Can I outsource ongoing translation maintenance to an agency instead of using Translate & Adapt's self-serve tools directly?
Agencies can run ongoing Shopify translation maintenance, and Shopify's permission model makes it awkward: no translation-specific staff permission exists, so access is granted through broader admin roles or through the translation API and CSV round trips (Shopify docs, September 2026). Deploi publishes no retainer price for this work.
The access problem, which nobody warns you about
Shopify's staff permission descriptions contain no permission scoped to translations, languages or Markets content. Checked against the current Help Center permission reference in September 2026: there is no "Translations" toggle to hand a contractor.
That leaves three ways to give an outside team access, and each has a real cost.
| Route | What you hand over | The catch |
|---|---|---|
| Staff account with Online Store and product permissions | Broad admin access | Your translator can edit live product copy, prices and theme content. This is the route most teams take and the one your security review will object to |
| CSV export and import round trip | A file | Shopify supports CSV export and import for translations, including metafields. No live access, and no way to stop the source copy changing while the file is out |
| Translation API via a private app | Scoped API credentials | Cleanest separation, needs somebody to build and own the integration |
What "maintenance" is actually made of
Ongoing translation work on Shopify is four recurring jobs, and only one of them is translating.
- Detecting source changes. A product description edited in English does not flag its French translation as stale. Nothing in native Shopify tells you this happened.
- Translating the delta. The actual linguistic work, and usually the smallest line.
- Covering new objects. New collections, new metafields, new theme sections. Each needs the translation created, and metafields need their definition marked translatable before the app will show them at all (community.shopify.dev, January 2025).
- Checking app content. The 19 types implementing
HasPublishedTranslationsdo not include arbitrary app data, so anything an app renders needs its own check (shopify.dev, September 2026).
Jobs 1, 3 and 4 are operations. Job 2 is translation. Agencies that quote per word are quoting for job 2 and will handle jobs 1, 3 and 4 as change requests, which is where retainers go wrong.
What we refuse to quote here
Deploi does not publish a price for translation maintenance, and no honest published benchmark exists. Per-word rates vary by language pair by more than double, the object count varies by catalog, and the detection work varies by how often your merchandising team edits source copy. A page that gave you a monthly figure would be making it up.
The method instead. Ask for a quote structured as four lines, matching the four jobs above, with the detection line priced as a fixed monthly and the translation line priced per word. Any supplier who will not separate them is pricing your uncertainty into their margin.
When NOT to outsource this
- When you run two locales and a stable catalog. That is an hour a month for somebody who already has admin access.
- Before you have a change-detection mechanism. Outsourcing an undetected problem outsources nothing.
- When the security review has not seen the access model. Discover the permission gap in scoping, not in the week before launch.
The Deploi point of view
Our own position, from building on Shopify. Separate from the facts above.
- Our take: Outsource the translation, keep the detection. The recurring value is in knowing what changed, and that is a system your team should own regardless of who does the linguistic work.
- What we’ve seen: Translation retainers that get cancelled were priced per month for undefined scope. The ones that survive are priced as a small fixed operations fee plus per-word translation, because both sides can see what they are paying for.
- Where we disagree: The category sells translation maintenance as a service you buy. On Shopify it is mostly an access-control and change-detection problem wearing a service's clothing, and the permission model is the reason. Solve the access question in the contract, not in the first invoice.
- What this page adds: that Shopify publishes no translation-specific staff permission, which is what makes third-party translation access an all-or-nothing decision the parent's build-versus-buy framing does not surface.
Reviewed by Martin Dejnicki, Director of SEO & AI Search. Facts verified 2026-09-14.
Where we worked this out
Our decision records