Five HubSpot sites folded into one bilingual WordPress site.

Over the years the company had ended up with five HubSpot sites, one of them a separate French-Canadian site. Each had its own copy, its own forms and its own idea of what things were called. Updating a page meant updating it several times, and the French site always lagged behind the English ones.

The goal was one WordPress site in English and Canadian French, with the old domains retired and redirected so nothing they had earned in search was lost. Machine translation made the volume affordable, but this is a technical industry. Left alone, DeepL will happily translate a company name that happens to be an ordinary English word, or turn an acronym every buyer knows into something nobody searches for.

And translation can’t stop at the page copy. Contact forms, validation messages, gated-content emails, downloads, site search and the locations map all had to work in French too, or a French-Canadian visitor would hit English the moment they tried to get in touch.

The most important part of this project wasn’t code. It was working out which words DeepL should leave alone, and which French words the company actually uses. A wrong translation of a brand name or a product term reads as careless to a buyer in Montréal, and it’s repeated on every page that mentions it.

I started from the company’s own French. The old French-Canadian site was the best record of how they already spoke to Canadian customers: which product and partner names stayed in English, which terms were localized, and which phrasing their team preferred. That gave the first draft of the list.

Then I sorted every candidate term into groups, because each group follows a different rule. Company and brand names, including a recently merged company whose name is a plain English word, are never translated. Manufacturer and partner names, product lines and model numbers stay as they are. Standards bodies and certifications keep their official names. Industry acronyms like RFID, UPC and SKU stay in English, because that’s what Canadian buyers search for.

The second half of the glossary is the dictionary of preferred terms: where there is a French word, use the Canadian one. “Courriel” rather than “e-mail”, “articles” rather than “messages” for blog posts, and the company’s own wording for its services. DeepL applies these on every string, so the choice is made once instead of fixed page by page.

Only then did the bulk translation run. Afterwards I compared every English page with its French version, looking for two kinds of mistake: English that was left behind, and names that got translated. Each find became a glossary entry rather than a one-off edit, so the fix also applies to every page that uses the term and to content written after launch.

The glossary lives in TranslatePress and DeepL, not in code, so the marketing team can keep adding to it as new products and partners come along.