Language is an important part of site branding and customer engagement.
Should a shopping cart link be labeled “My Cart” or “Your Cart?” Or would it be better to call it a “Shopping Bag” like the folks at Macys.com?
The question is no trivial matter. In fact, I made the change from “My” to “Your” on a few of my own sites after reading Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone’s book, Designing Social Interfaces.
Your Versus My, As An Example
“Objects labeled ‘My’ on behalf of a user by the system give the feeling of an impersonal, if helpful, robotic valet or assistant, generically identifying items as if by proxy,” wrote Crumlish and Malone.
Whether or not you agree, it certainly gives you something to think about, and however you decide to label these links, you will want a quick way to implement those changes on your site.
In this tutorial, I am going to explain how to use Magento’s translation CSV file to quickly change site labels like “My Account,” “My Cart,” and “My Wishlist.”
Video Tutorial: Use Magento’s Translation CSV File to Change Site Labels
Disable Caching
We are going to be making a minor change to one of your Magento files, and we would like to be able to refresh the page and see those changes take effect.
To do this, we need to be sure to disable caching in the Magento administration panel. Admin > System > Cache Management will lead you to the proper set of caching controls.
Locate the Translate CSV file in Your Theme
We are going to be editing the translate.csv file in your Magento theme. You can find this file at app > design > frontend > Some Theme > Some Theme > locale > en_US, where “Some Theme” is your theme’s name—“default” for example.
Locate or Create the Translations You Want
Depending on your theme, this file may be empty or it may be filled with line after line of words and phrases. You should either locate the phrase you want to change or type it in if it does not already exist. Each phrase must be on its own line in this format: My Account, My Account.
The first phrase on the line indicates the phrase you are going to change. The second phrase is what we will be changing the first phrase into. So to make “My Account” read “Your Account,” I change the appropriate line in the CSV to: My Account, Your Account.
Save the file, refresh your web browser, and the effect is complete. You can use this same technique for just about every phrase on the site.
