Understanding Ecwid store and site translation

You can translate your website with an embedded Ecwid store into different languages to reach a broader audience all around the globe. To translate your store and New-Gen Instant Site, you first need to add languages in the store settings, and then manually add translations for products, texts, and SEO-tags. Visitors will be able to choose a preferred language for shopping with a language switcher. 

In Ecwid, the store and the site where it’s added are translated separately:

• Store translation includes localizing catalog and SEO tags for products. It can be done from your Ecwid admin. Ecwid also auto-translates buttons, email notifications and invoices.
• Site translation means localizing site content. You can do it in the New-Gen Instant Site editor. A site created with a third-party platform (Wix, WordPress, etc.) can be translated in the editor of that site builder.

Default and additional languages in Ecwid

In your Ecwid store, you can choose one default language and any number of additional languages. Currently, there are 53 languages available: Albanian, Arabic, Armenian, Basque, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Georgian, German (Germany and Switzerland), Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Marathi, Mongolian, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese (Portugal and Brazil), Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish (Spain and Latin America), Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, and Welsh.

The default language is the main language of your store. It affects how customers see your New-Gen Instant Site and store.

Your store is displayed in the visitor’s browser language as long as that language is added to your settings. If none of your store languages matches the customer’s browser language, they will see your store in the default language.

Your Instant Site is displayed in the default language disregarding the visitor’s country or browser language. When a customer chooses a preferred language with a language switcher, both Instant Site and the embedded store will be shown in that language.

You can check or set up your language settings in Settings → General → Regional Settings:

How translating store works in Ecwid

Ecwid store is a storefront with your products and categories, buttons (Buy Now, Add to Favorite, etc.), and a checkout page. All texts in your store either translated automatically by Ecwid, or need to be localized manually.

Ecwid auto-translates all interface texts: buttons (Add to bag, Buy now, etc.), headings on the product details page (Product description, Save this product for later, In stock, etc.), and checkout texts. Ecwid also auto-translated marketing emails and customer order notifications.

Unique custom text like product names, descriptions, and options requires a manual translation.

Here’s a list of what you can manually translate in your store:

• Product names and descriptions
• Product options
• Product attributes
• Category names and descriptions
• Product ribbons and subtitles
• Shipping methods at checkout
• The Order comments field at checkout
• Product page title and meta description for SEO
• Legal pages
• Custom checkout fields

To translate a product catalog, you first need to enable additional languages in your store. After that, you will see additional fields in your store admin where you can add a translation. New field will appear near every store element you can localize, e.g., product description, product ribbons, legal pages:

After you enable additional languages in your store and add translations, Ecwid detects the preferred language of your customers’ browsers and automatically shows the store labels in that language. In case visitors use a language not in your repertoire, they will see the text labels in your default store language.

See the step-by-step instructions on how to make your store multilingual →

How the New-Gen Instant Site translation works

Ecwid Instant Site is a ready-to-use site with a built-in online store. When you add new store languages in the settings, a separate page appears for each added language in the Instant Site editor. On this page, you can add translations.

Translation is available for all site sections: site menu, customer reviews, store contacts and so on. If you add a new block to a website, it will be available for translation. For each language version of the site you can optimize SEO tags so that your website can be easily found in search engines in any language.

After adding the translation and publishing the site, a language switcher will appear in the header of the site. Visitors will be able to select the desired language to browse your site in.

See the step-by-step instructions on how to make your Instant Site multilingual →

How the third-party site translation works

You can add an Ecwid store to a site created with any third-party site builder. Site can be translated in the site builder’s editor. How much content you can translate, is there an automatic translation, and whether you can localize SEO will depend on the site builder you use.

For WordPress, you can use plugins to make your site multilingual. What you can translate depends on the plugin. See the step-by-step instructions on how to make your WordPress site multilingual →

For Wix, you can customize the site in the site builder’s editor to make it multilingual. See the step-by-step instructions on how to make your Wix site multilingual →

For another site builder, you need to check with their help center whether they provide site translation and how to do it.