Translating your store for new markets
What to translate first, what machines get wrong, and the local details that decide whether people buy.
Translating a shop is not translating words; it's rebuilding trust for someone who has never heard of you, in a language where every small mistake reads as carelessness. Machine translation gets you eighty percent of the way. The last twenty percent is where the sales are.
Translate in this order
- Checkout and payment steps — errors here cost money immediately.
- Shipping, returns and delivery times.
- Product titles and the first two lines of each description.
- Category and navigation labels.
- Homepage copy.
- Blog and long-form content, last and possibly never.
Most stores do this backwards, translating the marketing prose and leaving the shipping page in English, which is precisely the page a nervous new customer reads twice.
What machines reliably get wrong
- Formality: German and Japanese need a deliberate choice about how familiar you are.
- Units and sizes: clothing sizes, shoe sizes, litres versus fluid ounces.
- Idioms in product names — 'Sunday Best' does not travel.
- Legal wording for returns, which is not a translation job but a compliance one.
- Word length: German and Finnish will break your buttons.
Localise the money
Show prices in local currency, with local tax expectations, using local number formatting — 1.299,00 rather than 1,299.00 across much of Europe. Also state clearly whether tax and duties are included; ambiguity here is the single biggest source of abandoned international carts.
Get one human pass
Machine-translate everything, then pay a native speaker for two hours on the pages that touch money. It is the cheapest quality upgrade in international selling and it catches the one embarrassing phrase that would have followed you around for years.
Don't forget the invisible text
Email confirmations, error messages, form validation, the automated "your order has shipped" note. A perfectly translated shop that sends English error messages feels broken, and that's the moment people ask for a refund.
Customers forgive an accent. They don't forgive not knowing what they'll be charged.