Translation missing error

Shopify Apps

Topic summary

Shopify theme translations show “Translation missing: de…” across multiple elements after changing the store’s default language from English to German, despite using the “Translate & Adapt” app.

Evidence and context:

  • Translation files exist under locales/en.json and locales/de.json. The German file includes the key templates.search.title, yet the storefront shows “Translation missing: de.templates.search.title”.
  • The theme was initially in English; default language switched to German via Settings > Language.

Suspected cause:

  • Multiple Markets may be invoking different German locale variants (e.g., German (Deutschland) vs German (International)), potentially causing a mismatch if the storefront expects a specific locale code (such as de-DE) while translations are stored under de.

Status:

  • No fix reported yet; issue remains open. The key question is whether Markets’ locale variants must match the translation file’s locale and how to align them to stop the missing translation errors.
Summarized with AI on December 22. AI used: gpt-5.
1

We have a problem with the translations in our Shopify store. Our theme was originally set to English, but was changed to German as the default language in the Shopify settings under “Language”. We have also installed the “Translate & Adapt” app.

The translation file is correctly located in the Shopify code under locales/en.json and contains all the necessary translations. Nevertheless, the error message “Translation missing: de. …” is displayed in many elements of our store. An example of this is “Translation missing: de.templates.search.title”, although the corresponding key templates.search.title is present and correctly formatted in the de.json.

We suspect that the problem may be related to the use of multiple markets that could use different German language versions (e.g. German (Deutschland) and German (International)). We have already seen this several times.