Translate product pages automatically

Question

I have a website with a product catalog of more than 500 products. I'm using Drupal Commerce and have created a product display content type to group several SKUs under a single product page.

I'm using the i18n module because I need a multilingual website.

Once the data entry is done (for the English section), the catalog must be totally translated into all the other languages, and that means a huge amount of work. Can this step (translation of product display contents) be automated in any way?

Please note: I just need all the products to be visible in all the active languages, at present there are no "string" product fields to translate.

Edit

By "automated" I mean that I start from creating product display pages in one language, and then I need product display pages in each of the defined languages; I'm looking for an automated way to create product display nodes in other languages instead of having to manually translate each page.

I've accepted the answer below because it does provide a solution to the problem and it's not a workaround, anyway it's not the way I took.

How I made it work

1. I set product display pages as language neutral.
2. I translated all the product page fields' labels, and then all the select lists' values.

3. At that point, I was faced with an hybrid page, with translated labels and untranslated values. I wondered why, until I found this page, mentioned in this post. That is, I...

4. went to Administration > Structure > Content types.

5. Click on Product page > Manage display.

6. Set format to Default translated, Link (localized) or Plain text (localized) depending on the field type.

Answer 1

To translate products, you will have to look into Entity translation. Make sure to check the Title module as well which allows to use a field for the product title so that can be translated as well.

For the automation/mass management part, have a look at the the Translation Management Tool* project. The new alpha2 release now integrates into the default Translate tab added by Entity translation and there is also a generic overview for all translatable entity types that allows to mass-translate (by sending a job to translation agencies, machine translation services, export as XLIFF and translate in a desktop tool, ..) entities, which includes products.

Note that the project is in alpha which in this case means that it hasn't been tested on many real sites yet, especially not the new entity translation integration. It has an extensive automated test suite though and is well documented (there is even a introduction video now!).

You can also translate product displays (nodes) using the same tool chain.

*Disclaimer: I am the maintainer of that project.