How Do You Stop a Translator From Changing Your Brand Name or Your Prices?
Why Would a Translator Touch Them At All?
A translator touches them because it is doing exactly what it was asked: turning text into another language. It has no way of knowing that one particular phrase is your brand and another is a number your checkout depends on.
To a translation model, your product page is a block of text. Your brand name looks like a noun. Your price looks like a number with a symbol attached. Both are candidates for translation because everything on the page is.
Most of the time this works out. Models are reasonably good at leaving proper nouns and figures alone, especially when told to. The problem is that "most of the time" is a bad standard for something a customer acts on.
A brand name translated once in one language on one page is a small embarrassment. A price reformatted into a different convention is a shopper reading one number and being charged another. That is the failure worth engineering against on an OpoShop store, rather than trusting to good behaviour.
What Goes Wrong Exactly?
The failures fall into a few recognisable shapes, and knowing them tells you what to protect.
- A brand name that is also a word: If your brand is something like Northlight or Sundial, a translator may render it as a common noun in the target language.
- A product line that reads as a description: A range called Everyday Series can become a translated phrase rather than a name.
- A price with the symbol moved or the separators swapped: Number conventions differ between languages, and a reformatted price is a different number to read.
- Sizes converted silently: A measurement changed without the shopper knowing is worse than one left alone, because they cannot tell it happened.
- Order and tracking numbers altered: Identifiers are not language, and a changed one is simply broken.
The price case deserves the most attention because it is the one with money attached. Decimal and thousands separators are genuinely different across languages, so a number can be rewritten in a way that is technically correct for that locale and completely wrong next to a checkout that has not changed.
The safe rule is that nothing money-shaped should ever be sent to a translator in the first place. That is a structural protection rather than an instruction, and structural protections do not have off days.
How Does a Do-Not-Translate List Work?
A do-not-translate list is a set of phrases that are removed from the text before translation and put back afterwards, unchanged. The translator never sees them, so it cannot alter them.
The mechanism matters. A weak implementation asks the model politely to leave a term alone. A strong one replaces the term with a neutral placeholder, translates the sentence around it, and then substitutes the original back in.
The difference shows up under pressure. A polite instruction competes with everything else the model is trying to do. A placeholder cannot be translated because it is not a word.
What belongs on the list is usually short:
- Your brand name, in every form you use it.
- Product line and collection names that are names rather than descriptions.
- Anything trademarked, yours or a partner's.
- Technical identifiers that appear in copy, such as a model code.
Ten or fifteen entries covers most stores. It is worth adding them before your first translation run on OpoShop rather than after, because fixing them afterwards means re-translating.
How Do You Set the Protections Up?
The setup is short and the order matters, because protections added after a translation run only take effect on the next one.
1. Do it before the first run, not after
Protections applied after translation do not retroactively fix what has already been translated. You would have to re-translate the affected text, which costs money you did not need to spend.
Five minutes of listing names up front avoids it entirely, and it is the first thing to do after installing a translation app on OpoShop.
2. Include every form of your name
If your brand appears as Northlight, Northlight Apparel and northlight in different places, add all of them. Protection usually matches the phrase as written, and a form you forgot is a form that gets translated.
Longer forms should be listed too, because a good implementation protects the longest match first so a short entry cannot cut into the middle of a longer name.
3. Test with the worst case
Pick the product whose description contains your brand name, a price and a measurement in the same sentence. If that one comes through intact in every language, your protections are working.
What Is the Difference Between a Glossary and a Do-Not-Translate List?
They use the same mechanism and serve opposite purposes. A do-not-translate entry means leave this exactly as it is. A glossary entry means translate this to exactly this and nothing else.
A do-not-translate entry is language-independent. Your brand is your brand in German, French and Japanese alike, so you add it once.
A glossary entry is language-specific by nature. If you want Checkout to read as Kasse in German, that rule only makes sense for German, and you would set a separate rule for French.
Glossary rules are how you fix the phrases that are technically translated correctly but not the way you want. Industry terms, category names you have standardised on, wording you use in your marketing. They are also how a correction becomes permanent: because it is a rule rather than an edit, it survives the next time your catalogue is re-translated.
There is a cost benefit too. If a phrase is pinned outright, a well-built tool should not bother sending it to the translator at all, since the answer is already known. That makes pinned phrases free as well as correct, which is the behaviour to look for on OpoShop.
How Do the Protection Methods Compare?
Not all protection is equal, and the differences are worth understanding before you rely on one.
| Method | How it works | Strength | Where it fails |
|---|---|---|---|
| Prompt instruction | The translator is asked to leave certain things alone | Weak. It is a request competing with other instructions | Long text, unusual phrasing, or a model having an off day |
| Placeholder substitution | The phrase is removed before translation and restored after | Strong. The translator never sees it | Nothing much, provided the longest phrases are protected first |
| Structural exclusion | Money-shaped text is never sent for translation at all | Strongest. The failure is impossible rather than unlikely | Only applies to categories you can define, such as prices and identifiers |
The bottom two rows are what you want protecting anything that matters. The top row is fine as an extra layer and a poor foundation on its own.
The useful question to ask any tool is which of these it uses. If the answer is that the model is instructed not to change prices, that is the top row, and it is worth knowing before you rely on it.
How Do You Check It Is Actually Working?
You check by looking at your own store in each language and reading the specific things you protected, which takes a few minutes and is worth doing before any shopper does it for you.
Open a product page in each language and check four things:
- The brand name appears exactly as you write it, in the title and in the description.
- The price is byte-for-byte identical to your original, including the symbol position and the separators.
- Sizes and measurements are unchanged, including any size chart.
- No placeholder artefacts are visible. If you see stray brackets or numbers in a sentence, a protection was applied and not restored properly.
That last one is worth naming because it is the failure mode of placeholder protection done badly. If a translator drops a placeholder, a careless implementation prints the placeholder itself onto the page. A careful one removes it and leaves clean text.
Do this check once per language when you launch and again after any big catalogue change. On an OpoShop store it is a two-minute habit that catches the small number of things worth catching.
Best answer: Protect your brand name and product lines with a do-not-translate list, pin phrases you care about with a per-language glossary, and make sure prices and identifiers are excluded from translation structurally rather than by instruction. Set all three before your first translation run, because protections applied afterwards do not retroactively fix text that has already been translated. Then check one product page in each language and read the name, the price and the size chart.
What Should Never Be Left to Chance?
Three things should be impossible to change rather than unlikely to change, because the cost of getting them wrong is disproportionate.
Prices are first. A shopper who reads one number and is charged another has a legitimate complaint, and it does not matter that the cause was a translation setting. This is why structural exclusion beats instruction: the failure should not be rare, it should be impossible.
Identifiers are second. Order numbers, tracking numbers and SKUs are how a customer and your support process refer to a specific thing. A changed one breaks a conversation rather than a sentence.
Your brand name is third. It is less costly than the other two but it is the one customers notice, and a store that translates its own name reads as careless in a way that undermines everything else on the page.
Everything outside those three can tolerate an imperfect translation, because an awkward sentence is a small cost and an unreadable page is a large one. Getting the boundary right is most of what separates a translation setup you can leave running from one you have to watch. That boundary is the thing worth checking before you turn any translation app loose on OpoShop.
FAQs
Will a do-not-translate list slow anything down?
No. Protected phrases are substituted before the text is sent and restored afterwards, which is a trivial operation. If anything, phrases pinned outright can make a run slightly cheaper, because a phrase with a known answer does not need translating at all.
What if my brand name is a real word in another language?
That is exactly the case a do-not-translate list exists for. Without it, a brand like Sundial or Northlight is likely to be rendered as the ordinary noun in the target language. Add every form of your name and it passes through untouched.
Can I protect a phrase in only one language?
Yes, and that is what a glossary is for. A do-not-translate entry applies everywhere, while a glossary rule is set per language, so you can pin one wording in German without affecting French.
What happens if I add a protected term after translating?
Existing translations keep whatever they already have, because they were produced before the rule existed. You would need to re-translate the affected text to apply it, which is why listing your names before the first run saves both money and effort.
Do I need to protect every product name?
Only the ones that are names rather than descriptions. A product called Everyday Tote is a name and should be protected. A product called Large Canvas Tote is a description and should be translated, since a German shopper benefits from reading it in German.
How do I know whether prices are being sent to the translator?
Ask the tool directly, and treat a vague answer as a no. The behaviour you want is that money-shaped text is excluded before anything leaves, so a price cannot be reformatted even if the translator would otherwise have done it.
Set your protections before the first run rather than after, because that is the difference between a five-minute task and a re-translation.
