5 of the Best Shopify Translation Apps

27 July 2022

by Cieron Bradbury

Selling across borders comes with a raft of new challenges, like international shipping, customs, and regulations. Unfortunately, some retailers never get as far as sending goods abroad. They fall at the first hurdle: translating their stores into different languages.

Here’s the thing; offering international delivery isn’t enough to attract an international audience. You need to optimize your site for cross-border sales if you want to get customers from around the world. That means speaking to them in their language. Because if they land on your untranslated homepage and do not speak English, they’ll head to a competitor.

Thankfully, translating your Shopify store is easy — you don’t even need to hire a translator. You can use one of these five leading Shopify translation apps.

Why You Need to Translate Your Store

The simple answer is to sell more to international consumers. While the UK is a major eCommerce market, we represent only a fraction of total eCommerce sales. The vast majority of online sales come from non-English speaking countries. Unsurprisingly, China tops the list. But the top ten countries ranked by eCommerce sales also includes Japan, Germany, France and Spain.

To increase international sales, you need to speak directly to these international customers. We mean that literally. While some of these consumers may be fluent in English, making your store multilingual will guarantee you appeal to every potential customer in these markets and dozens more across the globe.

A multilingual site makes it easier for these consumers to find your website, too. When you translate your website according to Google’s guidelines, you increase the chances of your store ranking high in localized searches.

What is a Shopify Translation App?

A Shopify translation app is an easy way to translate your Shopify store into different languages. Rather than pay a professional to translate your site’s content and upload all of it yourself, these apps integrate with your Shopify store to automate the entire process. The vast majority of these apps will also integrate with the Shopify Translation API, which makes creating and managing multilingual versions of your store even easier.

What Are the Best Shopify Translation Apps?

Langify

The Langify app can be used to translate your entire storefront, including the language, currencies, and even third-party apps! And because it is 100% compatible with the native Shopify translation API, any improvement Shopify makes will be automatically reflected in the app.

Langify offers something for everyone. For brands that don’t want to worry about translations, they provide an Auto Translations feature that automatically translates your site’s content.

Brands that want more control can supply and upload their own translations. The intuitive dashboard makes it easy for retailers to find and translate every part of their website. While this is more time-intensive than other apps, it gives brands greater control over their translations and improves accuracy.

Translation can either happen automatically using the plug-in’s automatic detection feature, or customers can change the language themselves using a dropdown menu in the navigation bar.

SEO is at the heart of Langify. It follows best practices for optimizing for international SEO, including dedicated URLs and optimized hreflang and canonical tags.

Langify offers one plan that costs $17.50 per month. It includes unlimited manual translations, full SEO support and round the clock support.

GTranslate

GTtranslate makes any HTML website multilingual. It’s compatible with every major CMS platform, including WordPress, Squarespace and — most importantly — Shopify.

The app uses Google Translate’s automatic translation service to translate your entire store into over 103 languages cost-effectively. It also translates page URLs (which is great for SEO) and almost every third-party app on your store.

The best thing about GTranslate is the huge range of features retailers can use without having to pay a penny. The free version of the app includes automatic translations, no word limits, and a range of available language dropdown styles.

Go paid and you’ll get multilingual SEO features so your site is indexed in multiple languages in Google, better quality translations, URL and meta data translations, checkout page translation and much more.

GTranslate’s enterprise plan, which includes all of the features mentioned above, costs $39.99 per month.

Transcy

Transcy is another automated translation app that lets retailers translate their pages and third-party apps at a click of a button. Transcy translates everything, including your homepage, product pages, checkout, and blog posts.

It even lets you customize your site’s design based on your visitor’s language. For instance, different images can be displayed for different languages.

With Transcy’s auto update feature, you don’t have to worry about translating new copy every time you add or edit a product. It all happens automatically on the back end in real time.

Trancy’s geo-location feature means visitors are automatically taken to a version of your store in their local language. Or you can disable that feature and use Transcy’s eye-catching language switcher to allow customers to change language on their own.

If you’re not happy with the quality of the translation, Transcy lets you edit the content manually and manage every translation from a single dashboard.

Transcy has a free plan that allows you to translate your store into one language. Paid plans start at $9.90 per month rising to $39.90 per month.

LangShop

LangShop offers the largest number of support languages of any tool in this list, totaling 241. You can translate your site into all of them on any of their plans without limits.

Like many of the other tools we’ve reviewed, LangShop offers automated translation using some of the world’s best translation engines. This makes it easy to translate every page of your site (homepage, product pages, checkout, etc.,) in minutes. But that’s not the only translation service LangShop offers. It also allows for manual translation, pro translation drivers like DeepL, and professional agency translation.

LangShop takes your SEO efforts into consideration by providing server-side rendering translation. It also creates unique URLs for each language, translates meta data and optimizes hreflang tags.

LangShop’s free plan offers one additional language. Paid plans start from $9.90 per month rising to $67.50 per month.

Weglot

Weglot is a versatile translation app that works with every major CMS platform, including Shopify. Weglot automatically detects and translates the content of your site using the world’s leading neural machine translation providers. Of course, you can always edit automated translations yourself or send them to be reviewed by professionals at the click of a button.

Multilingual SEO is also automated by Weglot. The app creates dedicated URLs for each language on a separate subdomain or subdirectory. It also translates server-side, before the pages are seen by visitors (a Google best practice), adds Hreflang tags, and translates your site’s meta data, too.

Weglot is free to use if you want to translate your site into one language up to a maximum of 2,000 words. Paid plans start at €9.99 per month, rising to €499 per month.

Don’t Forget to Translate the Delivery Experience, Too

Translating your eCommerce content doesn’t stop with your storefront. There are dozens of customer communications you should be translating. The vast majority of these will concern delivery. There’s nothing worse than a customer purchasing through a store in their own language only to have every confirmation and delivery email be in English.

At Pro Carrier, we guarantee consistent and localised communication every step of the journey. That includes at least six shipping updates, all of which will be sent in your customer’s local language. So they get a seamless multilingual experience at every step of their journey.

Contact us today to find out how Pro Carrier can translate your cross-border delivery experience.

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