A bilingual website for Quebec customers is usually quoted as a translation job: count the words, send them to a translator, paste the French back in. The pages are the easy part. What gets missed is everything around them: the form that still answers in English, the order confirmation that arrives in English, the terms of sale nobody translated, and a French page that search engines never show because nothing tells them it exists.
Whether you are comparing bilingual web design in Montreal or selling to Quebec from another province, this is what a French version has to cover. It is a practical summary, not legal advice. The Office québécois de la langue française (OQLF), which administers Quebec’s language rules, answers questions about them directly.
What Quebec’s language rules expect from a website
The OQLF’s page on consumers’ rights in the language of commerce is plain about it. Commercial publications of businesses operating in Quebec must be written in French, and customers are entitled to a complete French version of a business’s website and to French content on its social media. They also have the right to be served and informed in French before, during and after a sale. English can sit alongside the French; the exceptions are set out in section II of the Regulation respecting the language of commerce and business.
Whether a business based outside Quebec that sells online counts as operating there is a question for the OQLF or a lawyer. Customers in Quebec expect French either way.
The rules are enforced. The OQLF’s list of convictions for 2025 includes businesses fined $1,500 each under section 52 of the Charter of the French Language for commercial publications, websites among them, that were not in French. A customer does not need a lawyer to raise it either. The same consumer page tells anyone who is not served or informed in French that they can file a complaint, which the Office reviews and follows up.
The parts a translation quote usually leaves out
A translator quotes the words you send. These are the words a website produces on its own, and they are rarely in the file:
- Buttons, menus, form labels and error messages. “Required field” in English on a French page is the most visible sign of a half-finished French version.
- The emails the site sends. Order confirmations, booking reminders and receipts are written once in a settings screen and forgotten. The OQLF lists invoices, receipts, purchase orders and contracts among the commercial documents customers are entitled to receive in French.
- Terms of sale and subscription terms. Standard terms a customer accepts without negotiating are what the law calls contracts of adhesion. Since June 1, 2023, the French version has to be given to the customer first, and another language is possible only after that.
- Documents and pictures with words in them. A PDF price list, a downloadable menu or brochure, and an image or video with text in it are part of what the site publishes.
- The small screens every visitor sees. The cookie and privacy notices, the privacy policy and the “page not found” page.
- Whoever answers. The right to be served in French covers the reply to the contact form, the chat window and the voicemail, not only the page that invites the question.
French that reads as if it was written in Quebec
Customers notice a translation. Quebec French has its own vocabulary and conventions, and the OQLF publishes both in its free Vitrine linguistique. Small things carry the most weight. In French, an amount is written with the dollar sign after the number and a comma before the cents, as in 25,50 $, which is the OQLF’s own rule for writing sums of money. A price written the English way on a French page tells the reader it was copied across rather than written for them.
Machine translation is a reasonable first draft. Before anything goes live, someone who writes French well should read every page, for the same reason you would not publish English copy that nobody had read.
How search engines tell the two versions apart
A French page that a search engine cannot identify as French is not shown to people searching in French. Google’s own guidance for multilingual sites comes down to four points:
- Give each language its own addresses, such as pages under /fr/, rather than switching the language of the same address with a cookie or a browser setting.
- Tell search engines which pages are translations of each other, with hreflang annotations, so the French page appears in French results and the English page in English ones.
- Do not redirect visitors automatically to the language you guess they speak. Link each page to the same page in the other language and let them choose.
- Translate the whole page. Google notes that translating only the menus and buttons while the main text stays in one language makes for a bad experience.
Then write the French titles and descriptions for French searches. People search in their own words, and a word-for-word translation of an English title is often not what anyone types.
Keeping both versions in step
Launch day is the easy part. The hard part comes a year later, when the English page has been updated four times and the French one never was. Decide at the start who writes and checks the French, and count a change as finished only when both versions are published. A new page, price or offer that exists in English only is how a complete French version quietly stops being complete.
How we build bilingual sites
Our multilingual websites service treats each language as a site of its own that agrees with the other. Each language gets its own addresses, and search engines are told which page is which. Titles and descriptions are written for each language, and the menus, buttons, forms and error messages are translated along with the pages. The plan and the price are the same wherever your business is.
If you are planning a new site, put the second language in the quote from the start. It is a second set of pages to write, build and keep current, and that is why it changes what a professional website costs. If your site is English-only today, a redesign is often the cleanest moment to add French. Either way, tell us what you sell and who buys it, and we will tell you what your French version needs to include.