When updating or changing a Shopify theme, merchants often struggle with preserving existing translations or translating a draft theme before publishing. In this article we will cover the 2 approaches that you can do to ensure a smooth transition, saving time and effort while maintaining a consistent multilingual experience for customers.
It's important to point out that theme translations are a theme-specific resource!
This means, that everything that is located in Translations -> Theme, Translations -> Theme Sections and Translations -> Product Templates belongs exclusively to the current theme.
Whether you update your theme to a newer version or change to an entirely different one, the resources in those 3 sections will no longer have translations.
There are 2 possible ways to update the translation for new/unpublished themes:
Transfer theme translations from one theme to another
This approach is best when you have updated the same theme to a newer version (for example "Dawn 12.1" to "Dawn 12.2"), since that means you should have most of the same custom sections in the theme already existing in the new theme as well and copying the translations from the previous version will be a great fit.
Open Translation Lab and navigate to Settings -> Tasks. There, click the New task button on the top right corner:
Select Transfer theme translations, under From Theme select the theme you would like to transfer FROM, under To Theme select the theme you would like to transfer TO.
In the image example, the translations will be transferred from theme Dawn to test-data
Note: Transferring translations from one theme to another will not delete any translations on the theme that the translations are being transferred from.
Important: Translations are transferred (copied) and matched based on text value!
That means only translations for resources that have identical original language text will be matched and successfully transferred.
Translate resources of a draft theme
Navigate to any of the three Theme Sections in our app (Theme, Theme Sections, Product Templates)
In any of these three sections, under its title, there is a drop-down menu with the available themes on your store, from it simply select the theme you would like to make translations to:
And that's it! You are now modifying the translations for the selected Draft theme.
When you select a different theme from the dropdown while in "Theme" or "Theme Sections", pressing the " + Bulk Translate " button will translate the resources in the currently selected theme.