Translation Quality
How Cassian AI™ evaluates your store's translations — Layer 3 of the Cassian Score™.
Translation Quality
Translation Quality is the third layer of your Cassian Score™, weighted at 20%. It runs on the Analyst plan and above — the Inspector (free) plan doesn't include translation analysis — and only when your store has translations enabled. If your store is monolingual, this layer is excluded entirely and the other four layers are reweighted to total 100%.
Cassian AI™ compares your translated content against the source language and evaluates it for completeness, accuracy, and naturalness. A bad translation doesn't just hurt your score — it loses sales in markets you've already paid to reach.
What Cassian AI evaluates
Machine translation artifacts
Automated translation tools have become remarkably capable, but they still produce characteristic errors that a native speaker will notice immediately. Cassian AI identifies phrases and sentence structures that appear to be unedited machine translation output.
Common machine translation artifacts Cassian looks for:
- Word-for-word literal translations that produce grammatically odd sentences
- Idiomatic expressions in the source language rendered literally rather than translated culturally
- Terminology that doesn't match industry norms in the target language (a word that's technically correct but not what that market actually uses)
- Inconsistent tone or register — content that alternates between formal and informal forms of address
- Brand names or product names that were left untranslated when a localised version exists
This check is about the quality of the translation as a reading experience, not just whether words are present. Content that passes a grammar check can still read as obviously machine-translated.
Missing translations
Cassian identifies pages and page elements where translated content is entirely absent. A customer browsing in French who lands on an English-only product page — or worse, a page that's partially translated — is very likely to leave.
Completeness is judged by Cassian AI reading the rendered page — everything visible on it, including:
- Product titles and descriptions
- Collection page titles and descriptions
- Page content (FAQ pages, About pages, shipping and returns information)
- Navigation items, buttons, and footer links
- Page metadata visible in the rendered HTML
This is a judgement on the rendered page, not a structured field-by-field audit of your backend translation records.
Missing translations on high-traffic pages (your most popular products, your homepage, your checkout flow) have the most significant customer impact. If you have hundreds of missing translation issues, prioritise by page traffic, not by alphabetical product order.
Backend vs frontend translation mismatches
When your store is connected via the Shopify connector, Cassian can compare the translations stored in your admin backend against what actually renders on the storefront. This catches:
- Backend translations that aren't rendering on the storefront
- Stale translations where the rendered text differs from the backend version
- Content pages in the default language despite backend translations existing
- Partial translations where some fields (title) are translated but others (description) are not
This check requires the Shopify connector — it uses admin API data that isn't available from crawling alone. The backend comparison covers your first configured translation language; crawled pages in your other languages are still fully evaluated from the rendered storefront. On other platforms, translation quality is evaluated entirely from the rendered storefront pages.
Setting up translations for Cassian to evaluate
For Cassian to evaluate your translations, you need to tell it that your store is multilingual.
Go to Sites in the sidebar and click on your store.
Open Settings → Language.
Enable "This store has translations" and select all active translation languages.
Set your primary language (the source language your other languages are translated from).
Save and trigger a manual scan. Cassian will evaluate your translations in the next scan.
Automatic detection: on the first scan of any store — regardless of platform — Cassian reads the <html lang> attribute and the hreflang tags on your pages to detect your primary language and any additional locales. You can override the detected languages at any time in Site Settings.
If you use a third-party translation app (Shopify Translate & Adapt, Weglot, Langify, etc.): no special configuration is needed — the rendered page content and hreflang tags are what Cassian reads, so the standard language settings are sufficient.
Supported languages
Cassian supports 26 languages for translation evaluation, with the same analysis applied to every one of them:
English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Arabic, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish, Polish, Czech, Turkish, Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Malay, Hebrew, Russian, Ukrainian, and Hindi.
There's no tiering between languages — prose quality, machine translation artifact detection, and completeness all run for every supported language you configure.
Monolingual stores
If your store operates in a single language with no translations, Translation Quality is excluded from your Cassian Score calculation entirely. The remaining four layers are automatically reweighted to total 100%:
| Layer | Standard weight | Reweighted (no translation) |
|---|---|---|
| Technical Health | 30% | 37.5% |
| Content Quality | 25% | 31.25% |
| Translation Quality | 20% | Excluded |
| Platform Consistency | 15% | 18.75% |
| LLM Readiness | 10% | 12.5% |
If Translation Quality is showing in your score breakdown but your store is genuinely monolingual, check that translations are disabled in Site Settings. An accidentally enabled translation toggle adds an empty layer to your score.
Where to see Translation Quality results
- Issues page → filter by "Translation" category. All translation issues listed by severity with affected language identified.
- Scans page → click any scan → Translation Quality section shows your layer score and all issues found.
- Dashboard overview → the Translation Quality card shows your current layer score. If translations are disabled, this card shows the layer as inactive.
Common questions
My store is in English only — why is Translation Quality showing in my score? Check Site Settings → Language. If translations are accidentally enabled, disable them. Cassian will exclude the layer from your next scan's score calculation.
Does Cassian support right-to-left languages? Yes — Arabic and Hebrew are supported for translation quality analysis (prose quality, completeness, missing translations). Persian and Urdu are not currently supported.
How does Cassian know which language is the source?
From your primary language setting in Site Settings, which is auto-detected on the first scan from your store's <html lang> attribute. You can always override this manually in Site Settings.
How many languages can Cassian check simultaneously? All languages configured in your store's translation setup. There's no per-scan language limit — crawled pages in every configured language are evaluated in a single scan. The one exception is the Shopify backend-vs-storefront comparison, which covers your first configured translation language.
My translation app generates translations automatically — will Cassian flag all of them as machine-translated? Not necessarily. If the automatic translations read naturally in the target language, Cassian won't flag them. The check looks for patterns that read as unedited machine output — stilted phrasing, literal idiom translations, terminology mismatches. Well-tuned automatic translations that have been reviewed and edited typically pass.
Translation Quality is active but I have zero issues — is that correct? Yes, it's possible. If all your translated content is present, complete, and reads naturally, Cassian will find nothing to flag. A Translation Quality score of 100 means no issues were found in that layer during the scan. (If the translation analysis fails to run for a scan, the layer is excluded from that scan's score rather than scored 100 — the scan detail page will note this.)
Cassian flagged a translation as a machine translation artifact but we wrote it manually. Machine translation artifact checks look for patterns that correlate with automatic translation. Occasionally, manually written translations that use literal constructions from the source language can trigger the same patterns. If the flagged content reads correctly to a native speaker, dismiss the issue from the Issues page.