Articles on: Frequently Asked Question

FAQ: I changed my theme — do I have to translate everything again?

Short answer: no. Your translations are not lost when you publish or update a theme, and you do not re-translate your pages from scratch.

What carries over

Theme text that is exactly the same in the new theme keeps the translation it already had. It is matched on the wording itself, so a line that did not change is still translated.

What does not carry over is anything new or reworded. A section you added, a heading you rewrote, a button with different wording — those arrive untranslated, because there is no earlier translation that matches them.

In your new theme	What happens	Where you find it
Text identical to the old theme	Translation carried over — nothing to do	stays Translated
Text you reworded, even slightly	The old translation no longer matches the new wording	shows as Outdated
Sections or wording that are new	Never had a translation	shows as Untranslated

So after switching themes, the work left is the difference, not the whole theme.

Can I translate only the parts that changed, instead of re-translating everything?

Yes — and that is the normal way to do it. There are two filters to check, because changed text and brand-new text land in different places.

In Content Translation, open the Themes resource and go through both:

Filter by Outdated — text that had a translation, but whose wording changed in the new theme. The old translation no longer matches what the page now says.
Filter by Untranslated — sections and wording that are new in this theme and have never been translated.

Before you retranslate an item, check whether you edited it yourself. Retranslating replaces the current translation with a fresh machine translation — including any wording you had corrected by hand. Translations you edited yourself are marked with a person icon next to them; for those, edit the text directly instead of retranslating.

Check both. Filtering only one of them is the usual reason a store looks finished but still has untranslated text on the live page.

Everything outside those two lists carried over and needs nothing from you. You do not need to re-translate the pages and sections that are already translated.

The switcher is the one thing you do have to set up again

If you had embedded your switcher in a specific place — in the footer, in the header, next to the menu — it will be back to the floating style on the new theme, and you will need to place it again.

This is not a setting that was reset. Embedding the switcher puts Transcy's code into your theme's own files, and that code belongs to the theme you put it in. A new theme is a different set of files, so the embed does not come with it and the switcher falls back to floating.

→ Set up Switcher on your store with Transcy

Remember that Transcy only works with published themes. If you are still testing on a draft or preview theme, the switcher and translations will not appear there — publish the theme first.

Need help? Contact us via live chat or email us at support@transcy.io

Updated on: 30/09/2026

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