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Translation Lab for Shopify Review: Is It The Best?

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By Sam Nguyen

CEO Avada Commerce

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Imagine that you’re running a successful store on Shopify; you sell attire, jewelry, or dropshipping gadgets. However, you’ve only served locally. Although everything has been going well, there are numerous chances for improvement and fresh markets you can exploit.

In the past few years, a lot of Shopify store holders have prioritized approaching international markets. This has benefited them by boosting their marketing share and expanding their brand globally, increasing their search engine rankings and generating more sales.

Therefore, to support its users, Shopify has launched Translation Lab to facilitate popularizing brands in the international market. To learn more about this invention, read our following article, Translation Lab for Shopify Review: Is It The Best Shopify Translation App?.

What is Shopify Translation Lab?

Shopify Translation Lab is an app that helps you manage different languages in a single store on Shopify. As usual, translation apps tend to maintain their own backend with translations and make big changes to the theme of your online store to give the translation sources.

Translation Lab works with the new multi-language feature of Shopify. That means there is no code added to your theme and no external backend, which may slow you down.

Translation Lab enables you to translate the content on your store in any language. You can control the translation of every resource in your store.

It’s also super easy to use this app. Just a one-step setup and simple interface, Translation Lab would be the best choice for any Shopify store to go multilingual.

Selling in multiple languages on Shopify: What you’ll need to know

Selling in multiple languages on Shopify: What you’ll need to know
Selling in multiple languages on Shopify: What you’ll need to know
  1. It’s essential for you to install a translation app that works with the Shopify Store languages. And Translation Lab is one of the five available apps on the Shopify App Store.

  2. There’s a must for your theme to be compatible with the feature. All free Shopify themes address this requirement. Remember that your theme needs upgrading. This is crucial as themes that have not been updated to assist the Shopify Store Languages will typically have relative URLs in their liquid code. If someone browses your site in a language different from the default, these themes won’t work. You need to use the new routes liquid object for the themes; then, they output multiple internal links.

  3. If you’re using a Shopify plan, it’s possible to add up to 5 languages to your shop. If you’re using a Shopify Plus plan, your store can be translated into 20 languages.

  4. When you publish a language, visitors can browse your store and check out in that language. As you publish a language or a locale, there will be automatic URLs built for every translated page in your store. For instance, if your domain is www.my-shopify-store.com, the URL will be built as you add German to your shop: www.my-shopify-store.com/de. If you unpublish the German language, all /delinks will be 404-redirects.

  5. Keep in mind that Shopify does not support domains for various locales.

  6. Shopify will automatically use meta and hreflang tags so that Google and other search engines can identify the different languages and index the localized pages in your store more quickly.

  7. Your site Sitemap is created in the main language of your store and cannot be translated.

  8. You should be aware of some certain limitations. For instance, if the search function on your site searches only in the main language of the store, products, articles, blog tags cannot be translated.

  9. There’s a list of all types and fields of sources that can be translated:

Resource type Fields
Online store article title, description, summary
Online store theme dynamic keys based on theme data
Online store blog title
Online store page title, description
Shop meta_title, meta_description
Shop policy body
SMS template body
Collection title, description
Email template title, description
Link title, description
Delivery option name
Metafields (customer-facing only) value
Product title, description
Product variant title, option 1, option 2, option 3
Product option name
Payment gateway name

What are the advantages of using the Shopify translation lab app?

What are the advantages of using the Shopify translation lab app?
What are the advantages of using the Shopify translation lab app?
  • As mentioned earlier, Translation Lab is one of the supported third-party translation apps. That means it works seamlessly with the Shopify Store Languages.
  • There will be no code added if your Shopify theme is compatible with the Shopify Store Languages.
  • If the theme doesn’t work, there will be a language switcher liquid snippet included to your theme.liquid when you install the Translation Lab app. It depends on you to decide to add the language switcher snippet in your theme header or anywhere else. The process of doing this is mentioned in the admin panel of the app.
  • It enables you to manage over 130 languages supported by Shopify. Note that you are allowed to publish only 5 languages at the same time if you’re using a normal Shopify plan. If you pay for a Shopify Plus plan, 20 different languages can be added to your store.
  • You are able to add, publish, unpublish, and remove languages from the Languages dashboard.
  • If you unpublish a language, your customer cannot see it in your store. However, you’ll not lose your translations, and Shopify still allows you to manage it within the app.
  • Translation Lab lets you translate all the sources of content, including checkout, buttons, menus, and more. There’s no need for any skill to translate and manage these resources.
  • Translation Lab is compatible with every SEO app, even SmartSEO.
  • It’s free for you to access all these amazing features. Shopify also has a Pro plan with a fee of $9.99 per month. This plan provides click or automatic translations with up to 250k characters per month, and import-export features.

Conclusion

The Translation Lab for Shopify Review has brought you some useful knowledge and great benefits of this app. We hope that with the new Shopify Store Languages, you can expand your brand reach and achieve more success in the future. You won’t need to own many different stores (one for each language) or install complexible apps anymore.

If you have any questions, drop us a line in the comment section below. We will answer you as soon as possible.


Sam Nguyen is the CEO and founder of Avada Commerce, an e-commerce solution provider headquartered in Singapore. He is an expert on the Shopify e-commerce platform for online stores and retail point-of-sale systems. Sam loves talking about e-commerce and he aims to help over a million online businesses grow and thrive.