Sick and tired of using rubbish apps, which do not actually work for those who use them? Shopify has brought out the native multilingual functionality – a feature which has been sorely missed.
Shopify translations have now allowed merchants to deliver a locally-focused experience to their customers and has also created a more potential reach for their store. Luckily, to aid this, Shopify has recently announced that they have introduced new APIs that allow Shop :
The Shop Locale API Update
This API helps manage the locales and languages available on the merchant storefront. Shopify merchants can easily choose between different Shopify translations, and enable/disable locales from the Shopify admin.
Merchants have the option of picking between primary and alternate locales for their business. These locales have two attributes: primary and published. Merchants may only have one primary locale for all others, and they can decide between whether they are published or unpublished.
Every Shopify store can have up to five alternate locales, and even more if you’d like.
There are two locale formats that are currently accepted: with language subtag, or the language plus region subtag (so either “en” or “en-UK”).
Note: Locales have to be enabled and published before they become available for translation.
The Shopify Translations API Update
The Shopify translation API allows customers to have a consistent customer experience. Having localized apps as a part of the Shopify store localisation plays a big role in that customer experience.
Shopify developers can quickly determine whether a merchant has a multi-language storefront by querying the ShopLocale object and retrieving a list of locales. If there’s more than one locale with the published setting set to true, then it is indeed.
The GraphQL Admin API helps create and retrieve translated content such as email notifications or product information. Additionally, it allows customers to view products in multiple languages and communicate with them too!
The same API will create and retrieve content at the moment an app requests for read_translations or write_translations access scopes. To do that, the app needs permission from the user, which will authorise it for access.
Some resources, types, and/or categories that can be translated include:’,
- Collections
- Email and SMS templates
- Links
- E-commerce articles, blogs, pages, and themes.
- Payment gateways and shipment rates
- Shipping rates based on price and weight.
- Shop and shop policies
- Sub-options of the product.
Developers can retrieve a list of available translations via translatableResources queries for each language they support.
To create new translations, the GraphQL API is used to apply mutations. The translationsRegister mutation is used to import new translations, and once they are created, the original content will have to be added to translatableContent in order that the translations may
Shopify multilingual functionality
The Liquid API Update
The Liquid API needed some substantial changes in order for it to work consistently with the new Shopify API and translate/locale API, and now can be used to create localized Shopify experiences directly from the Shopify admin.
New APIs updates have been available in developer preview, and developers are offered the unique flexibility to write and modify apps in order for them to support multiple languages.
Downside of Shopify Multilingual
SEO was disappointed when it did not see the option for unique URLs for each language. Each handle would serve the same piece of content; so you could not have a German and an English URL; only one.
Need Help with a Shopify Multilingual Setup?
If you’re looking to take advantage of the new multilingual features from Shopify, you’ll most likely have a tonne of questions and concerns – even an established retailer would. This is a feature we have. Please talk to us if you feel this is functionality you would like to explore too. Our shopify developer excited to help you scale into new markets with new languages.