Is your catalog actually translated,
or just partially?

The hidden debt

Shopify Markets makes it possible to sell in multiple locales. It does not make it easy to know how complete your translations actually are. Most merchants who use Markets have a story that goes like this: they exported translations to a CSV, sent it to a translator or a CSV tool, imported it back, and moved on. A year later, they have added 200 new products. None of them have been translated. Their fr-FR coverage is 70% and falling.

This is a common pattern because Shopify admin does not surface translation completeness per-product in an actionable way. There is no dashboard that says "you have 340 products in French and 410 in English." The gap accumulates silently.

The problem compounds when merchants use automated translation tools. Many CSV-based translation workflows do a first pass on titles and descriptions but skip metafields entirely. A French-language agent querying for material, gender, or audience attributes hits empty fields — and the product is effectively invisible for any filtered query, even if the product title is correctly translated.

What Legible checks

For each locale you have enabled in Shopify Markets, Legible answers one question for every product: does a translation exist for the product title and description in this locale, or does it fall back to your default locale?

• Title coverage — how many products have a translated title in each target locale versus falling back to the default locale
• Description coverage — how many products have a translated description in each target locale versus falling back to the default locale

The output is a per-locale report with an overall coverage percentage so you can see at a glance that your fr-FR titles are 92% complete and act accordingly. Deeper translation-quality checks — per-locale metafield translation coverage and placeholder detection (untranslated strings that match the default locale) — are on the v2 roadmap.

Sample output

The description gap is typically the most surprising finding for merchants. Many believe their translations are near-complete until they see how many products still fall back to the default locale for body text. Closing that gap requires either manual translation or a translation tool that covers your full catalog — not all do.

Why this matters for AI agents

An AI shopping agent operating in the German market reads de-DE product data. When a German-language query arrives — "wasserdichte Wanderschuhe, breite Passform, unter 180 Euro" — the agent pulls German product records from connected stores. A store that is 22% translated in German is effectively invisible for 78% of its catalog to that agent, regardless of how good the English copy is.

Agents do not silently fall back to English when the target locale is missing. Some do attempt a fallback, but they penalize the fallback products in their ranking — a translated product at 70% relevance beats an untranslated one at 90% English relevance, because the agent is penalizing for locale mismatch. Getting your de-DE coverage from 22% to 80% is not a branding exercise; it is a catalog distribution decision.