Nichome review for Shopify Translate & Adapt

May 2, 2025

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