What Shopify Translate & Adapt Doesn't Translate

The filter chips down the side of your collection page are still in English. The newsletter popup that opens on the third scroll is in English. And a product you added last week is in English while everything around it reads correctly in the second language. Meanwhile the app says the store is translated.

All three of those are real, all three are documented, and only one of them is a limitation of the app — the other two are a switch in a different place and a button nobody pressed. This page is the map: what Translate & Adapt genuinely will not translate, what closes each gap, and the point where a paid app stops being a purchase you talked yourself into.

The Quick Verdict

Find the symptom you actually saw. Everything below it is the evidence, and the sections it points at.

What Translate & Adapt does not translate

Start here, because the list is short and Shopify states it plainly: these are types you cannot translate with the app. It is not the whole of the app's limitations — the same section adds that the word “products” inside a URL handle cannot be translated either. What the page does not do is tell you which of them matter, or what to do instead — that part is the table below.

Excluded types quoted from the Translate & Adapt documentation, read on August 25, 2026. The tag row also rests on Shopify's localization page, which states that product, article and blog tags cannot be translated.

Two rows deserve reading twice. The forms row is the one merchants most often report as a bug — it is not one, and the fix is free. The tags row is the one to plan around rather than shop for: Shopify documents tags as untranslatable at platform level, not as a gap in this particular tool, so treat them as internal labels rather than storefront copy.

Product images: what that line actually means

This is the row most often read too widely. The excluded list and the localization instructions sit on the same page and describe two different things. The exclusion is about the pixels: a size chart with English headings stays English in every language, because nothing rewrites the inside of a JPEG. The localization section is about the file: you can serve a different one.

Practically, that means a language-specific version of an image or video is a native capability, not a reason to shop for an app. Upload the second version to your files, open the resource in the translation editor, and swap the image on the row for that language. Logos work the same way per market — with one exception worth knowing before you plan around it.

Fourteen languages it will not touch

If your target market speaks one of these, the decision is made before any of the rest of this page applies. The documented list is: Bengali, Cebuano, Corsican, Frisian, Haitian Creole, Hawaiian, Hmong, Latin, Nyanja (Chichewa), Odia (Oriya), Samoan, Scots Gaelic, Sesotho and Tagalog (Filipino).

The second half of this matters more than the first. Shopify links that limitation to its list of languages with professional translations for checkout, the cookie banner, the privacy policy, the data sales opt-out page and the default content of Shopify-built themes. We counted 33 languages on that list on August 25, 2026 — the same number Shopify quotes for pre-translated checkout options. None of the fourteen is among them, so a store in one of those languages is translating the checkout furniture as well as its own catalogue.

Thirteen resource types the search does not show

This one is regularly mistaken for a second excluded list, and it is not. The resources below are translatable resource types; what they do not do is turn up when you search inside the app, which is why merchants conclude they are untranslatable and start pricing tools.

• DELIVERY_METHOD_DEFINITION
• EMAIL_TEMPLATE — your customer email templates
• FILTER — storefront filters
• METAFIELD — metafield values
• ONLINE_STORE_THEME_APP_EMBED
• ONLINE_STORE_THEME_SETTINGS_CATEGORY
• ONLINE_STORE_THEME_SETTINGS_DATA_SECTIONS
• PACKING_SLIP_TEMPLATE — your packing slip template
• PAYMENT_GATEWAY
• SELLING_PLAN — selling plans
• SELLING_PLAN_GROUP
• SHOP
• SHOP_POLICY — your store policy pages

FILTER appears here and in the excluded list above, and the two lists answer different questions: the first says what the app will not translate, this one says what its search will not show you. For collection filters the picture is muddier still: Shopify's filters documentation says their labels and values can be translated, while the excluded list here says the app cannot. Where you are unsure whether a field is translatable at all, Shopify's own rule settles it — if the field is not in the translations CSV, then it is not translatable.

The entry that costs merchants the most attention is METAFIELD, because that is where a great deal of third-party app text and custom content actually lives — our guide to metafields and custom data covers what they are and when you own them. If you cannot find a string in the editor, export the CSV for that language before you conclude it cannot be translated.

Your popup is translated somewhere else

Two official statements look like a contradiction here and are not. The Translate & Adapt page says forms created with the Shopify Forms app cannot be translated with it. The Shopify Forms listing promises you can translate forms in-app. Both are true, because they describe two different mechanisms — and the reason this matters is that a merchant reading only the first one concludes the popup is unfixable.

The Forms app has its own translation documentation and its own settings panel. Shopify states plainly that the Languages settings are used to translate your form into additional languages, and that the form has to be saved before translations can be added. There are two methods, and which one you get depends on your store rather than your plan.

The language table on that page is its own closed list, and it is worth checking before you promise a market a localized signup. We counted 32 languages on August 25, 2026, of which 19 support auto-translation on stores whose primary language is English and the remaining 13 are manual-only. Shopify states the rule for anything outside it: if a language is not in the table, it cannot be added to a form.

Auto-translate runs when you click it, not when your store changes

This is the gap that appears on no list of limitations, and it is the one easiest to miss when you first set the app up, because on day one you translate everything at once and the store looks finished.

Two details decide whether you can safely fix that by pressing the button again — and you can. A fresh run only fills in content that has never been translated and content that has gone out of sync, meaning the source text changed after the translation was made. And it explicitly does not overwrite anything you translated or edited by hand, so re-running it costs you none of the corrections a human has made.

The status labels are how you audit it. Shopify defines three, and the middle one is the one to filter for after any bulk edit to your source-language content.

Translated is not the same as shown

Merchants who cannot find their translated text often fail the second gate while assuming they failed the first, and go looking for a better translation tool. The two lists below are deliberately separate, because a missing requirement and a missing render need different fixes — and because optimizing the wrong one can go on indefinitely.

There is a one-second test for which table is yours. If any part of your storefront already reads in the second language, the first gate is behind you — read it once anyway for the language-selector row, since you can reach a translated page by URL while your buyers have no way to switch, and then work the second table. If nothing renders in the second language at all, start with the first.

The admission gate: what the store needs first

Shopify publishes these as requirements rather than recommendations. The theme half is the one worth checking on a store that has been customized: our guide to Shopify themes covers how much of that is a theme decision rather than a settings decision.

Requirements read on the localization and translation documentation on August 25, 2026. The plan wording is quoted in both forms deliberately — that page states the 20-language option for every plan except Lite, and separately lists Basic or higher among its requirements.

The visibility gate: what decides whether it is served

This is where the mechanics of Markets and languages take over, and they have their own guide: how a language maps onto a domain, a subfolder or a subdomain is answered in the domains and languages section of our Shopify Markets guide. What belongs here is the narrower question of why a translation you can see in the admin is not on the page.

How many languages you actually get, and what the app costs

This is the part of the topic most often described wrongly, including in older writing of our own. The sentence that gets repeated is that a third language moves you to a paid tier of the app. As of August 2026 there is no paid tier of the app. The listing carries the pricing label Free and, read on August 25, 2026, showed no plan table at all — where the paid translation listings on the same store carry a full ladder.

Read that sentence inside its real frame. “As many as you wish” is bounded by what the store supports, and Shopify states that every subscription plan except Lite gives you the option to sell in up to 20 languages from a single store. So the honest version is: two languages machine-translated for you, up to twenty languages if you bring the words.

Where the words come from is the whole decision, and there are four routes. Note that the automatic cap is a maximum of 2 languages and applies to that route alone.

Which gap is actually yours?

The table at the top answers by the one symptom you noticed. This answers when three of them are true at once — which to fix first, and whether the total adds up to a monthly bill. It crosses four signals the verdict rows do not: the surface that is untranslated, how many languages you need, how fast your catalogue moves, and who reads the machine output before customers do.

Every route below is a legitimate place to end up, including the free one and the paid one. The result names a class of answer, not a product — and if it names an app, the section after it carries what that class costs and when we read the price.

When a paid translation app is the honest answer

Start with what does not justify one. Untranslated new products, an English signup popup and a missing language selector are all free to fix, and together they account for most of the English text a merchant finds on a supposedly translated storefront. Work through those first — the checklist further down is exactly that sequence.

Two reasons to subscribe have nothing to do with content type. The first is needing a third or further language machine-translated specifically: by hand or by CSV export it is free at any number of languages the store supports. The second is a catalogue that changes faster than anyone can re-run Auto-translate and proofread the result — the same button this page describes, pressed on a schedule nobody has time for.

The second thing worth knowing before you compare listings is that this is not a migration. Shopify documents the native app as compatible with other third-party translation apps that use the Translations API, and states that content created with those apps appears in both places. You are adding a tool, not replacing one.

Prices and ceilings are each listing's own published plans on its Shopify App Store page — Weglot and langify, both read on August 25, 2026. The two ladders are deliberately not compared per word: Weglot sells words as plan capacity, while langify sells a free AI-translation allowance on top of manual translation that is unlimited on every tier. App pricing moves — confirm on the listing before you subscribe.

Shopify also publishes its own collection of apps for store languages, which is the right place to look for a listing that names your specific language or your specific app, rather than a general promise of coverage.

What paying does not fix

The checkout is the clearest example, and it is worth understanding because it is where merchants assume a paid tool will earn its money. Weglot's own support documentation states that it does not detect checkout pages because they are on another domain, that Shopify hosts those pages and handles the translations on its side, and that Weglot informs Shopify of the visitor's language choice so the same language displays.

langify describes the same boundary from the other end. Its documentation states that due to security restrictions during the payment process it cannot apply translations from its Custom section to the checkout, and — separately — that custom shipping details cannot be translated in the Shopify checkout at all. Both vendors route checkout wording back to the same native mechanism: the theme's own checkout and system content.

Filters are the case where Shopify's own documentation splits, and that is worth knowing before you pay for anything. The Translate & Adapt page lists collection filters among the content the app cannot translate. Shopify's filters documentation says the opposite: filter labels, values and groups can be translated into your store's other supported languages, and it names translation apps such as Translate & Adapt as the way to do it. Both pages agree on the exceptions — the product tag filter is shown only to customers browsing in the store's default language, and product vendor filter values are always the default language. So check your own storefront in the second language before you buy anything for filters. If you do land on a paid route, langify documents two methods and the limitation of each: translating the filter metafield on every individual product, where a partial job makes the filter appear twice on the collection page, or a custom-content translation that has to sit in a specific mode or it can break filtering.

One boundary we could not resolve from either side is the new customer accounts pages. No Shopify page we have found states whether that interface can be translated, and no Weglot documentation we have found covers it either — if those pages are your gap, ask before you buy. What they are and how they replaced the legacy version is covered in our customer accounts migration guide.

The coverage claims are the third. Weglot's marketing states that it is compatible with all Shopify themes and third-party apps, ensuring 100% of your store content is translated, and langify's pricing page states that it translates the texts of most third-party apps — a word that quantifies nothing. No source we read publishes a tested app list, a percentage or a methodology behind that 100%, so treat both as vendor claims and test your own stack on a free tier before you subscribe.

Audit your own storefront before you pay for anything

Steps one to five apply to every store on this page, whichever route the quiz gave you. Order matters more than usual here: step three is the one that changes the answer, because re-running Auto-translate typically removes a large share of the English you just wrote down, and everything you price afterwards is priced against a smaller and more honest list.

The Bottom Line

The app is free, its listing showed no paid tier in August 2026, and it does a defined job: two languages machine translated, and any further language you supply the words for by hand, up to what your store supports. The trap is not the price list — it is assuming that a documented exclusion explains whatever English you happen to see.

Frequently Asked Questions