How catalog translation works
Translating a catalog is not translating a website. A website has fifty pages. A catalog has 40,000 products with eight text fields each, half of which change every quarter. The difference is not size — it is that catalog translation never ends, so it has to be a process rather than a project.
The scenario
Your Austrian subsidiary sells to a Polish buyer. The buyer opens your shop, switches to Polish, and sees: a Polish navigation, Polish category names, German product names, and an English description that was machine-translated eighteen months ago from a German source that has since been rewritten.
Every one of those four states is a separate mechanism, and this article is about all four.
What is localizable and what is not
An attribute marked localizable holds one value per language. One that is not holds a single value used everywhere. The distinction is set on the attribute in the catalog, and it is the decision the whole translation workload rests on.
| Localizable | Not localizable |
|---|---|
name, short_description, description | sku, ean, manufacturer_part_number |
application_notes, marketing_claim | weight, length, pressure_rating |
| Option labels — Stainless steel V4A | Option codes — v4a |
| Category and family labels | Category and family codes |
| Asset titles and alt text | The asset file itself |
The test: would a translator change this value? If yes, localizable. If it is a number, a code, an SKU or a date — not.
Two consequences people miss:
- Option labels are where most of the value is. A select attribute with
twelve options translated once serves every product that uses it. Translating
materialandsurface_finishlabels costs an hour and localises the facet panel of the entire catalog. - Measurements do not need translating; they need converting.
10 baris10 barin every language. A market that uses psi needs a unit conversion, which is a measurement family question, not a translation one.
Fallback chains
No catalog is ever fully translated. The question is what a buyer sees when a value is missing, and the answer is a fallback chain: an ordered list of languages to try.
de-AT → de-DE → de → (empty)
fr-CH → fr-FR → en → (empty)
Regional variants fall back to their base language first — an Austrian buyer should see the German text, not the English one. Languages with no relation fall back to whichever language your organisation treats as the source, usually German or English.
Where the chain ends is a policy decision with two honest options:
| End of chain | Effect | Right when |
|---|---|---|
| Source language | The buyer sees German text on a French page | Technical catalogs; a German name is more use than a blank |
| Empty | The field is absent; completeness marks the product incomplete | Marketing-led catalogs, or where mixed language damages the brand |
Most B2B catalogs choose the source language for name and empty for
description. A German product name in a French listing is recognisable. Three
paragraphs of German marketing prose in a French product page is not.
What to translate first
The order is not obvious and it decides how quickly a new market becomes usable.
- Category and family labels. A few hundred strings. Without them the navigation is in the wrong language and the shop looks untranslated regardless of what else you do.
- Option labels. Also a few hundred, and they localise the entire facet panel — see Facets and filters. Highest value per string in the whole catalog.
- Product names. Thousands, but short. Names are what buyers scan in a result list and what search matches against. A market with translated names and untranslated descriptions works. The reverse does not.
- Short descriptions. The listing-page line.
- Long descriptions. Last, and only for the products that justify it.
- Application notes, marketing text. Only for your top articles.
The rule underneath: translate what is short, structured and reused before you translate what is long, unique and rarely read. Nobody reads paragraph three of a description for a hexagon screw in any language.
Cut the scope further by product, not just by field. Your top 500 articles by revenue usually cover most orders. Translate those fully; translate the tail's names and option labels only.
Machine draft, human review
Machine translation is good enough to be the first draft of a catalog and not good enough to be the last. It gets prose right and technical vocabulary wrong, in exactly the places where being wrong is expensive: it will translate a norm designation, invent a material name, and cheerfully convert a thread size.
The workflow that works:
source value changed
↓
machine draft generated → state: machine
↓
reviewer edits or approves → state: reviewed
↓
source changes again → state: needs review
Three states, and every value in every language is in exactly one of them —
plus untranslated for the ones nothing has touched. That state is what makes
the work visible and assignable; see
Translation quality.
Never publish machine-only text for the fields buyers make decisions on. Names, safety notes, and anything with a norm or a dimension in it get human eyes. Long descriptions on tail articles can ship as machine drafts, clearly tracked, and be reviewed when someone has time — but that is a decision you take deliberately, not one you discover later.
Give the machine a glossary before it starts: your product names, brand
names, norm designations and material codes, marked as do-not-translate or with
a fixed target term. Without it, V4A becomes something different in every
paragraph. With it, machine drafts need a fraction of the correction.
How this works in the Revenue Cloud
- Languages belong to markets. A market carries its locales, currencies and
tax classes; a locale is a language and a country —
de-AT,fr-CH. Set up in Configuration › Markets. See Add a language. - Localizable is an attribute flag, set in PIM › Data model › Attributes.
- Completeness is calculated per locale, so "how ready is the French catalog" is a question you can actually answer — see Channels, locales and completeness.
- Search is per locale. Each language has its own index and its own synonyms, which is why an untranslated catalog shows up first as a terrible zero-result rate in that market.
Next
- Add a language — the setup, once.
- Translate the catalog — the daily work.
- Go multi-country — the whole path, of which this is one part.