Shopify multilingual: how to translate your store and boost your international sales

Shopify is one of the most powerful e-commerce CMSs for growing an international business. Thanks to its flexible features and the many available translation solutions, it allows merchants to adapt their store into multiple languages and reach a global audience.

But how do you properly translate your Shopify site? Between different methods, available tools, and SEO best practices, it’s essential to structure your project to ensure effective results.

In this article, we explore the most suitable solutions for translating a Shopify site, as well as the key steps to a successful implementation.

🏆 Why properly translating your Shopify site is essential

Translating an e-commerce site is more than just converting text from one language to another. A good translation should be smooth, natural, and culturally adapted.

  • ✅ Increase your revenue: reach new markets and customers
  • ✅ Improve international SEO: optimize your ranking on Google and other search engines
  • ✅ Build brand credibility: good translation builds trust
  • ✅ Improve user experience: offer a fluid and localized customer journey

⚠ Only 5% of websites are multilingual, yet 60% of consumers prefer to browse in their native language. There is a real opportunity for merchants looking to expand internationally.

🔍 The different translation methods

1️⃣ Automatic translation

Most Shopify plugins offer automatic translation of content. This method saves time and reduces costs, but it has its limitations.

  • ⚠️ Brand issues: translation errors can damage your image and credibility.
  • ⚠️ SEO impact: unoptimized automatic translation can lead to low-quality content.

2️⃣ Human translation

To ensure optimal quality, human translation is essential for strategic content such as:

  • 📝 Key product descriptions
  • 📄 Homepage and strategic pages
  • 📢 Marketing campaigns and emails

3️⃣ Enhanced AI translation

This approach involves feeding AI with human translations of strategic content to improve the quality of machine-generated translations.

  • 🤖 AI translation provides the first draft
  • 👨‍💻 Human review to refine and localize
  • 📚 Glossaries to ensure consistent terminology

📢 “There’s no one-size-fits-all solution or plugin for Shopify. It all depends on your goals, volume, and SEO requirements. The audit phase is essential.” – Mikael Le Gallo

📌 Technical translation solutions

1️⃣ Proxy translation

Proxy translation uses an intermediate server that intercepts user requests and displays a translated version of the site without modifying the original content on Shopify. This system works as an overlay: the original site remains unchanged, and the translated version is served dynamically.

The translations are hosted on the proxy translation provider’s servers, which means they are not stored directly in Shopify. These solutions are SaaS-based and require a monthly subscription.

  • ✅ Weglot: automated solution with review options
  • ✅ LangShop: advanced plugin for managing multiple languages and currencies

2️⃣ Local translation

Shopify allows you to add multiple languages directly through subdomains or subdirectories.

  • ✅ Langify: manual solution for full control
  • ✅ Translate & Adapt: native Shopify tool with automatic and manual translation

🔗 Discover more solutions here: Shopify Apps for Translation

⭐ Conclusion

Translating your Shopify site must be well planned to ensure a great user experience and effective SEO.

📩 See our case studies here: Our client projects

📢 Need a quote for your project? Contact us for tailored support.