a translation.
• Outdated: the content in the default language has been updated, but the translations don't reflect any updates.
• Untranslated: the content has no translation yet.

To work through them, click Export in Settings > Languages. Shopify's export options include Outdated, for translations that are out of date with your default language, and Untranslated content; a separate Metafields option exports metafield content.

In Shopify adminOpen in your store

1. Settings
2. Languages

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If a field you expect isn't in the app, the same CSV export shows whether it's available in the Translation API. And where no translation exists, the store shows your default language instead, so an English line on a German page is a missing translation, not a broken page.

Theme updates are safe for your work: when you update your theme, your custom translations are kept, and translations for content that changed are marked Outdated so you can review them.

Publish the Language When the Content Is Ready

Publishing is what makes the language available to customers in your online store:

1. From your Shopify admin, go to Settings > Languages.
2. Click the ⋯ button beside the language, then click Publish.
3. If the language has no translations yet, Shopify asks you to confirm; click Publish again.

That third step is the warning worth heeding. A language you publish without your own translations displays only the default translations for the theme and checkout, so your products and pages appear in your default language under translated buttons. Google describes that pattern: translating only the boilerplate text while keeping the bulk of your content in one language can create a bad user experience if the same content appears multiple times in search results with various boilerplate languages.

Your Setup Checklist

Steps one to four are the same on every route. On the Translate now route, steps five and nine can merge if you select Publish [language] after translation before the run, but the language then goes live as soon as the run ends, before you review it in steps five and eight, so finish steps six and seven first. On the manual route, step five is a CSV round trip of export, translation and import, with Overwrite any existing translations left off unless replacing is what you want. Progress is saved in this browser.

The Bottom Line

Translating a Shopify store is mostly a question of order: which languages get the automatic slots, when the language goes public, and who owns the fields a machine never touches.

Frequently Asked Questions