Shopify Translate & Adapt

I was told by the Theme developer that the Translate & Adapt app was necessary to provide a second language (Japanese) to my store, thus installed it. While I appreciate the effort to streamline the translation process and find the search functionality to be indispensable, the automatic translations are impressively horrendous and cannot be used. Not a single one of them. The Japanese translations are very unprofessional in tone and manner and laughably incorrect. Many translations make no sense whatsoever.

We spent two months manually translating every single word of text throughout not only the website, but checkout journey and all hardwired communications and finished about 1/2 of the stores translations. Then, we had an issue with the navigation menu not leading to the correct URL, thus contacted Shopify to help. The IT support was able to identify and rectify the issue, but in the troubleshooting process, accidentally pressed the “Auto-translate” button, which then over-rode all of the manual translations that we spent months painstakingly translating.

Considering that there is no way to download an Excel spreadsheet for the translations nor is there a way to identify which translation applies to which page without constantly referencing the website while applying the translations, this mistake has set us back tremendously. It is absolutely incomprehensible that Shopify IT support not only has access to that button, but that pressing one button can override ALL of the manual translations. The icing on the cake is that there is no way to reverse the action or revert the code back.

USE WITH EXTREME CAUTION!!!

To the Shopify Product Managers / UI/UX Team, please consider the following enhancements:

1: Move the location of the “Auto Translate” button to a less conspicuous place. The current placement invites errors and mistakes.

2: Add a confirmation pop-up that clearly explains the ramifications of pressing the button

3: Add a functionality to reverse any changes

4: Add a functionality to restrict usage of this button or grey it out for some users

5: Make a proper user manual and ensure your internal staff know the ramifications of pressing that button

Limited. Tried using this App and everything was looking really good, until we realised that it was translating underlying URL links in the body of our pages. This meant that the URL's in the links weren't correct, causing 404 errors. Once again, the standard response from Shopify was that the App was limited, and that we would need to pay more for a third party App that might do a better job.

It was working fine but at some point it completely stopped taking the right references but using for all products the same info. Support could only tell me to manually translate the references or use another app. It is unknown what the bug is due to and if it is fixable

For a long time, I couldn’t understand why my product descriptions weren’t updating across English variants (e.g., US, CA, AU, GB). Shopify support repeatedly redirected me, suggesting conflicts with other apps, which caused significant delays in resolving the issue.

It turns out the Translate & Adapt app itself prevents automatic syncing of updates between English language variants. If I hadn’t figured this out on my own, my product descriptions would have remained outdated indefinitely, negatively affecting my store’s accuracy and user experience. This limitation is highly inefficient and creates unnecessary manual work.

Shopify Translate might be suitable for basic needs.

But it lacks some advanced features available in ConveyThis and Weglot. Notably, Shopify Translate does not offer strong multilingual SEO support (like translated URL slugs and hreflang tags), nor does it provide extensive customization options for language switchers or dynamic content translation. While Shopify's native app supports multiple languages, it doesn't allow as much flexibility in design or API integration for custom translation workflows.

It would be great if we could have a custom language selectors, multilingual SEO features, and a robust API for on-demand translations, for more complex or large-scale stores.

I have using this ever since I bought my new theme and my site is very heavy and just now getting to all of the technical Search Console stuff. This app is causing over 3000 errors on google search console with it turned on in my theme. All of these pages after checking are the translated app pages. ERROR__Page indexing Alternate page with proper canonical tag error---ALL FROM THIS APP. No Wonder I have no visitors on my site tc-beauty.com

This is a gamechanger for internationalisation. Only the metaobjects could have been included from the start, one has to manually "auto-translate" each object. Or is there another method?

Spent hours translating my entire site only to find that the language does not automatically switch based on a visitor’s location. So my website is still very much single-language for everyone. What good is a translating app that doesn’t have geolocation?

Checked all Help articles and the only geolocation app Shopify links to is no longer available in the App Store. So the Help articles are not even up to date.

I then tried to contact support, but all I get is a chat widget with neverending three dots. A very frustrating experience.

I am writing to express my extreme dissatisfaction with the support I have received for your app. This has been the worst support experience of my life.

After two weeks of waiting and being assured by your support team that the issue would be resolved, I was informed that you are aware of the problem where the export function sends completely incorrect TYPE values. Out of 3875 entries, only 8 are correct for import.

To quote your support team: “Type was unintentionally changed to something different in the export than we expect for the import.”

This situation is unacceptable, and I am very frustrated with the lack of effective resolution. I expect immediate action to correct this issue.

This app was working fine until a couple days ago. Some products have wrong translation in Spanish, French and German. When I click auto-translate it doesn't fix it.

I contacted Shopify and they suggest me to manually edit but I have 2329 product pages. There is no way I can do it manually.

It messed up our SEO, they don't even care about the issue. We pay thousands of dollars to them every month and this is the service we get.