French website translation: vous, tu and fr-CA tags

French has no neutral "you". A sentence that speaks to the visitor uses vous or tu, and its verb agrees, so a French translation commits to a register as soon as it addresses the reader: in a welcome line, a form error or an order email. Buttons often avoid the choice with an infinitive or a noun. WooCommerce's own French translation, for example, uses "Ajouter au panier" for Add to cart and "Commander" for Place order. The other early decision is geography. Readers in France, Belgium, Switzerland and Quebec all read French, but they do not write it the same way, and a language tag tells search engines which of them a page is for.

LangRelay handles French as the tag fr, served under /fr/ and written as the French of France. Its Formality register can be set to formal (vous), informal (tu) or left to the language default.

Vous or tu for a website#

LangRelay treats the choice as the brand's to make, since neither register is wrong. Its guidance is that vous is the conservative default for French site copy, and that tu suits a consumer brand that wants to sound close to its customers.

The common problem is a site that uses both. A homepage in tu with checkout errors in vous reads as two companies stitched together, and it usually happens when pages are translated at different times by different people and nobody writes the decision down.

A worked example: changing register six months in#

Take an invented example. A shop selling running gear adds French to its Site and leaves the register on Language default. In this example its product pages come out in vous, and they are approved and published.

Six months later the marketing team decides the brand should use tu. Someone with Configure Site access opens Settings, Languages and sets French to Informal. From that moment:

1. Every machine translation started afterwards asks for tu. A new product page added the next week gets its own text in tu, but the header, footer and notices it shares with older pages were translated before the change, and LangRelay reuses those approved translations, so they stay in vous.
2. The existing pages keep their approved vous text. LangRelay never retranslates them on its own, so nothing published changes without a person's say.
3. To bring the shared text and the old pages over, someone selects that text in the Translation grid, filtered to French, and chooses Machine retranslate. When you retranslate pages yourself, the new tu versions wait for your approval, whatever the Site's publishing setting.
4. Until that is done, the new product page mixes tu and vous. Asked to check it, Relay reports lines whose register differs from the rest of the page as minor findings, so the mix shows up in a Relay review.

The shop decides how fast to move: retranslate the checkout and the account pages first, where the mix would be most visible, and the blog archive later.

French in France, Canada, Belgium and Switzerland#

A bare fr means French as written in France, because that is the Unicode CLDR default for the tag, and LangRelay asks its translation engine for exactly that. In hreflang the same fr reaches every French reader, which is what most sites need for their first French version.

Quebec is where a separate version is most often worth it. Quebec French has its own words for everyday web vocabulary: fin de semaine for the weekend, where France writes week-end, magasiner for going shopping, and courriel for email, a word the French government also adopted in 2003. A Quebec shopper reading a newsletter sign-up written for Paris understands it but notices that it was written for someone else.

Switzerland differs in typography as well as words. French in France puts narrow non-breaking spaces inside « guillemets »; Swiss French usage leaves them out.

LangRelay's locale model treats fr-CA and fr-CH as Target locales of their own, each with its own /fr-ca/ or /fr-ch/ prefix, hreflang entry, translations and approvals. They are on the roadmap; today a Site offers bare fr. The register setting belongs to the language, so a Canadian French version would inherit the choice between vous and tu like any other French locale.

Which hreflang values to use#

The hreflang guide covers the tags in depth. Google's rules for hreflang are short: a language code from ISO 639-1, optionally followed by a region code from ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2, and every version must list itself and all the others. For French that gives fr, fr-FR, fr-CA, fr-BE and fr-CH, all valid. A country code alone is not. Google's own example is be, which is the code for Belarusian, not Belgium.

Take a home page in English with a French version today and a Quebec version later. Today both pages carry:

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://example.com/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="https://example.com/fr/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://example.com/" />

With a Quebec version added, all three pages would carry one more line, hreflang="fr-CA" pointing at /fr-ca/. Google can then show the Quebec page to French readers in Canada and the /fr/ page to French readers everywhere else. The French page's <html lang> stays fr, the same tag as its hreflang, because LangRelay derives the prefix, the hreflang value and the lang attribute from one tag.

The register never shows up in any of these. There is no tag for "formal French", so a site cannot run vous and tu as two versions of one page without inventing a code search engines ignore. LangRelay therefore keeps register as a setting on the French Target locale.

Before you publish French pages#

• Read the sentences that speak to the reader one after another: the welcome text, form errors, the order email. Buttons written as infinitives carry no register, so a mix shows up in sentences first.
• Check that names you keep in English (product names, plan names) are in the French glossary as Keep as source, so the engine never translates them.
• Look at headings and buttons on a narrow screen: French phrasing often runs longer than the English it came from.
• Check dates and prices for the market. The localization vs translation article walks through one page done both ways.
• Open the live French page's source and look for lang="fr" and the hreflang set above.

For the other two pilot languages, see Spanish website translation, which covers the es-419 trap, and German website translation. The multilingual website guide covers the decisions before any of them. To walk through a French setup on your own Site, book a demo.