Offering your store in multiple languages

You can have a multilingual Ecwid store on your website so your customers can shop in their preferred language. Add translations of your catalog, including product names, descriptions, options, category names. Ecwid will automatically translate the rest — texts on buttons, invoices, and email notifications.

Displaying your store in multiple languages

If you wish to go global and target new markets or you are doing business in a multilingual country like Canada or Switzerland, you may want to display your store in more than one language.

Ecwid storefront is professionally translated into 53 languages: Russian, English, German, German (Switzerland), French, Spanish, Spanish (Latin America), Italian, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Dutch, Norwegian, Finnish, Swedish, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Japanese, Arabic, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Czech, Wales, Danish, Greek, Estonian, Basque, Filipino, Persian, Indonesian, Icelandic, Catalan, Hebrew, Croatian, Hungarian, Armenian, Georgian, Korean, Lithuanian, Latvian, Macedonian, Mongolian, Marathi, Malay, Polish, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Serbian, Albanian, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese.

You can enable the necessary additional languages in your store settings. After that, Ecwid detects the preferred language of your customers’ browsers and automatically shows the store labels in that language.

In case a visitor uses a language that is not in your repertoire, they will see the text labels in your main store language.

While the default store labels are automatically translated into additional store languages, your unique custom text like product and category names and descriptions requires a manual translation.

After you add translations of your catalog (see instructions below), your whole store will become multilingual – your store visitors will see both store labels and your catalog in their preferred browser language.

Language switcher

Besides the automatic detection of visitors' browser language, that saves clicks, it is possible to offer customers to manually pick a language they want to see the store in:

- If you add your multilingual Ecwid store to a multilingual Wix site or to a multilingual Wordpress site via our plugin, their language switcher will work for both your site and your store within it.
- If you want to add a language selector in some other site, you can create a landing page where your store is forced to appear in a certain language and add a link to this page to your site menu.

Enabling additional languages

With additional languages, you can add translations for your catalog – product and category names and descriptions, options and variations. For the additional languages you enable, Ecwid shows translated texts on buttons, invoices and mail notifications.

To offer your store in multiple languages:

1. From your Ecwid admin, go to  Settings → General → Regional Settings.
2. Click Language Settings in the Store Language block.
3. Click +Add Languages in the Additional languages section:

4. Select a language from the drop-down box.

5. Click Add Language.
6. This language now appears on the list of additional languages:

Repeat the above steps to enable additional languages in your store.

Once complete, additional sections (i.e., translations) appear in your product and category management pages. There you can add translations of your catalog. Ecwid translates texts in the store interface (buttons, forms, etc) for you by detecting the browser language of customers visiting your store. As a result, visitors will be able to shop in their language.

Translating product names and descriptions

When you have enabled the additional languages, it is time to translate your catalog – product names, category names, option names, and descriptions.

To add translations of your product names and descriptions:

1. From your Ecwid admin, go to Catalog → Products.
2. After selecting a product, you will see the product management page.
3. Add the translated product name and description to the respective language section under Translations:

4. Click Save.

Translating product options

If your products have options, you may add translations for option titles and selections:

1. From your Ecwid admin, go to Catalog → Products.
2. Click on a product to open its management page.
3. Click the Options tab.
4. Add a product option , if you haven’t done so yet, and click Save.
5. Add the translated title and selections to the respective language sections that appear below that option:

6. Click Save.

Translating category names and descriptions

With additional languages enabled, you can add translations of category names and descriptions:

1. From your Ecwid admin, go to  Catalog → Categories.
2. Click a category name on the left (the management page of that category is on the right).
3. Add the translation of the category’s name and description in the respective language section under Translations:

4. Click Save.

The translated category names appear in the catalog, in Instant Site’s menu, and in the Menu on your site, where you have added your Ecwid store.

Translating the Order comments field at checkout

The Order comments section is a small text box that appears during the checkout. Your customers can add any additional information regarding the order to the text box. With additional languages enabled, you can add a translation for the Order comments section caption that will match a buyer’s browser language:

To add multilingual order comments to your store:

1. From your Ecwid admin, go to Settings → General → Cart & Checkout.
2. Scroll down to the Order comments section.
3. Enable the Order notes field toggle.
4. For each language, add a corresponding translation that will be shown at checkout:
   

   

5. To show the Order comments field caption in the default language, simply leave the field empty:
   

   

6. Click Save.

That’s it. Now Ecwid will detect the preferred language of your customers’ browsers and automatically show the Order comments field caption in that language.

Sending multilingual email notifications to customers

Customer email notifications in Ecwid include order notifications and automated marketing emails. When you create a new Ecwid account, the language used in your email notification templates is the same as your store’s default language. After you add a new language to your Ecwid store, all customers' email notifications will be automatically translated to the language you enabled in your Ecwid admin (or in English, if your store language is not yet supported for translation). Your customers will receive order confirmations and marketing emails in the same language they browse your storefront in.

Сustomer email notification templates can be translated into:

Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, German (Switzerland), Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Romanian, Russian, Slovenian, Spanish, Spanish (Latin America), Swedish, Turkish, and Ukrainian.

Both customer and admin notifications are available in:

Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Spanish, Spanish (Latin America).

If the language that you want to use for your email notifications is not yet available, you can add a custom translation. To do that, you need to manually edit the notification template by changing its HTML code.

Each email template in Ecwid has message keys—a short piece of HTML code that contains text messages. When an email is sent, message keys are replaced with actual text. They cover all the text in the notification, except for the values of payment and fulfillment statuses. So to translate the email’s content, you have to replace message keys with the corresponding translations.

The translation process is ongoing, and you can always check whether your store language is supported for a particular type of notification. For this, go to the page of this notification in Settings → Notifications and click the notification name, then click Preview template on the opened page. This way, you can also check how the notification will look for your customers.

How translation works for customers

After you enable an additional language and translate your catalog into it, your store will become multilingual. Ecwid will detect on the fly what is set as a primary language in a visitor's browser and, if you offer this language, your storefront will be shown in that language to the visitor. This includes store labels (Ecwid automatic translations) and information about your products and categories (your manual translations):

If a visitor's browser is set to a language that you don't offer, they will see your storefront in the main store language.

The translated category and product information appears in:

• storefront page and product lists;
• category and product pages;
• product filters;
• Order Confirmations;
• Invoices attached to Order Confirmation notifications;
• order details within a customer account;
• product card when you add a single product to a site page:

Related articles

Changing the store language
Creating a multilingual store with Wix and Ecwid
Adding language switcher to Instant Site
International business online: how to start selling globally (blog)
How to optimize your store for a global audience (blog)