The question sounds administrative. It actually decides how much work a passport represents, because translating for the markets you sell in and translating into the twenty-four official languages of the Union differ by a factor of five.
Three texts overlap here, and none of them says the same thing. The most interesting part is that the rule governing the passport is not where you would look for it.
The label: the language of the country where it is sold
This is the only part already in force, and it is clear. Regulation (EU) 1007/2011 provides at article 16 that labelling or marking "shall be provided in the official language or languages of the Member State on the territory of which the textile products are made available to the consumer, unless the Member State concerned provides otherwise".
So not the language of your head office, and not English by default: the language of the destination market. One narrow exception exists, for sewing, mending and embroidery yarns sold individually, which may carry any official language of the Union's institutions provided they are inclusively labelled.
Which leaves the end of that sentence, "unless the Member State concerned provides otherwise". Which states have used it? I found no official register of those derogations: the regulation places no notification or publication duty on member states, and the Commission routes the question to national contact points. The widespread idea that "some countries accept English" should therefore be treated as trade folklore until a national source is cited, country by country.
The passport: the rule is not in the passport chapter
Here is the surprise. The chapter of the ESPR regulation devoted to the Digital Product Passport contains no language provision at all. Neither the articles on its content, nor those on its technical design.
The rule sits elsewhere, in the chapter on information requirements. Article 7 says that information supplied under information requirements "shall be provided in a language which can be easily understood by customers, as determined by the Member State on whose market the product is to be made available".
And the passport is precisely an information requirement: article 9 provides that a product may only be placed on the market if its passport is available. So the language rule catches it by construction.
The practical consequence is blunt. Nobody is asking you for twenty-four languages. They are asking for the language of the markets you sell into, and the destination state decides which that is.
The extra layer France adds
If you sell to French consumers, a national layer applies, and it is wider than the label.
Article 2 of the law of 4 August 1994, known as the loi Toubon, makes French mandatory "in the designation, the offer, the presentation, the instructions for use, the description of the scope and conditions of a guarantee of a good, a product or a service, as well as in invoices and receipts". The next paragraph extends it to all advertising.
Two points matter for an online shop. The law is d'ordre public, meaning no contract or terms can derogate from it. And the Ministry of Culture states that it covers goods marketed in France "including when they are imported or offered on websites and online sales platforms". The test is selling into France, not being established there. Enforcement sits with the consumer protection authority, and a breach is a fourth-class contravention.
Worth noting: the decree organising the AGEC product sheet contains no mention of language, French or translation at all. It regulates the medium, not the language. So it is the loi Toubon that supplies the missing obligation, which is a legal inference rather than a quoted rule.
The EU registry translates the schema, not your data
A confusion worth clearing. The regulation creating the registry sets no language requirement, but it does provide that the semantic repository holds "multilingual labels and definitions for all mandatory data attributes".
In other words, the Commission translates the field names, not their contents. Whether the field is called composition, Zusammensetzung or composición does not excuse you from writing the value in your customer's language.
How many languages, in practice
The Union has twenty-four official languages. No rule says a passport must carry them all, and no guidance designates a subset.
So the useful calculation starts from the countries you ship to. One country gives one language, except for the multilingual states: Belgium wants two, Dutch and French, Luxembourg French and German, Malta Maltese and English.
A French store selling into France, Belgium, Germany and Spain therefore lands on four languages, not twenty-four. That is an afternoon's work, not a project.
What gets translated, and what does not
Four categories, and the first one is the trap.
Fibre names are not freely translatable. The 2011 regulation sets out in annex I a list of harmonised names, with an official designation per language. Cotton, viscose and elastane each have an official name in Polish as in Finnish, and it is not necessarily the one a machine translation will propose. It is the most exposed field in the passport, and the only one whose translation is already standardised elsewhere.
Proper nouns are not translated at all. Your brand, and the names of certifications, which are registered trademarks. A label stays spelled identically across all twenty-four languages.
Numbers are not translated, they are formatted. A percentage and a washing temperature are presented differently from country to country without the value moving.
That leaves what is genuinely prose: care instructions written out in words, a statement of origin, a note on durability. That is where translation does its work, and it is the least risky part.
Which language to start with
Two criteria, in this order.
The one the law presses hardest. If you sell into France, French is not optional, and it was not optional before the passport either. The same reasoning applies to any market whose national requirement you know about.
Then volume. One language per market, starting with the one that weighs most in your shipments.
One method note to close: do the whole catalogue in one language before starting the next. The vocabulary repeats from product to product, and consistency is far easier to hold in a single pass than by alternating.
Is machine translation acceptable?
The honest answer is that no text says so, neither to allow it nor to forbid it. I looked on the European side and the French side, and every categorical claim in circulation traces back to translation agency blog posts rather than to a regulator.
What the law fixes is the result: comprehensible information, in the required language, and the responsibility falls on the trader. It says nothing about the method.
The consequence is simple, and more useful than an imagined rule. How you produce the translation is up to you, and its accuracy stays yours. What deserves rereading is therefore not the prose but the fields carrying facts: a composition, a country, a care instruction. An awkward turn of phrase reads badly. A mistranslated material manufactures a false statement.
What DPTag does
The split is clean, and it can be checked.
The free plugin serves translated passports. The public page honours a requested language, but only if the passport actually offers it, otherwise it returns to the source language. That detail stops a fanciful parameter from minting a cached page for nothing. The page's own labels ship in twenty-three translations, so the furniture of the page is in the right language even when your values are not yet.
The Pro add-on brings what is needed to write them: the translation editor, AI-assisted translation, and market detection, which suggests the languages to prepare from the countries you ship to, without ever imposing them. Destinations outside the Union suggest nothing, since the rule is a rule about the European market.
Two design choices are worth mentioning, because they are arguable. The brand deliberately has no translatable field, being a proper noun. And translating the product name is optional: leaving it empty serves the shop that wants the page to match the printed label.
If a Pro subscription stops, translations already written stay stored with the passport and keep being served. The full reasoning is in where to host your passports.
For the starting point, see the passport seen from WooCommerce, and for the label itself, what is required and where the QR goes.