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What's the right Magento bilingual EN/FR setup?

The Magento-native pattern for bilingual Canada is:

  • One websiteone storetwo store views (en_CA default, fr_CA alternate)
  • URL strategy: subfolder /fr/ for the FR storeview, with rel=canonical pointing to itself and hreflang alternates linking en-CA ↔ fr-CA
  • Translation source: Magento’s native CSV translation files for theme strings, plus per-store-view attribute values for products / categories / CMS pages
  • Translation pipeline: Crowdin or Phrase with an API push from Magento → translator → auto-pull back. We script this in CI so new products show up in Crowdin within minutes of being saved
  • Auto-detect from ship-to: if the cart ship-to is QC, default the storefront to FR (with a one-click EN toggle if the user prefers)

This is the architecture that satisfies Quebec Bill 96 and keeps Google’s indexing clean.

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