What's the right Magento bilingual EN/FR setup?
Categories:
Magento Developer Canada
The Magento-native pattern for bilingual Canada is:
- One website → one store → two store views (
en_CAdefault,fr_CAalternate) - 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.
Was this helpful?