In Quebec, a province in Canada, there are strict rules about operating a website in the province. You must offer a bilingual site (French and English) to customers if you do business in the province or are resided in that province. Actually the website content must be in French, but English is optional, as French is the official language in the province of Quebec. Failing to comply with the rules, can run you afoul of Office Quebecoise de la language francaise and possible fines and sanctions.

So what do you do if you are a small business without the resource to create a French site? Thankfully Google offers you some solutions other then spending a small fortune in translation services. Below are the solutions and the scripts you need:

1- Translate all the pages

This is the more time consuming solution by if you visit Google Translate, you can enter your site text, visit your website url, or upload your documents/web pages. Instantly Google will translate your files into French. Of course this is a machine translation, but it will give you the ability to come pretty close. If you know someone who reads/writes French, this will quicken the turn around time in translating your site. We recommend you add your French pages to a subfolder on your sever (i.e http://www.yoursite.com/fr).

2- Offer Translation Tool on Index

A quick solution is offering Google’s translation tool on your pages. Just use the below code.

<div id="google_translate_element"></div><script>
function googleTranslateElementInit() {
  new google.translate.TranslateElement({
    pageLanguage: 'en',
    includedLanguages: 'en,fr'
  }, 'google_translate_element');
}
</script><script src="http://translate.google.com/translate_a/element.js?cb=googleTranslateElementInit"></script>

3- Use .HTACCESS file to redirect based on browser language.
Using an .HTACCESS file, you can detect the language of the visitors browser. If a visitor has a French version of Firefox, Chrome or IE when coming to your site the site will be translated to French automatically using Google. If they come to with an English language browser, they will not notice a difference. All you need to do is replace “www.englishsite.com” in this code with your domain name. Sure to save file as .HTACCESS filetype.

The other option is this code which will create sub-folder for each language. English users will be taken to www.yoursite.com/en unless they are using a French browser. In this case they will be taken to www.yoursite.com/fr.

So there you go! Three quick solutions to get your site in French fast and keep your Quebec customer happy. Now you may ask why we did not offer an IP blocking solution. Unfortunately, its just not efficient. For example, you would need to keep an updated IP list for all users in Quebec. This is a major issue, because there are always new IP addresses. Furthermore how do you identify users in Quebec with ISP’s in Ontario or for that matter those visitors using a proxy?

The best solution in our view is to start with solution # 2 or 3 above, while you work on using solution #1. A we have mentioned earlier, sometimes you just have to spend the money on website design. Having a fully translated website is the best way to increase your revenue from a local market and the most professional way to present your site. Most of all, we hope the above solutions helps cash-strapped (small) businesses in Quebec (or elsewhere) facing issues in translation.