Shopify's Translate & Adapt can now re-translate your French copy on its own when the English source changes. Automatic translation updates switched on for merchants in the US and Canada on 27 October, which lands about three weeks before most stores start rewriting product descriptions for Black Friday. If you sell into Quebec, that timing matters more than it does anywhere else: a stale French page isn't a tidiness problem, it's a compliance exposure under Bill 96.
The short version. Content the app machine-translated will refresh when you edit the source. Content you hand-edited is yours, and the app treats it as such, so a manual override will sit there unchanged while the English above it moves on. That is the correct behaviour and also the thing that will bite you in November.
Why your French product descriptions went out of date in the first place
Before auto-sync, the flow was: edit the English description, the French translation stays exactly as it was, and the app marks it outdated in the admin. The marker is easy to miss. Nobody opens Translate & Adapt on a Tuesday to check for yellow flags. So the French storefront drifted, usually fastest on the products that mattered most, because the bestsellers are the ones whose copy gets rewritten for every campaign.
We've seen stores where the English page said "now with a 3-year warranty" and the French page still promised two. That's not a translation bug. That's a different offer in two languages on the same domain, and in Quebec it's the kind of thing a complaint to the Office québécois de la langue française is built on.
How to turn on auto-sync for translations in Shopify
It's in the app, not in theme settings. Open Translate & Adapt from your apps list, pick the published language, and look for the automatic translation settings. You're enabling two things in practice: new content gets translated when it's created, and existing machine translations get refreshed when the source string changes.
Three things to do before you switch it on across the catalogue:
- Test on one product. Edit the English description, wait, and confirm the French updated and that nothing you'd previously corrected got overwritten. Do this on a real product in a quiet collection, not a draft, because draft behaviour isn't always the same.
- Export your current French translations first. Translate & Adapt supports CSV export. Ten minutes of work and you have a rollback.
- Decide which fields you do not want touched automatically, and hand-edit those so they're locked as manual. Legal text, ingredient claims, warranty terms, sizing guidance.
On the language limit: free automatic translation covers a small number of languages on standard plans, with a higher allowance on Shopify Plus, and a store can publish a larger set of languages in total using manual or third-party translations. Confirm the current numbers in your admin rather than trusting a blog post, Shopify's included quotas have moved more than once. For an English plus Quebec French store you're comfortably inside the free tier either way, and that's the common case in Canada.
What Bill 96 actually asks of a Shopify storefront
We're not lawyers and you should get an opinion from someone who is, particularly if you sell regulated goods. But the operational shape of it is clear enough from how merchants are being asked to comply.
French has to be available on terms at least as good as English. Not a token homepage translation with English product pages behind it. If a buyer in Montreal can read your returns policy in English, they must be able to read the same policy, saying the same thing, in French. Commercial publications aimed at Quebec, which includes your website and your product catalogue, fall in scope. Contracts of adhesion, and your terms of sale are one, are expected to be presented in French.
Two consequences that change how you run the store:
- A French page that contradicts the English one is worse than no French page, because it's evidence that the French version is an afterthought.
- Enforcement usually starts with a complaint. Which means a competitor, or one annoyed customer, decides when you get audited. You don't.
Auto-sync closes the drift gap. It does not make machine output compliant on its own, because the places Bill 96 cares about most are exactly the places a translation engine is least reliable.
Where machine translation is fine and where you need a manual override
Fine, in our experience: plain descriptive product copy. Dimensions, materials, care instructions, what's in the box. Collection descriptions. Blog posts where the stakes are low. Navigation labels, once someone has checked them.
Not fine without a human pass:
- Anything with a legal consequence. Warranty, returns window, subscription cancellation terms, age restrictions.
- Claims. "Cliniquement testé" means something specific. So does "biologique". Health, cosmetic and food claims translate into a different regulatory vocabulary in Quebec, not just a different language.
- Brand voice and campaign copy. Machine French reads like a manual. Your Boxing Day banner shouldn't.
- Anglicisms. Standard French tolerates words that Quebec French does not. "Magasinage" rather than "shopping", "courriel" rather than "email". Add French (Canada) as the language rather than generic French, and it helps, but it isn't a guarantee.
The practical system: let auto-sync handle the long tail, hand-edit the top sellers and every piece of legal text, and treat a hand-edited string as a permanent commitment. Once it's manual, your French copy for that field will never update itself again. Keep a list. A shared sheet with product handle, field and who owns it is enough, and we've not found a tool that beats it.
Checkout, policies and notification emails in French Canadian
Shopify ships its own French for the checkout interface, so buttons, field labels and error messages arrive translated when the buyer's language is French. What isn't handled for you:
Your policies. Refund, shipping, privacy, terms. These sit in the Policies section of Translate & Adapt. Machine-translate them to get a draft, then have a francophone reviewer go through them line by line. This is the single highest-risk block of text on a Quebec-facing store and the one most often left as raw engine output.
Email and SMS notifications. Order confirmation, shipping confirmation, refund notice, abandoned checkout. These are translated separately from theme content and they're the usual gap. A customer buys in French, gets a French thank-you page, then receives an order confirmation in English. Check all of them, including the ones you never think about, like the account invite.
Custom checkout fields and app content. Anything injected by an app, delivery date pickers, gift message fields, loyalty widgets, carries its own strings. Some apps expose them to Translate & Adapt. Many hardcode English. Audit this with the French storefront open and a buyer's eye, not from the admin.
Shipping copy. Canada Post disruptions have forced plenty of merchants onto Purolator, UPS or a regional carrier at short notice. When you change the carrier promise on the English shipping page, the French page has to change in the same hour. Make it one task in your runbook, not two.
One tax note while you're in there: QST registration and collection is a separate matter from language, but your French tax line and your English one should describe the same thing. GST 5% plus QST 9.975% on a Quebec order, and the French page shouldn't say otherwise.
URL and domain structure for a bilingual Canadian store
Run one store, one domain, French on a subfolder. For most Canadian merchants that means yourbrand.ca with the French market serving at /fr or /fr-ca. Shopify generates the hreflang tags for published languages automatically, which is the bit people underestimate, and link equity stays on a single domain instead of being split across two.
The alternatives and why we usually argue against them:
- A separate French store. Double the theme maintenance, double the app bills, two inventory sources of truth. We've migrated several merchants off this setup and nobody has asked to go back.
- A fr. subdomain. Works, Shopify supports it through Markets, but you're managing an extra domain for no SEO upside over a subfolder.
- Auto-redirecting by IP. Don't. Offer the language switch, remember the choice, and let a Toronto buyer who prefers French stay in French. Shopify's language recommendation banner does this without hijacking anyone.
If you're also selling into the US from the same store, keep the language question and the market question separate in your head. US pricing, duties and de minimis handling belong in Markets. French belongs in Translate & Adapt. Mixing them produces a configuration nobody on your team can explain six months later.
The arithmetic of a Black Friday copy refresh
Say you carry 600 SKUs and you rewrite the English description on 40% of them for the campaign. That's 240 products.
Without auto-sync: re-translate each one, then read it. Call it 4 minutes per product including the admin clicks. 240 × 4 = 960 minutes, or 16 hours. At a freelance French reviewer rate of CA$45/hour, roughly CA$720, assuming nothing goes wrong and the person is available in the third week of November.
With auto-sync: the re-translation step disappears and you're only reviewing. Straightforward descriptive copy takes about 90 seconds to scan. 240 × 1.5 = 360 minutes, 6 hours, around CA$270. You still spend the full four minutes on the 20 or 30 products with claims or warranty text in them, so add an hour back.
Net saving of roughly nine hours and CA$400 per campaign cycle. Modest. The real value is that the French storefront can't silently fall behind while you're busy, which is what actually happens between Black Friday and Boxing Day.
QA checklist for a French storefront before you publish
Run this on a real device, in French, as a buyer. Not in the admin.
- Homepage, one collection, one product, cart, checkout, thank-you page. Any English string in that path is a finding.
- Variant option names and values. "Colour / Red" surviving in English is the most common miss we see, because people forget option values are translatable at all.
- Metafields and metaobjects. Size charts, ingredient tables, spec blocks. These need translating individually and auto-sync only covers what it was given.
- Theme app blocks and hardcoded section strings. Review widgets, trust badges, countdown timers.
- Search and filter labels. If filters come from an app, confirm it reads the French locale.
- All four or five transactional emails, triggered for real with a test order.
- Policies, read end to end by someone who speaks Quebec French. Every time they change.
- 404 page, password page, and the account pages. Forgotten, always.
- View source on a French product page and confirm hreflang and the French meta description are present. Translated meta titles and descriptions are a separate field in the app and they're frequently left blank.
- Currency and tax display. CAD, and the tax lines reading correctly in French.
Ten items, maybe 90 minutes the first time. We budget it as a recurring task before each major campaign rather than a one-off at launch, because the storefront that passed in August will have grown three new app blocks by November.
One thing to do this week
Open Translate & Adapt, filter for outdated translations, and see how many you have. If the number is small, turn auto-sync on, lock your legal copy as manual edits, and get on with the campaign. If it's in the hundreds, you have a backlog to clear before automation helps, and clearing it is a better use of a developer week than anything else on your list before Black Friday.
If you'd rather someone else ran the audit, our free store audit covers the French storefront paths alongside speed and checkout, and the Canada team has done this on bilingual stores with catalogues large enough that the manual route was never realistic. Either way, do the test product first. Trust the automation after you've watched it work, not before.