While your Magento 2 multi language journey requires a lot of steps, translating products is one of the most important ones. Not only because customers prefer shopping in their local language. But because you increase the chances of ranking higher for different languages.
So, in this guide, you'll learn everything you need to translate products in Magento and do it the easy way. Or even without doing it yourself.
Intrigued?
Product Translation in Default Magento
Even though Magento offers you the Translate Inline Tool for general translation, it doesn't cover long-form content. So, you have to translate all the descriptions, metadata and other fields manually for each product.
Just navigate to a product you want to translate and switch to a corresponding store view.
Note: if you don't see the store view you would like to translate the product for, scroll down to the Product in Websites section. Make sure the product is assigned to a corresponding website.
From there, just translate the content visible on the frontend. But note that you need to translate product attributes and their values separately to get them displayed in a specific language.
Translate Magento Products with the Extension
We might only guess how much time translating products in Magento manually will take. Since you have to add translations for each language, let's just assume it'll take long.
So, if you want to speed things up or even automate the translations, you need the . It comes with different options to help you translate Magento products easily.
Let's go through each option available for you once you configure Magento Translation Extension.
Translation Popups and Forms
Switching back and forth between store views when translating products is quite irritating. So, the first thing Magefan Translator allows you to do is translate products in Magento without switching a store view. You just do it all within one page.
Popup
If you want to translate separate fields, like short description or meta title, use the Translate option under each field. It's available for all fields you can translate.
The pop-up shows the same field from all store views, allowing you to see and translate each easily.
Form
If you want to go even further, you can view all the product attributes from all store views in one form. For that, find the Translate option in the top menu.
Just remove the default values and add translations for all store views at once.
Note: this form also comes in handy if you want to review and change product attributes, like Visibility or Tax Class, without constantly switching store views.
Auto-Translation
If you don't want to bother going through each product field, or just have too many products to cover, use auto-translation.
Once you enable it and configure one of the AI translation engines, you'll see the Auto Translate option in the top menu. Hit it to translate a product to all store views at once.
But you still have to go and click that option on all products. To go even further, enable the Translation Schedule.
The Magefan Translator will automatically start translating products for you. All you need to do is specify whether to skip some fields from translation and review the translation (if needed).
Bulk Translation
Although the translation schedule covers all products, you might still need some control. In that case, select some specific products in the Catalog > Products grid and choose Auto Translate from the Mass Actions.
Hreflang Tags for Product Pages
Once you translate product pages, you have to make sure they are "seen" by Google and other search engines.
For that, you need to add hreflang tags to Magento pages. These specify what language or even region you're targeting. So that search engines know who to show your localised products to.
Regardless of the method you choose to localise products in Magento, make sure to check translations on the frontend.
But also remember that products are now the only pages on your store. For the ultimate user experience, you have to translate Magento categories, pages and CMS blocks too.
