I recently got a question from one of my subscribers who asked if he could Google a translation tool and then just translate his store and ads into other languages using the auto-translate feature.
The short answer is: That’s a horrible idea.
These auto-translate tools are very inaccurate and usually give you a bunch of gibberish, mixed with words from the original language and lots of syntax and grammar mistakes all over the place. If your audience sees a Facebook ad with lots of mistakes, there’s no way they can trust your ad it’s almost guaranteed they’ll be put off.
That’s also the case with your online store in general. If there’s a bunch of mistakes and syntax errors on your website, and the sentences just don’t make sense, it’s going to kill your sales.
Here’s the right way to translate your store and ads: Go to a site like Upwork.com and hire someone to do the translations for you.
It’s not like it’s going to cost you a fortune or anything.
Simply create a job posting and explain what you need to get done and then review the applications for the job and pick an affordable and high-quality translator. Another option is to reach out to your network and see if you have a friend or family member who speaks the language and is able to translate your store and ads for you.
That being said, Shopify also has language options in the theme settings. You can simply change the language of your store to any other major language like German, French, Spanish and so forth.
But whenever you want to translate your store, there’s definitively some element of manual work involved. You can’t automate this.
Even Shopify’s built-in language themes aren’t perfect.
In my experience you have to manually edit at least some of the translations, but luckily this can easily be done from within Shopify. And you can also have your translator do this for you by creating a staff account and sending him or her the login details for the store.
This way your translator can login and translate the store directly from within Shopify, but without accessing your admin and orders.
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