Goal: Move the translations of your current Shopify theme to a new theme. Shopify stores theme translations on the theme itself, so when you publish a different theme, its storefront text shows without your translations. You can export the translations, point the file at the new theme, and import it again.

This article is about theme translations only (the ONLINE_STORE_THEME type). Translations of products, collections, pages, and other store content are not stored on the theme, so they stay when you switch themes.

Prerequisites:

In Altera, click New export and select Translations. Click Add filter, select Data type, and select Online Store Theme. Click Start export.

Without a Theme ID filter, the export contains the translations of your published theme. Do this step before you publish the new theme.

If you already switched themes, you can still get the translations of the old theme. Add a Theme ID filter with the ID of the old theme (see Step 3 for how to find a theme ID). This filter also works for unpublished themes.

The export contains only base translations. If you use market adaptations, run one more export with a Markets / Adaptations filter (see Markets / Adaptations filter).

When the export is complete, click Download output. Keep an unchanged copy of the file as a backup of your translations.

In your Shopify admin, go to Online Store > Themes. Click Customize on a theme. The theme ID is the number after /themes/ in the URL of the theme editor (for example, admin.shopify.com/store/your-store/themes/123456789012/editor).

Write down the ID of the old theme and the ID of the new theme. The old theme ID is also in the Identification column of the exported file.

In Online Store > Themes, publish the new theme.

Open the exported file. In the ID, Identification, and Parent ID columns, replace the old theme ID with the new theme ID. Use the find and replace function of your spreadsheet program and select only these three columns, so that the default and translated content do not change.

Change the ID column too, not only Identification. Altera uses the ID column first, so if it still contains the old theme ID, the import updates the old theme.

Delete the rows where the Translated content column is empty. When a row has an empty Translated content cell, the import deletes that translation. The new theme can have translations of its own (for example, the translations that come with the theme), and these rows would remove them.

In Altera, click New import and upload the file. Review the file analysis, then click Start import.

When the import is complete, look at the warnings and messages in the results:

The translations of your old theme are now on the new theme, for each field that both themes have. You can check them in the Shopify Translate & Adapt app or on your storefront in each language.

A translation moves to the new theme only when the new theme has a field with the same key (the Field column). How many rows match depends on how similar the two themes are:

Altera does not match rows by their default content, so a row with a key that the new theme does not have is skipped, even if the new theme has the same text.

These rows move two translations from theme 123456789012 to theme 987654321098. Only the ID, Identification, and Parent ID columns change.