Shopify Translate & Adapt

Be careful with descriptions if you update them!

Translated data is not updated, creating confusion for customers who continue to see outdated information and drive you crazy.

Des traductions vraiment éclatées et certains termes qui ne veulent rien dire en guise de traductions. Les traductions faites manuellement pour remplacer les traductions farfelues ne sont pas prises en compte même après enregistrement des modifications. Aucun chat ou support pour signaler le problème. Bref une App vraiment bien décevante au final.

Terribly confusing app. Won't translate homepage, and adds sections on it's own. Unable to delete and start fresh.

Doesn t say anywhere that you have to set up a market to make sure vistors I have access to it. I have lost 3 months on that. And even now that I have set up a market. It doesn t really work. And Shopify support helpers usually quite efficient are not at all trained on this. It s 2025 people: translations should not be a luxury...

The app has been problematic for us, as it repeatedly translates blank sections when automatically translating the website. Unfortunately, the support team has not been helpful to us or to others experiencing the same issue.

Selbst erstellte Inhalte können nicht übersetzt werden. Ansonsten bringt mich die APP zur Verzweiflung.

Horrible! nada más que decir

I'm reporting a massive failure in translation integrity and UI design inside Shopify's Translate & Adapt app. The app is silently cherry-picking what it translates and has published many half-translated, outdated, or blank pages to my live international storefront — without warning, notice, or transparency. It is hiding this behind a deeply inefficient and non-transparent interface, and leaving me with a grueling, manual audit job that no modern technology stack should ever require.

This issue has cost me visibility in Google, revenue from international traffic, and days of unpaid labor just to locate and fix what Shopify never properly built or marketed in the first place.
Translate & Adapt is Failing on Every Front:

It has arbitrarily skipped translating major portions of many product descriptions, default product and variant fields, collections, metaobjects, menus, etc.

It does not alert me to untranslated or out-of-sync content.

It offers no dashboard or audit view to track which items have been translated and which haven’t.

It forces me to manually click through every parent > child > grandchild element in the app to detect translation failures. And with 975 failures according to Google, this workflow is unacceptable.

Each click comes with a 10–20 second load time, and each missing translation takes up to 2 minutes to fix.

There is no batch view, no summary, and no timeline of what's been changed or ignored.

SEO Consequences — and Why This Is Costing Me Revenue

The result is that hundreds of translated pages and site elements are not approved by Google because of:

Outdated content

Wrong languages (e.g., body text in English on a Dutch page)

Thin content (e.g., product title + images, but no body text)

Blank product descriptions

Mismatched content across locales

Missing translations for default fields or field values (e.g., price, color, gender, and age which are required by Google)

Google doesn’t just check if a translated page exists — it checks for:

Relevant content in the expected language

Unique, high-quality body copy

Content-to-code ratio and completeness

If a page is:

Just images or 1–2 words

Missing description text

Marked Dutch URL but written in English

Identical or near-duplicate to the English page
Showing outdated content that's inconsistent with the same page in another translation

Lacking critical information like price, color, gender, and age group

Google will suppress or deindex that page.

And that’s exactly what’s happening:
Google Search Console currently shows 975 translated URLs as “Not Approved” — many flagged for content, indexing, or missing product attributes that originate directly from incomplete translations and broken data inheritance caused by Translate & Adapt.
Shopify Has Misled by Omission.

Shopify markets Translate & Adapt as a seamless way to expand globally. I built my international storefront using Shopify’s tools, trusting the system to behave predictably and honor its own architecture.

Instead, I’ve been forced into a days-long audit of every product, data field, menu, collection, etc., wasting time I should be spending on design, production, and marketing. I'm now looking at at least a full week of manual fixes ahead — just to correct what should never have happened, much less happened deep under the hood with no notification or warning.
What I Need from Shopify Immediately:

A formal acknowledgment that Translate & Adapt cherry-picks content silently and has no features in place to notify merchants or help them fix it in a reasonable workflow.

A clear admission that this breaks international SEO and harms indexing in Google Merchant Center and organic search.

A commitment and timeline for implementing basic protections:

A visual dashboard of untranslated content

A bulk view of translation coverage

Warnings for untranslated or outdated content

Documentation of these limitations and a bug report escalation to the Translate & Adapt product team.

Credit or compensation for the hours of manual work and the lost visibility/revenue caused by this system failure since installing this app.

This is not a content issue. It’s a platform issue — a system that publishes broken content without ever notifying the merchant.

Please escalate this ticket to a senior product manager or tech lead on the Translate & Adapt team. I am not accepting surface-level replies. This needs to be addressed at the architectural level.

This should even call itself a language app. you can only pick ONE extra langauge. So no, you cant translate your whole site for multiple countries and sell in multiple markets.

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.