Would like to publish site for Quebec

Am I opening a big can of ver de terre?

[gussie]

I would like to hear from anyone who has French speaking Canadian customers. Do you have a web site in French? Do people call you on the phone thinking you speak French? Do they e-mail you in French?

I would like to expand my customer service area to include Quebec. It would be a small number of customers (about 7% of my total) but every customer counts. Publishing the site in French is no problem (translation services abound) but unfortunately my French is not good enough to handle customer inquiries, or speak French when I finally meet my customers (I run a travel-related business, and so far its just me.)

Do you think people who read a site in their own language would expect to have follow-up in that language? I don't want to appear amature or discourteous. Indeed, I have been thinking that I might appear rude appealing to French-speaking people in English.

Gus

[JudgeJeffries]

I have a site for Canada in English and often get complaints from French speakers hatr the site is not also in French. What surprised me was that some only have a very basic command of English so I anticipate that there is a need for bilingual sites aimed at a Canadian audience and just doing one in English is not enough.

[gussie]

Thank you, that is exactly what I was wondering about.

[rogerd]

If you happened to read the humor in content [webmasterworld.com] thread, be careful about trying to translate your funnies for the Quebecois. Late-night talk show host and humorist Conan O'Brian tried that, and wasn't well received [canada.com]. ;)

[rbacal]

IF you are actually located in PQ, you may have another issue - the language laws. The Quebec government is starting to go after websites that are in English since they may contravene the language laws there.

If you are outside PQ, it's probably not an issue.

[carlr]

I am a French Canadian myself,

There are a couple of minsconceptions about the language law and i would be happy to help with any specific questions :)

[rogerd]

Hi, carlr, thanks for jumping in. Are there indeed special legal issues involved in Quebec web sites? If so, how is legal nexus determined, i.e., by hosting location, business headquarters location, etc.?

[carlr]

Here's an explanation on the Government website that should clear things (you can see the whole document here
[olf.gouv.qc.ca...]

"The Office québécois de la langue française will apply a simple rule : a French version must be provided only in the case of advertisements posted on the Web site of a company located in Québec for products available in Québec."

Also another misconception explained here:

"It is noteworthy to specify that "cyber-inspectors" will not be surfing the Net for possible language violations. The Office does not have the time nor the resources to dedicate to such task. In practice, OLF almost exclusively follows up on complaints received from the public."

Hope it's useful - Lemme know if you need other infos :)

[customclothier]

Our customer base is quite international (sweden, france, germany, USA, etc..) and we're based in Newfoundland, Canada. We have found that online, most customers will use english. From time to time we have used local translators to close a sale in Spanish and Japanese. Our website remains 100% English however.

I'm curious if someone has actually translated pages from their site and then noticed an increase in foreign language emails?

customclothier