Note: Before you enter any products or make any other modifications to your site you will need to research and figure out what character encoding to use and if this encoding will work with all the languages you plan to use.

You can read more about character encoding here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_encoding

If the default store encoding of UTF-8 (used to be ISO-8859-1) does not cover your language or all of the characters that you want to use, you can create new languages with the proper encoding.

To configure multiple languages for your online store:

  • Log in to the admin panel of your online store.
  • Click on Site Content (left-hand menu) > Multiple Languages.  Here you will be able to add a language and assign encoding.

*Note: The Charset of all languages must use the same encoding. Again this is best if done before adding products/categories or content to your store.

Example:

You start out with “English” that works fine with the store default of UTF-8 (previously ISO-8859-1) but you need to use “Russian” as a secondary language.  If “Russian” didn't fully work with UTF-8, you could use the “KOI8-R” encoding which displays “English” just fine.

To remedy this you would simply create a new “English” language called “English” (so you will have 2 called “English”) and “Russian” and set both encodings to “KOI8-R.” Then deactivate the old “English” language. Then you can add products and categories and set up your store.

If you already have products and content on your website:

You must export all products and categories then follow the instructions above. Once language configuration is complete, import everything back in. Unfortunately any content pages or other content outside of the product/categories you exported will need to be redone (content pages cannot be exported at this time).

If you add additional languages (other than English, Spanish and Portuguese) content will not be automatically translated for you; you must provide a translation.

To add translations of additional languages:

  • Click on Site Content (left-hand menu) and click on Multiple Languages.
  • Click "Edit" for the language you wish to add a translation.
 


To translate product information, you will need to edit each product and there will be new fields for each language you've added. The same applies to categories, as well.

Now, you must configure a drop-down menu on your homepage so that your customers can select the language they speak as they view your online store. There are two locations where you can display the language drop-down menu on your website: a sidebar or in the header. To display the language dropdown in a sidebar on your homepage, follow these instructions (if you'd like to display the dropdown in the header, skip to the instructions below):

  • Click on Design (left-hand menu) and click on Sidebar Widgets.​​
  • In the middle of the page, you will see a drop down menu, "Select a Category." Expand the menu, then click on "Dropdown Widgets."
 

 
  • ​Drag and drop "Languages" to the sidebar in which you would like the dropdown menu displayed.

If you don't want to have multiple languages but want to change the *default* from English to another language:

  • Click on Site Content (left-hand menu) tab and click on Edit Words/Phrases and you can translate into your language of choice there. Changes made here will apply to both the admin area and the storefront.
To display the language dropdown menu in the header of your website:

Note: If you want to add the language widget to the header, you will need to modify your header.html and secure.header.html files. As a result, you will need to be familiar with HTML. If you are not familiar with HTML, you can also submit a ticket to have a support tech make this change for you.

  • Log in to the admin panel of your online store.
  • Click on Design (left-hand menu) and click on Edit HTML/CSS.
  • Under the "Edit HTML/CSS" section, select "header.html."
 
 
  • Add ##LANGUAGES## into the code where you want it to appear
  • Publish the file, then make the same changes to secure.header.html.
  • By default, the widget will display just like it does in the sidebar, with a header, and as a drop-down. You will need to use CSS to modify the appearance.
  • Note: If you want to use links or images, you can attach a specific URL to each image/link for each language. You will need to append /cart.php?l=4 to the end of your domain, e.g. http://mystore.com/cart.php?l=4. You will need to use the correct ID (which is 4 in this example), You can see in the URL when you edit a language in the admin, under the Site Content tab, Multiple Languages.