Just as preface for the article, a short story out of my life as Shopware developer:
My personal experience
Once upon a time, one of my clients asked me to implement Weglot translate on a self-hosted Shopware instance. And to make it short: Just don’t do it. Weglot might be good for standard solutions they are partnering with like Shopify or WordPress but not for a self-hosted Shopware.
The tech stack I found under the Weglot translation system required to reroute all HTTP requests to their server so that their server delivers the translated response to the visitor. Unfortunately, they don’t forward all HTTP headers required for a slightly more sophisticated setup. When I remember correctly, it was the HTTP_HOST and SERVER_NAME server variable which came erroneous when you use subdomains as language prefixes.
And besides that they charge monthly for per translated word. So you even don’t own the translation of your content.
The DeepL API
So we did a step back in the internationalization process and after some research we found out about DeepL. A German company which is specialized in automated translations. They have an API and yes, they are better than Google Translate. Here a comparison chart.
Biloba IT Auto Translation Pro
So after some more digging and diving, we came to the Biloba Auto Translate Pro plugin series, which I still I would recommend. These plugins translate all different content types, and snippets automatically on your server using either the DeepL or the Google Translate API. These plugins are not the cheapest, but cheap can become expensive very fast. And yes, you have to pay the DeepL API separately, but it will be still cheaper than a human translator.
The Biloba Auto Translation Pro Suite enters into the smallest parts of Shopware and translates it automatically via DeepL. Here is a short list of some features of the different App of the Suite:
- Auto Translation Pro Bulk App, with this app several articles can be translated at once at the touch of a button.
- Auto Translation Pro language pack, this app adds more languages to the translation apps.
- Auto Translation Pro Lexicon App, with this plugin you can write some words into the translations yourself. Simply enter your words, add the corresponding translations and retrieve them with every translation!
- Auto Translation Pro More Areas App, this app extends the translation of the Translation Pro main app to include the areas of properties, categories, manufacturers, dynamic product groups, text snippets and email templates.
- Auto Translation Pro More Areas Bulk App, with this plugin the translation of the Auto Translation Pro Bulk App by the areas of properties, categories, manufacturers, email templates, dynamic product groups and text modules.
In total the complete package may cost a bit more than 1100 Euro/year, but depending on the functionalities you need you can discard some modules.
In my opinion, this is the best solution for a high performing shop which needs to scale well internationally.
