Translation Overrides
Override any storefront, seller dashboard, or transactional email string per language. Customize wording for your brand voice, your industry, or a specific market — without touching code.
Why translation overrides?
Prometora ships with a default set of strings in six languages (English, Danish, French, Dutch, Romanian, Japanese). The defaults work for most marketplaces — but sometimes you need:
- Brand voice — rename “Vendor” to “Maker” or “Artisan”, change “Buy now” to “Reserve”
- Industry vocabulary — rentals call it a “reservation”, services call it an “appointment”, a marketplace might call orders “requests”
- Native review of machine translations — the non-English defaults are machine-translated. Replace them as a native reviewer revises them
- Regional terms — same language, different wording for different markets
What the panel looks like
A simplified view of the layout — pick a language, browse by surface bucket on the left, edit the override on the right.
wishlist.signInToSaveOverriddenSimplified illustration. The real panel sits inside Store Settings → Translations and shows full pagination, additional filters, and a CSV preview-and-apply flow.
How it works
Pick the language to edit
Open Store Settings → Translations. The picker at the top defaults to your store's primary language. You can switch to any of the six supported languages even if you haven't enabled it yet for visitors — your edits sit dormant until the language goes live.
To make a non-primary language visible to your visitors, enable Multi-Language Storefront in General settings and tick the languages you want available. Visitors then see a flag-style picker in the header to switch.
Find the string you want to change
There are over 1,600 strings, so the panel offers two ways to navigate:
- Search — matches against the key name, English value, current-language value, and any existing override. Type a word you see on your storefront and the relevant rows surface.
- Sidebar buckets — strings are grouped by surface (Emails, Buyer: Browse & Buy, Seller: Sales & Bookings, Authentication, etc.) so you can browse without scrolling the full list.
Each row shows the canonical English value as a read-only reference, the default value in the selected language (if different), and an editable field for your override.
Save — it ships instantly
Type your replacement and click Save. The override goes live on your storefront within seconds. There's no draft / publish workflow — this is direct.
To revert a row to the platform default, click Reset on that row. The row stops being “Overridden” and visitors see the default value again.
Reviewing your overrides
The Only overridden filter chip narrows the list to just the strings you've customized. Every bucket count in the sidebar updates to reflect the filter, so you can see at a glance which areas you've customized.
To wipe every override for a specific language — for example, you machine-translated a batch and want to start fresh — click Clear all [LANG] overrides at the top right. A confirmation modal shows how many overrides will be deleted. Other languages aren't affected.
CSV import / export
For batch editing — especially when you want a translator or reviewer to work through many strings at once — use the CSV workflow.
Export
Two export buttons:
- Export [LANG] — just the currently selected language
- Export all languages — every supported language in one file, grouped by key (so a translator sees all six language rows for “Add to cart” together)
The CSV has four columns: key, language, base_value, override_value. Edit only the override_value column — the others are reference data.
Import
Click Import CSV, then drag a CSV onto the drop zone or click to choose a file. The file must be under 10 MB.
Click Validate & preview first — you'll see a summary of how many rows will be created, updated, deleted (rows with empty override_value remove existing overrides), or unchanged. Any rows the validator can't use (unknown keys, unsupported languages, oversized values) appear in a skipped list with line numbers.
Click Apply to commit. Caches are flushed for every language touched, so the new overrides go live immediately.
Edge cases
Switching your store's primary language
Overrides are saved per language, so they aren't deleted when you switch your store's primary language. They sit dormant. Switch back any time and your edits are still there. The panel always lets you pick any of the six languages, even ones not currently shown to visitors — you'll see a banner reminding you that your edits are queued, not live.
Strings that aren't in the panel yet
Most customer-facing copy is in the panel. A few surfaces — the public storefront seller signup form, sign-in / sign-up flows, and a handful of older transactional emails — are still hardcoded English and appear here as they get migrated into the system. If you spot one missing and need it overridable now, get in touch.
Variables in the text
Some strings contain placeholders like {recipientName} or {storeName}. Keep these intact in your override — they're replaced at render time with the actual values. If you remove a placeholder, that data won't appear in the message.
Plan availability
| Feature | Starter | Pro | Business | Scale |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Translation override panel | - | - | ||
| CSV import / export | - | - | ||
| Multi-Language Storefront (visitor-facing language picker) | - | - |
On the Pro plan you can still pick a single primary language for the whole store under General settings — the override panel itself starts at Business so you can also offer multiple languages alongside the customizations.