Running Traditional and Simplified Chinese on one Shopify store

What changed

Shopify released the Translate and Adapt app on 14th September 2022, a native translation layer that sits on top of Shopify Markets. The supported language list carries both Chinese scripts: Simplified Chinese, which Shopify has offered since 2019, and Traditional Chinese alongside it. A single market can now serve both, each on its own locale path (zh-Hans and zh-Hant), from one store and one product catalogue.

For merchants in Hong Kong, this is the setup that matters. The city reads Traditional Chinese, a large part of its customer base also searches in Simplified Chinese, and English remains the language of a significant share of premium buyers. All three can now run natively on one Shopify instance.

Why this beats the old workarounds

Until now, serving both Chinese scripts meant third-party translation apps or separate stores. Both created the same underlying problem: the translated pages lived outside Shopify’s own understanding of the store’s structure, so hreflang annotations and canonical tags had to be constructed and maintained by hand or by an app, and they broke quietly whenever the catalogue changed.

When the languages are configured natively through Shopify Markets, the platform generates the hreflang annotations and canonicals itself, correctly, for every page, from the day the language goes live. There is nothing to retrofit and nothing to drift out of date. For search engines deciding which language version to show a Hong Kong buyer, that consistency is the whole game.

The order of work matters

Translation comes last. The store’s architecture, collection structure and copy need to be settled in the primary language before any translation begins, because translating a moving target means every correction has to be made three times, once per language.

Once the English store is stable, the remaining work is short. Add the languages to the market in Shopify admin, run Translate and Adapt’s automatic translation as the first pass, then review by hand. Product names, brand terms, and anything with commercial search value deserve human attention: automatic translation is a starting point for those, never the finish.

What to review by hand, in order

1. Brand vocabulary: product line names, materials and any term the brand deliberately does not translate, checked against a banned-and-preferred terms list agreed before the review starts.
2. Commercial page titles and meta descriptions, because machine translation optimises for meaning while search optimises for the words buyers type, and the two diverge constantly in Chinese.
3. Collection and product names, where a literal rendering can read as a different product category to a native reader.
4. Sizing, measurements and policy wording, since a mistranslated returns clause is a customer service incident waiting in a locale nobody on the team reads daily.
5. The checkout and transactional strings, read end to end in each script by someone who shops in it.

The review is where the two scripts earn separate treatment. Traditional and Simplified are separate languages with their own vocabulary, phrasing and search behaviour, not two encodings of one text, so the two reviews are two pieces of work, ideally by two readers, and a Simplified review signed off by a Traditional reader is a review that has not happened.

Details that repay attention

Internal links should use relative paths. An absolute URL written into a template or a blog post pulls a Chinese-language reader back into the English store, while a relative path keeps every locale self-contained.

Watch the coverage gaps auto-translation leaves: content added after the first pass, app-injected text and some template strings sit outside what the app translated on day one, and each new product or page needs its translations confirmed as part of publishing rather than discovered missing by a customer.

And measure each locale on its own terms once live. Impressions and rankings for the zh-Hant and zh-Hans paths build separately in Search Console, and the early reading to watch is whether Google serves the right script to the right market, which is the hreflang doing its work.