Translate products into another language

Selling to customers who read a different language means giving your products a name and a description in that language. This article covers how to do that, what Brainerce translates for you, and the things that are never translated no matter what you do.

Turn on Multi-Language first

Nothing to do with languages appears anywhere until this is on. Go to Settings, find the Multi-Language card, and turn on Enable Multi-Language.

A translation only reaches your website when Enable Multi-Language is on. If it is off, your website shows one language: it has no pages in other languages and sends Google no language tags. Translations saved while it is off (from the editor, by AI translation, or through the API) are kept, but nobody sees them until you turn it on. Listing a second language elsewhere, for example for email templates, does not turn it on.

• Default Language is the language you already write in. It is your store's main language and it is not something you set here; it comes from your store's language setting.
• Additional Languages is the list you sell in as well. Use Add Language to add one.
• The languages you can pick from are a fixed list of ten: English, Hebrew, Arabic, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Chinese, Russian and Portuguese. A language that is not on that list cannot be added, and there is no way to add your own.
• Each language you add shows a % translated badge counting your products, categories, brands and tags together, so you can see at a glance how far along you are. A Translation Status panel breaks the count down into Products, Categories, Brands and Tags, and Remove takes a language off the list.
• When I create content in another language is an assistant setting in the same card. It decides what the AI assistant does with a product name you type in a language other than your default: Translate to my default language, Keep what I typed as the main name, Ask me each time, or Single language: don't translate.

Add product names and descriptions in another language

Open any product, and use the language switcher in the header of the product editor to switch from your default language to the one you are adding. Type the translated text and save.

Five fields on a product can be translated, and no others:

Anything you leave blank falls back to your default language. A product with a Hebrew name but no Hebrew description shows the Hebrew name and the English description side by side. This is deliberate: a shopper always sees something rather than an empty page. It also means a half-finished translation is invisible to you unless you check, so use the Translations column on the Products page, which shows Complete, Partial or Missing for each product.

AI can write the translation for you. In the same editor there is an auto-translate button that translates the fields for the language you are on, and you can edit whatever it produces before saving. It uses AI credits like other AI features. Always read what it wrote before saving: it is translating your product copy, not just words, and nobody else is going to check it.

Translate many products at once

You do not have to open products one at a time.

• On the Products page, tick the products you want, then use the Translate bulk action and pick a target language. The confirmation warns you, and it means it: AI translation overwrites translations you already have for those products in that language. If you have hand-corrected a translation, do not include that product in a bulk run.
• In Settings, each language you have added offers Translate Missing, which fills only what has no translation yet, and Translate All, which redoes everything in that language. Translate Missing is the safe one. Translate All overwrites work you may have corrected by hand.
• Auto-translate new products in the same settings card translates every new product as you create it, so a growing catalog does not fall behind.
• In a file. To read every translation in a spreadsheet, or to send the sheet to a translator and load it back, Export from the Products screen and keep Translations ticked (it is ticked by default there). The sheet has one row per item, language and field, with the item's name in your own language in an entity_name column so you can tell what each row is. Change the translated text and import the file again: you get a review of exactly what will change first, and the import can be undone for 30 days. See Edit your data in a file.

There is no undo on the AI translation actions above (the Translate bulk action, Translate Missing, Translate All and auto-translate). There is no "restore the previous translation" button, because only the current text is kept. Only a file import can be undone.

What is the same in every language, and cannot be translated

This is the list merchants expect to be able to change per language and cannot:

• Price. One price per product, shared by every language. Selling at a different price in a different market is a currency and regional-pricing question, not a translation one.
• Stock and inventory. One stock figure, shared.
• The pictures themselves. The same images show in every language. What can differ per language is the alt text of an image, and you write that in the media library, not on the product. See Write image alt text in each language.
• SKU and barcode. Shared, as they should be. They identify the item, not the words about it.
• Customer reviews. Shoppers write them in their own language and they are shown exactly as written. Brainerce does not translate reviews, and there is no setting that makes it.

The product editor says this to you as well, with a note that price, inventory and images are the same across all languages.

Translate categories, brands and more than just products

Products are not the only thing that carries translations. The same per-language editing exists for categories, brands, tags, variant names, attributes and their options, custom fields, modifier groups and their modifiers, bundles, order bumps, discount rules (name and description), contact forms (including each field's label, placeholder and help text), blog posts (title, excerpt, body, SEO title, SEO description and slug), content entries such as FAQs, footers and pages (the Translations column on the Content list shows Translated or Missing per language), and your homepage meta description.

Each one translates its own text fields only, and each one falls back to your default language for anything you leave blank.

Write image alt text in each language

Alt text is the short description of a picture that screen readers read aloud and search engines use. It belongs to the image, so you write it once in the media library and every product that uses the image shows it. Each language has its own line.

1. Open Assets in the sidebar and click an image to open the inspector.
2. Under Alt text, pick a language. The first tab is your default language.
3. Type the alt text for that language. It saves when you click outside the field.

The language tabs only appear when Enable Multi-Language is on in Settings and you have added at least one more language.

• A language you leave empty falls back to your default-language alt text. A shopper never sees a blank, and the default-language field is the one that matters for search engines in your main language.
• It reaches your products by itself. Saving copies the alt text, in every language, to each product and variant that uses the image. You do not repeat it product by product.
• A product with its own alt text for that image keeps it, and it is not translated. If you wrote a different alt text for this image on one product, a change in the media library does not overwrite it, and shoppers in every language see the one you wrote for that product.
• No AI button translates alt text. The Translate bulk action on the Products page translates product text, not image alt text. Alt text in another language is typed by you, or set through the API or the assistant.
• The language must be one of your store languages in Settings for shoppers to see it. Alt text saved for a language you removed later is kept but never shown.

Why my storefront still shows the wrong language

Your website has to ask for the language. Brainerce does not guess it. This catches people out, and it applies here however complete your translations look in the dashboard: the dashboard can show 100% translated while every shopper still reads English.

Brainerce returns the language your storefront asks for. If your website never asks, or asks for a language you have not added, it gets your default language back and nothing looks broken from the outside. A storefront built with the current Brainerce template, or built by an AI builder following the current integration guide, handles this already. A storefront built before you turned Multi-Language on may need a change to offer a language switcher and pass the choice through.

If your translations are done and shoppers still see the wrong language, that is a website question, not a translation one. See a feature you turned on is not showing on your website.

What's next?

• Add a product covers the product editor itself.
• Manage products covers the Products page, its Translations column, and per-language editing in the table.
• Store settings is where the Multi-Language card lives.