Shopify's Translate & Adapt app translates your store and serves the right language to each visitor at the same URL. That is different from an Atlas language variation, which creates a separate page at its own URL. For genuine multilingual selling you want Translate & Adapt; for a targeted campaign in one language, an Atlas variation is the right tool.
In this article:
Which tool for which job
You want | Use |
Visitors served their own language automatically | Translate & Adapt |
Your whole store multilingual | Translate & Adapt |
One page in one extra language, for a specific ad campaign | An Atlas language variation |
To test whether a translated angle converts | An Atlas language variation |
ℹ️ An Atlas language variation lives at its own URL. Nothing routes visitors to it automatically, so you have to send traffic there yourself, usually by pointing an ad at it. It is a campaign tool, not localisation.
Setting up Translate & Adapt
Install Translate & Adapt from the Shopify App Store.
In your Shopify admin, go to Settings, then Languages, and add the languages you want.
Open Translate & Adapt and choose a language to work on.
Use auto-translation to generate a first pass, then edit what matters.
Publish the language when you are satisfied.
Shopify then serves the right language based on the visitor's market or their selection.
Translating Atlas pages
Pages Atlas published are normal theme templates, so Translate & Adapt can translate them like any other page. Their content appears in the app's list of translatable content once published.
💡 Publish your Atlas pages first, then translate. Translating before publishing means the translations have nothing to attach to.
What to check after republishing
⚠️ Republishing a page from Atlas rewrites its content in your theme. Translations attached to the old content may no longer match, and some may be lost.
After any republish:
Open Translate & Adapt.
Check that page's translations for each published language.
Re-translate anything that has come loose.
For this reason, get a page's content settled in Atlas before investing in careful translation of it.
Using both together
The two tools cover different situations and work fine side by side.
Translate & Adapt for your store as a whole: navigation, product pages, checkout, and the Atlas pages you have published.
Atlas language variations for a specific campaign page in a specific language, where you want a distinct URL to point an ad at and want to measure it separately.
A common pattern: use Translate & Adapt for the store generally, and build an Atlas language variation for the single landing page behind a paid campaign in that market, so its performance can be measured on its own.