How to translate your theme

Helix reads all of its wording from Shopify, so you translate your store in Shopify admin — never by editing theme files. Shopify's free Translate & Adapt app does the work.

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Languages included with Helix

Helix already comes translated into the languages below, so the theme's own wording — buttons, labels, cart and account messages — shows in your customer's language as soon as you publish it. You only need to translate your own content, such as products, pages, and the text you typed into sections.

Storefront (31 languages): Bulgarian, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Lithuanian, Norwegian Bokmål, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, and Vietnamese.

Theme editor (21 languages): Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian Bokmål, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, and Vietnamese. Section and setting names in the theme editor follow the language of your Shopify admin.

Helix also supports right-to-left languages such as Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian. When a customer views your store in one of them, the layout mirrors itself automatically. These languages aren't included above, so translate the theme wording in Translate & Adapt as described below.

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Step 1 — Set up the translation app

1. Open Shopify Translate & Adapt on the App Store and click Install.

2. In Shopify admin, go to Apps → Translate & Adapt.

The app is free and can auto-translate up to two languages with Google Translate. Beyond that you can add as many translations as you like by typing them in yourself.

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Step 2 — Turn on a second language

1. In Shopify admin, go to Markets.

2. Open the market you sell to, then Languages and domains.

3. Click Add languages and pick your language.

4. Go to Settings → Languages, find it under Unpublished languages, click ··· → Publish, then Save.

An unpublished language stays hidden from customers even when it is fully translated — handy while a translation is still half-finished.

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Step 3 — Work through the translations

1. In Translate & Adapt, choose your language.

2. Open the Theme section and work down the side-by-side editor. Changes save as you go.

3. Repeat for Products, Collections, Pages, Policies, and Navigation — the theme is only part of what a customer reads.

Any field you leave blank falls back to your default language, so you can start with the pages that matter most. Where a field contains HTML or Liquid, translate only the visible words and leave the tags exactly as they are.

Theme translations are stored against the theme they were made in, not the store. If you duplicate Helix or install an update as a separate theme, that copy starts without them — check it before publishing.

To let customers switch language for themselves, add the selector to your header, footer, or mobile menu — see Localization block.

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