Can you translate collection filters on a Shopify store?

Two Shopify pages disagree about collection filters

If you have added a second language and the filter chips on a collection page are still in English, you are reading a gap Shopify documents twice, in opposite directions. The Translate & Adapt help page opens its exclusion list with "You can't translate the following types of content with the Translate & Adapt app:", and collection filters is the first of the six items that follow.

Read only that page and the answer is no. Shopify's own filters documentation answers the same question the other way — and it points to that same app as one example of how to do it:

Both pages were current when we re-read them. No Shopify page we have found — the Translate & Adapt help page, the Search and discovery filters page and the app's App Store listing, all read on August 27, 2026 — explains why collection filters sit in an exclusion list on one page and in a translation instruction on the other. The closest thing to a bridge we can read in Shopify's own words is that filter text is largely inherited from product content the app does translate, which is the mechanism the next section describes. That reading is ours, not Shopify's.

Why half your filter chips are still in English

A half-English filter panel is usually a half-translated catalogue. Shopify's filters documentation splits the answer into three parts, and they do not behave alike. Filter values are based on the translated content for your products and product variants — a value chip changes language because the product field behind it has a translation, not because you edited a filter. Where that translation is missing, Shopify falls back: when there isn't translated content for filters, the store's default language is used.

Two consequences follow. The number of values shown for a filter can differ between languages, and where one source value ends up with two translations, Shopify's fix is to edit the product's translated content rather than the filter. Markets add a second split: filter value translations do not support additional instances of a language set up for specific markets, while filter labels and filter groups do. If per-market languages are new to you, our guide to Shopify Markets covers how languages and markets are set up in the first place.

The two filters your translations never reach: tags and vendor

Two filter sources behave differently from everything above, and a merchant who keeps auditing translations to fix them is chasing something Shopify states in one note:

The tag filter is not left in English so much as withheld: it is shown only in the default language, which on a storefront reads as a filter that disappeared rather than one that stayed untranslated. Vendor does the opposite and keeps showing, in the default language. Both sentences describe how the filter itself works, not a translation that failed. For the tag filter Shopify does name a way out on the filters page: it advises to "Use metafield filters for better translation support across multiple languages", and says a metafield type of single line text or list type can be used instead of the product tag filter type — a replacement for the tag filter, not a translation of it.

How to tell whether paying would help your filters

Start with the free option, because there is one: the Translate & Adapt App Store listing carries a Pricing label of Free and shows no paid plan, so testing whether your filters translate costs time rather than money. Watch the scope of the ceiling Shopify states on the app's help page: you can automatically translate a maximum of two languages, and that limit is about automation, not about how many translations you may add.

Confirming the result is on you. What the documentation does support is a comparison: open a collection in your second language and trace each English chip back to its source — a product field, a tag, or a vendor name. Only the first of those three moves when translated content exists. Shopify is not silent here: the filters page carries a short "Filter translation issues" checklist, and its first step is to verify that the content is translated in your translation app. Still, neither of the two Shopify help pages we read on August 27, 2026 turns that checklist into admin steps for confirming that one specific filter is translated.

The wider question — when a paid translation app is the honest answer at all — is bigger than filters. Our guide to what Translate & Adapt leaves untranslated works through that decision.