Shopify Translate & Adapt

April 13, 2023

Shopify support can be amusing. Every once in a while, you will come across a gem of a support person. This time was not the case. First, Rona passed the buck by asking me to go through a verification process. Understand that to open a ticket, you have to verify yourself. Only then can you open a ticket. But that wasn't enough. So, Rona emailed me to request a chat and verify myself. Asked me to give the support person a ticket number. So, I went through the process and gave Alex the ticket number. Without reading the case notes, Alex wants to know if I followed the steps in the email sent by Rona! What?! So, I copied and pasted Rona's email and pointed out that the instructions were to open a chat request and (re)verify myself, which is what I was doing. The next 30 minutes were amusing and painful as Alex couldn't follow simple requests to visit the URL of the website I provided to see the errors for himself. Instead, he repeatedly asked me to send him screenshots by uploading them via the File/Content. Instead of seeing the errors for himself live, he repeatedly asked me to upload screenshots. Then, when it seemed that it couldn't get any more bizarre, it did. Alex sent me a screenshot of what he saw on my website. At the bottom of the screenshot was a button I asked him to click on, and he could not find it! So, I asked him what he saw on the bottom of the screen, if he saw a coral-colored button, and if he could please click it. He finally found the button (resembling the screenshot HE had sent) and clicked it. Then, it walked him through step by step to point out the error. Wow. Finally, I suggested to him that it was beyond him or Rona to be able to help and if he could PLEASE escalate the issue as the development team probably needed to look into it. The app doesn't translate the titles of products consistently. It skips translating some titles but does translate the description. Of course, it is a free app, so I guess we shouldn't expect much... The above interaction was on Tuesday, April 11, 2023. Still no update.

Feb. 18, 2023

While the translation is good, there are few unbelievable issues with this app - if you duplicate a product, the translations will only show you the old description (of the product that was duplicated). We figured this out after few weeks and few hundreds of products that we must fix manually now in German and English.... Some other issues: - Some products will only have partial translation. - If you edit a description/option sometimes the translation app is not adjusting the translation (even if you go and press translate for the language in question). - Is translating some html parts of the theme (color code from "red" to "rood" for example, 30px to 30 pixels, icon names...), causing a broken layout in german (and probably other languages).

Oct. 4, 2022

Edit, Up to 2 stars because of the reply from the team, thank you. I believe our case won't be an isolated one, as people who use Traditional or Simplified Chinese all scatter around the globe, so any website that is using Shopify and serving both sides of them at the same time would face the same problem. ======= We appriciate shopify to have their own lanaguage translate app but this mess up our website and setting. Initially, we were using another app and let the website display English, Chinese Traditional (with /zh-tw) and Chinese Simplified (with /zh-cn) and customers can choose the langauage they want with a selector. Now shopify put all chinese language under /zh only and can only allow us to choose 1 of them as the store language along with English, we understand we can assign Simplified to China, and Traditional to Taiwan but the problem is we serve customers from both side who live here in UK. You just put our hours of work of doing translation into nothing. I sincerely hope you can rectify this asap, thank you.