There are two stores for the same brand: one in the UK, and one in the US. For certain words, ‘translations’ are needs (e.g. ‘colour’ vs. ‘color’, ‘tyre’ vs. ‘tire’). I’m using a custom theme.
Originally I launched the UK site with one translation file, en.default.json, and it was all fine. But now the US are ready to launch, so I duplicated the locale file, renamed them both to en-GB.json and en-US.json respectively, and uploaded.
I sort-of expected this to simply work, but it absolutely did not. On the UK store, every translatable string displayed up as Translation missing.
I checked the site settings, and while the store location and markets are set as United Kingdom, the Settings -> Languages setting was simply English (default). I had the option to select British English or American English, so I selected British English, and it displayed the following:
Checkout and System> British English translations are not available for the cart, checkout, search, cookie banner, gift card, password, 404, or customer account>
Theme> British English translations will be made to your current theme and themes in your theme library
When I hit Save… nothing happened. It didn’t change the language. Hit refresh, tried again. Nothing. Tried American English instead - same thing.
I don’t entirely understand the warning either: the cart, search, gift card, password, 404 and customer account bits are all within my custom theme, and they all have translations. The only bit I can’t touch is the checkout, which is fine.
If it’s an issue that Shopify doesn’t allow simply because it won’t translate the checkout then
a) Why does the documentation specifically state these naming conventions for translation files; and
**b)**Why does it give me the option to Save the language as British English, only for it to not save at all?
(Also: hopefully a temporary Shopify bug, but I changed the language to German just to test and that worked fine. Now I can’t even change it back the the default English - every time I try I get Server Error ?)