Multilingual Shopify landing pages: translated or written?

Disclosure: we build Menaks, one of the tools discussed here. Every statement below about another vendor is quoted from that vendor's own documentation or listing, with the link beside it, read September 17, 2026.

Translating a page and writing one are two different jobs

Translation starts from finished sentences and carries their meaning into another language. Writing starts from the product and the buyer, and produces the sentences that language would have produced on its own. In a browser the two look alike. A translated headline still carries the rhythm, the objection order and the offer conventions of the language it was born in.

On a landing page that difference lands where it costs money. Headlines, price framing, guarantee wording, the line above the button: these are the parts a shopper actually reads. They are also the parts that survive translation least well, because they lean on idiom and on what buyers in that market expect to be told.

What each page builder documents about languages

Shopify page builders are split on languages, and the split is not between good and bad. Two of the large ones do no translation at all and hand you to a separate translation app. Two have built translation in. None of them describes producing the copy in the target language in the first place. The documented verb is always "translate".

• GemPages — "GemPages itself does not perform translations. Instead, it displays the translated content provided by Shopify or the installed translation app." Its guide lists Translate & Adapt, Transcy, T Lab, Langwill and Weglot as the routes. help.gempages.net
• Replo — its support article hands translation to Shopify Markets with the free Translate & Adapt app, or to third-party apps, naming Weglot, Langify and T Lab; it describes no translator of its own. support.replo.app
• PageFly — has its own AI Translator: "Translate your page content into any language with one click — and localize per Shopify market on higher plans." The help centre adds the conditions: it spends plan-based AI credits, and Market Content "is not available on Free, Pay-as-you-go or Builder" and covers only "stores that installed PageFly from 2025 onwards". pagefly.io · help.pagefly.io
• EComposer — ships an Auto-translate button that runs content through Google Translate or AI, editable afterwards. Its conditions: the page must be created after the feature shipped, published first, and each language must already exist in Shopify. help.ecomposer.io
• Shogun — works with Translate & Adapt "with a few small caveats", and warns that the tool cannot tell content from code and "will change everything it sees fit and may break your page". getshogun.com

So "can this builder do multiple languages?" is the wrong question. The answer is often yes. What separates them is how: a translation engine pointed at a finished English page, or copy produced in that language to begin with.

Shopify's free translation stops at two languages

Shopify's own answer is the free Translate & Adapt app, which covers 21 languages. Its help page carries the sentence that decides most of these projects: "You can automatically translate a maximum of 2 languages." If you want nine, that is seven languages entered by hand, or a paid app. help.shopify.com, Translate & Adapt

The same page lists what the app does not reach, and one item matters for page builders specifically: "third-party app content that isn't hosted as a Shopify translatable resource type". Collection filters, product images and tags sit outside it too.

Your plan sets a separate ceiling: up to 20 languages on Basic, Grow, Shopify and Advanced, and up to 30 on Plus and Enterprise Commerce. The same page is blunt about who does the work: "You must provide the translated content yourself, or use a translator." Shopify hosts languages. It does not write them. help.shopify.com, languages

What nine languages costs once you add a translation app

Nine languages means eight translation languages on top of your source. Translation apps price by that count. Weglot's Pro tier covers five, so eight lands on Advanced at approximately $329 a month, with Weglot noting its USD figures are estimates of EUR prices. Langwill's Growth plan covers 20 languages for $19.99 a month, as listed on September 17, 2026. Both sit on top of the builder fee. apps.shopify.com/weglot · apps.shopify.com, Langwill

Stacked up, as listed on September 17, 2026: PageFly Builder at $24 plus Weglot Advanced is about $353 a month; the same plan with Langwill Growth is about $44; GemPages Build at $29 plus Langwill is about $49. EComposer is the cheap end, because its Standard plan at $25 includes the built-in translator. The free plan does not. ecomposer.io/pages/pricing

Quoting only the $353 figure would be a selective use of the same evidence, so both ends are above. What does not vary is the shape: two vendors, two bills, and a second workflow where every copy change goes through the translation layer again before it reaches eight of your nine markets.

The free translation tier search engines never see

"There are free translation apps" is a fair objection with a specific answer. GTranslate's free plan covers every language with unlimited words through machine translation. Its Shopify listing also states that those pages are not indexed by search engines. Indexing arrives on the paid tiers: $12 a month for one extra language, $25 a month for all of them with editing, as listed on September 17, 2026. apps.shopify.com, GTranslate

If the traffic comes from a paid campaign, an unindexed page is fine. If the point is organic search in those markets, the free tier is not a smaller version of the paid one. It is a different product.

This is not an SEO penalty argument

Much of the writing about machine translation and Shopify SEO claims that translated pages get penalized. That claim is out of date. In June 2025 Google removed the section of its multilingual documentation about using robots.txt to block automatically translated pages, and called the edit "a docs-only change, no change in behavior". developers.google.com, search updates

What remains in the spam policies is about value, not method. Translation appears only inside scaled content abuse: many pages made "through automated transformations like synonymizing, translating, or other obfuscation techniques, where little value is provided to users". Google's line on AI-produced text applies the same test: whether content is helpful, "rather than how the content was produced". developers.google.com, spam policies · Google Search and AI content

So do not pick between translating and writing to avoid a penalty. The reason to care is narrower: which one produces a page a buyer in that market reads without friction.

Where the page lives decides what Shopify does for you

If your store uses Shopify Markets, part of the multilingual plumbing is already handled: "Hreflang tags and meta tags are automatically created for every international domain or subfolder that you set up", and "your sitemaps also include all published languages". A page that exists in your theme as an ordinary template sits inside that, like your product and collection templates. help.shopify.com, hreflang tags

That is a statement about the page's address, not a ranking claim, and not a point against anyone else. We found no evidence that any builder above hosts pages outside the store.

How to tell which one you have: a five-minute test

You can settle this on a page you already own, without asking a vendor. The goal is to find out whether the target-language text is a stored translation of an English string or content in its own right. Four checks, in order of how fast they answer.

1. Look for the source page. In Shopify admin open Settings then Languages, or your translation app's editor, and search for a phrase from the page. If the target language appears beside an English original in a translation pane, you have a translation layer, however well it reads.
2. Edit the target language directly. Change one word in the German headline and publish. If it survives the next translation run, the German is content. If it is overwritten, or you are told to edit the English and re-translate, the German is output.
3. Read the offer lines to a native speaker. Not the whole page: the headline, the line above the button, the guarantee, the shipping promise. One question: would a store in this market phrase it this way? Translated copy often comes back correct and generic at the same time. That is a judgement about tone, not something we have measured.
4. Check the parts the engine does not own. Button microcopy, badge labels, form field names, unit labels beside a timer: anything printed by a theme section rather than by your copy. Mixed-language furniture around translated body text is the clearest sign the language was applied on top.

The answer also tells you what maintenance costs: a page whose second language is an output gets re-translated every time the offer changes; one whose second language is content gets re-written. Neither is free.

Where Menaks sits, and what it cannot do

Menaks generates the copy directly in nine languages: English, Spanish for Latin America, German, French, Portuguese for Brazil, Italian, Dutch, Turkish and Polish. The target language is enforced in the generation prompt rather than applied afterwards. The page is written into your active theme as an ordinary Online Store 2.0 template, so you edit it in the theme editor. No translation app, no second bill.

Here is the other side of the same design, worth weighing before taking any of this as a recommendation.

• Nine languages is the ceiling, and right-to-left is outside it. Arabic and Hebrew are not supported, and neither are Chinese and Swedish. If your markets need any of those, this is the wrong tool.
• The app's own interface is English and Turkish only. The language of the page it writes and the language of the admin screen you work in are two different things, and we speak two on that screen.
• It leaves files in your theme. Menaks uploads 37 section files and 33 stylesheet and script assets into your theme, and they stay after you uninstall. Shopify revokes the app's API access at that moment, so removing them is manual. More on that trade-off in what happens when you uninstall a page builder.
• Theme updates are your work. Shopify counts "automated code changes that an app which you installed on your store has made to your theme files on your behalf" among the changes that may not carry into a new theme version. Menaks is exactly that category. help.shopify.com, updating themes
• Nobody has measured that writing beats translating. We looked for a controlled test comparing copy written in a language against the same page machine-translated, on rankings or conversion. There isn't one, ours included. The argument here is a judgement about copy, presented as one.

That last point is the honest end of the piece. The documented facts here are the two-language limit, the second subscription and what each vendor says it does. The claim that written copy beats translated copy is the part to test on your own store rather than take from a vendor, ours included. The same scrutiny applied to urgency and review features is covered separately.