Auto-translate fills in translations for you using machine translation. It's a separate switch from multi-language, so your organisation may have one and not the other. If you can see an Auto-translate button on the Translation tab, you have it.

This fills every missing or out-of-date field, in every language on the experience. Fields you've written or edited by hand are left alone. If everything is already up to date, the button tells you so and does nothing.

In the Auto-translate menu there's a switch called Auto-translate on publish. With it on, Makeshapes offers to fill missing and out-of-date fields each time you publish, so a late change to the English doesn't quietly ship untranslated. You can set it per language from the column headers.

The moment you type in a cell, that field is marked custom and shows a violet pencil. Auto-translate skips custom fields — including when you run Translate all. The same applies to translations imported from an XLIFF file.

To hand a field back to auto-translate, click its violet badge. That discards your text and re-translates the field from English.

If you edit an English field that's already been translated, every translation of it is marked out of sync with an orange badge. It isn't wrong yet — it's just describing the old English. Run auto-translate again, or fix those cells by hand.

Custom fields keep their violet badge when this happens rather than turning orange. Hovering the badge tells you the English has moved on.

Auto-translate honours your organisation's safe words — terms on that list come out exactly as written rather than being translated. This applies to auto-translated text only; translations you write or import by hand are never altered.

Auto-translation uses your organisation's AI credits. If you run out, translating stops working until the allowance resets or is topped up.