hi everyone, i’m stuck with a language problem and wondering if anyone has actually found a solution.
my store was built with English as the default language, but the client only wants Dutch. i used Translate & Adapt to add Dutch and auto-translate with AI — that part worked perfectly, the whole site was in Dutch.
the issue started when i tried to make Dutch the default. when i click on Dutch in the language settings, there’s only “Assign to domain,” no “Change default.” the only place with “Change domain default” is on English.
so i changed default from English → Dutch. shopify warned me all Dutch translations would be deleted, and yep, they were. the store was just English again.
i thought no problem, i exported the Dutch CSV first. but when i imported it back, nothing happened. i even tried editing the CSV — copying Dutch into the Default content column, swapping headers, changing the locale from en to nl — shopify just ignores it.
so it seems like you cannot overwrite the primary language with a CSV at all. only secondary languages can be imported.
that basically means once you change the default, you lose all your AI translations and have to redo them by hand in “Adapt.”
has anyone here found a way around this? like making a secondary language into the new default without losing the translations?
thanks in advance — i feel like i must be missing something obvious, but right now it looks like there’s no way.
