What the law actually asks of a private business
New Brunswick is the only officially bilingual province, and that leads a lot of owners to assume their website has to be in both languages. For most private businesses it does not. Here is where the obligations actually sit.
The Official Languages Act applies to public bodies
The province's Official Languages Act sets duties for "institutions": government departments, Crown corporations, courts, boards, commissions and similar bodies set up to perform a governmental function. It also covers municipalities. Every city, and any municipality where the official language minority is at least 20 percent of the population, has to adopt its by-laws in both languages and offer prescribed services in both.
Private businesses are not on that list. The Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages for New Brunswick says so plainly in its own FAQ: a private company does not have to offer service in both languages.
The exception: working for the province
There is one case where it does reach a private business. If the province or one of its institutions hires a third party to deliver services on its behalf, section 30 of the Act makes the institution responsible for making sure those services are offered in both official languages. In practice, that obligation comes through your contract. If you deliver a program, run a clinic, or answer the public for a provincial body, read the language clause before you build the site.
Dieppe's sign by-law is about signs
Dieppe's By-law Z-22 requires new exterior commercial signs to carry both official languages, with French displayed first and the lettering identical in style. Company names may stay unilingual. The city describes it as a rule for exterior commercial signage, and it says nothing about websites. A Dieppe business that puts up a new sign is bound by it. Its website is not, at least under that by-law.
This is a plain-language reading of public sources, written by a web designer. If you contract with government or work in a regulated field, ask your lawyer or your contracting officer what applies to you. Federally regulated businesses, such as banks and airlines, have separate federal language duties that this guide does not cover.
Why many New Brunswick businesses do it anyway
The law is the floor. The market is the reason. Roughly a third of New Brunswickers have French as their first language, and in the southeast that share is much higher. Dieppe is a majority francophone city, Moncton declared itself officially bilingual in 2002, and the coast from Shediac up through the Acadian Peninsula is largely French-speaking.
Search makes this concrete. Google works out the language of a page from the visible text, not from a setting in the code. Someone searching "plombier Dieppe" or "électricien Moncton" is being matched to French pages. If you do not have any, you are not in that race at all, no matter how good your English site is.
There is also the simple trust signal. A francophone customer who lands on a page in their own language, written the way people around them talk, knows you can serve them. One who lands on English-only copy has to wonder whether the person who answers the phone will understand them.
For a business mainly serving anglophone Riverview or Fredericton, English alone can be a perfectly reasonable call. For a business in Dieppe, Shediac or Bouctouche, a French version is usually where a large share of the customers are.
Separate URLs, not a toggle
The single most important technical decision is how the two languages live on the site. There are two broad approaches, and Google is clear about which one it prefers.
The toggle that swaps text in place
Some sites keep one address per page and switch the language with a button, a cookie or the visitor's browser setting. It looks tidy. The problem is that Google's crawler mostly arrives from the United States without a language preference, so it tends to see one version and never find the other. Google's guidance says it recommends different URLs for each language version rather than cookies or browser settings, and that you should not automatically redirect people based on what you think their language is.
The same goes for translation widgets that rewrite the page in the visitor's browser. The French a visitor sees is generated on the fly, so there is no French page for Google to index and nothing for a French search to find.
A real page for each language
The approach that works is a real, separate page for each language. For most small businesses the cleanest pattern is a subfolder: yoursite.ca/services/ in English and yoursite.ca/fr/services/ in French. Some businesses use a separate French domain instead. Both work. The subfolder is simpler to run, keeps one hosting account and one set of analytics, and lets both languages share the authority the domain has built up.
Whichever you pick, follow three rules:
- Every page has a language switch that goes to its twin. The French link on your furnace repair page goes to the French furnace repair page, not to the French home page.
- The French pages are complete. Translating the menu and leaving the body in English gives Google two near-identical pages and gives the reader neither.
- Titles, descriptions and image text are translated too. The words that appear in search results are the ones most people read first.
Hreflang, done properly
Hreflang is a small tag that tells Google "this page also exists in French, and here it is." It helps Google show the French page to French searchers and the English one to English searchers, instead of guessing.
For a page with two versions, the head of both pages carries the same set of three lines:
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-CA" href="https://yoursite.ca/services/" /><link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-CA" href="https://yoursite.ca/fr/services/" /><link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://yoursite.ca/services/" />
The rules Google publishes are short, and most broken setups break one of them:
- It has to be reciprocal. Each version lists itself and every other version. If the French page points to the English one but not back, Google may ignore both.
- Use full addresses. Include the
https://and the domain, not just/fr/services/. - Use real codes.
fr-CAanden-CAare valid. Made-up codes are ignored. - Set an x-default. It tells Google which page to show someone whose language matches neither version.
Each language version should also carry its own canonical tag pointing at itself. Pointing the French canonical at the English page tells Google the French page is a duplicate, which undoes the whole exercise.
Human or machine translation
Machine translation has become good enough that it is tempting to run the whole site through it and call it done. For a francophone reader in Dieppe, it still usually shows.
The problems are rarely grammar. They are tone and vocabulary. Machine output tends to sound like a European manual, uses words nobody in southeast New Brunswick would use for a furnace or a deck, and misses the local feel of Acadian French. It also cannot tell you that your English slogan is a pun that does not survive the trip. A reader notices all of that within a sentence or two, and the trust you were trying to earn goes the other way.
A sensible middle path for a small business:
- Write the English first and keep it plain. Short sentences translate better than clever ones.
- Use machine translation for a first draft if it saves money.
- Have a fluent francophone, ideally from the region, edit every page before it goes live. That is the step that turns a translation into copy.
- Keep a short glossary of your trade terms and service names so every page uses the same words.
If you are the kind of business where a misunderstanding has consequences, such as health, legal or financial services, pay for professional translation from the start.
What it costs and how long it takes
There are two separate costs, and people often only budget for one.
The build. A second language is more pages, not more software. Each page needs a French twin, the menus and forms need both languages, and the hreflang and canonical tags have to be wired correctly. On our own plans the build fee and the monthly stay the same for a bilingual site. What it adds is time, usually turning a two-week build into something closer to three.
The translation. Translators in Canada generally charge by the word. A small five-page business site is a few thousand words, so professional translation of the whole thing usually lands in the hundreds of dollars, and more if the site is large or technical. Editing a machine draft costs less than translating from scratch, but not nothing.
Most of the delay in a bilingual project is waiting for translated copy, not building pages. The fastest projects are the ones where the English is signed off early and goes to the translator in one batch.
Then there is the ongoing cost: every future change happens twice. A new service, a holiday hours notice, a price change. Decide before launch who writes the French for those, or the French side quietly falls out of date and starts to undo the trust it was built to create.
We build both languages as matched pages with a switch on every page and the hreflang set up correctly, for businesses across New Brunswick, from Moncton and Dieppe to Fredericton. The French copy comes from you or a translator you trust, because the person who knows how your customers talk should be the one choosing the words.
Sources
Checked on 2 October 2026.
- Official Languages Act, SNB 2002, c O-0.5 (Government of New Brunswick)
- Frequently asked questions (Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages for New Brunswick)
- Exterior commercial signage, By-law Z-22 (City of Dieppe)
- Managing multi-regional and multilingual sites (Google Search Central)
- Tell Google about localized versions of your page (Google Search Central)