How to find missing translations in your Shopify store

Published 5 November 2026

You published French or German, ran an automatic translation, and the store looks translated. Then a customer emails in English about a product page that’s half in English. This guide shows where translations usually go missing in Shopify and how to find them.

Why translations go missing

Shopify stores each translation per field: a product’s title, its description, its SEO title, each option name, each option value, each image’s alt text. A gap in any one field shows the original language to shoppers. The usual causes:

• New products and pages. Content added after the first big translation run isn’t translated unless your translation app runs again or auto-translates new content.
• Edited originals. When you change a product description, Shopify marks the existing translation as outdated, but it keeps showing the old translated text until someone updates it.
• Fields the translation app skipped. Option values (“Small”, “Navy”), image alt text, metafields, menu items, filters and policies are easy to miss.
• Auto-translation that copied the original. Sometimes a translation exists but is the original text, word for word, so the store counts it as translated.
• Brand names that got translated. Automatic translation can turn a product line called “Morning Dew” into its literal meaning in another language.

Checking by hand with Translate & Adapt

Shopify’s free Translate & Adapt app shows translations one item at a time:

1. In your Shopify admin, open Settings › Languages and check which languages are published.
2. Open Translate & Adapt, pick a language, and choose a resource type (Products, Collections, Pages…).
3. Open each item and look for empty fields and fields marked outdated.
4. Repeat for every resource type and every language.

That works for a store with a dozen products. With 300 products in three languages, it’s thousands of fields, and it doesn’t find translations that are just a copy of the original.

Checking the whole store at once

A coverage check reads every translatable field in every published language and lists the gaps:

• Missing: no translation.
• Out of date: the original changed after it was translated.
• Same as the original: a translation that is the original text.
• Glossary term changed: a brand or product name that should have stayed the same.

Sort the list by what shoppers see most (product titles and descriptions first, policies and filters after), fix them in your translation app, and check again.

Theme text is a separate check

Button labels, cart messages and section headings come from your theme’s language files, not from your products. If a storefront shows text like “translation missing: fr.products.product.add_to_cart”, the theme is missing a key for that language. Fix it in Online Store › Themes › … › Edit default theme content, or in Translate & Adapt under Theme. Updating the theme to a version that ships the language also fixes most of these.

A routine that keeps it fixed

• Check coverage after every product import or big edit.
• Keep a glossary of names that must never be translated.
• Before a sale or a launch in a new market, check that language once more.