Translation of Shopify Websites

01/2019. Earlier this month we were contacted by a company looking to translate their Shopify website into Chinese. Shopify is a cloud-based e-commerce platform for online stores. It is used by more than 500,000 businesses in 175 countries. Since we had not done any translation work in Shopify before we did a bit of research, which we would like to share here.

Although Shopify can handle multiple languages and currencies it appears that the localization process is not as straightforward as for example in WordPress or TYPO3, where content can exist side-by-side in multiple languages and can be accessed, imported/exported and managed through a simple localization interface.

While it appears that Shopify lacks such built-in localization capabilities, we came across Weglot, a translation API that integrates into Shopify (as well as a number of other systems). The advantage of Weglot, aside from providing a convenient localization interface, is that it allows export and import of Shopify content in XLIFF format, which is compatible with our translation environment system Memsource. This ensures a smooth and cost-effective process as our translators can work in the environment they are familiar with and benefit from tools such as translation memory, terminology and linguistic quality assurance (LQA). Once the work has been completed, the content is simply imported back into the Shopify site.

We are looking forward to rolling out this project in the near future. If you have any questions regarding Shopify localization or would like to discuss a specific project feel free to contact Martin Heimann through any of our translation offices.