I’m facing an issue with my Shopify store after translating it into Arabic. I have a product page that includes a PDF link (Google Drive embed/viewer link). However, after applying Arabic translation, the link appears broken or incorrectly displayed — it shows as garbled text or the link doesn’t render properly.
The link I’m using is: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eM54OqhBgW_T5xPp2WT4MiWktm3n8yr5/view
It works fine in the default language, but after switching to Arabic, the link seems to be affected by the RTL (right-to-left) formatting or translation app.
Has anyone else experienced this issue? How can I ensure that the PDF link remains intact and clickable after translation?
Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
This is a known issue with RTL languages. URLs are inherently left-to-right, so when your page switches to Arabic (right-to-left), the browser tries to render the URL in RTL direction and it breaks.
If you want to keep the Google Drive link, the fix is to force LTR direction on the link element. In your product description, switch to HTML mode (click the <> button) and wrap the link like this:
The dir="ltr" tells the browser to render that link left-to-right regardless of the page direction.
Also check your translation app settings. Some translation apps try to “translate” URLs and break them in the process. Make sure the Google Drive link is excluded from translation.
Another approach worth considering: instead of embedding a Google Drive link that can break with RTL, you could upload the PDF directly as a digital product using a delivery app like Big Digital Downloads (full transparency, I work with the team). The customer buys the product and gets a clean download link automatically, no Google Drive dependency, no RTL rendering issues with URLs. It just works regardless of language direction.
First of all, thank you so much for your help earlier — the PDF link is now working perfectly! I really appreciate your time and support
I have one more small issue I was hoping you could assist me with:
On the product page, the text for the PDF download button/label is showing the wrong language depending on the store language:
When the store is set to Arabic, the text appears in English
When the store is set to English, the text appears in Arabic
So it seems like the languages are reversed or swapped. I want it to show:
Arabic when the store is in Arabic
English when the store is in English
Could you please guide me on how to fix this? Is this a translation mapping issue, or do I need to adjust something in the theme code or translation app settings?
And this issue sounds like the translations got swapped in your translation app. The Arabic text was mapped to the English field and the English text was mapped to the Arabic field.
To fix it:
Go to Apps → Translate & Adapt (or whatever translation app you’re using)
Search for the product page that has the PDF download button
Find the button/label text and check what’s in each language field
You’ll probably see the Arabic text sitting in the English translation and the English text sitting in the Arabic translation. Just swap them
If the button text is coming from your theme (not a product field), go to Translate & Adapt → Themes and look for the label there instead. Same idea, just swap the values.
After saving, do a hard refresh on your store to clear the cache and check both language versions
