french-native-copy

name	french-native-copy
description	Native-quality French copywriting standard for the website engine. Produces French web, marketing, and product copy that reads as if written by an educated native speaker — correct register (tu/vous), idiomatic phrasing, French typography, and zero machine-translation artefacts. Use whenever French copy is written, adapted, or reviewed; do not rely on raw translation of English source copy.

French Native Copy

Acknowledgement: Shared by Peter Bamuhigire, techguypeter.com, [phone].

Use when

• Writing any French-language page, section, microcopy, CTA, email, or metadata for a site the engine builds.
• Adapting approved English copy into French where the French must stand on its own as native copy, not a translation.
• Reviewing French copy (human, translated, or AI-generated) for register, idiom, grammar, and typography before it ships.
• Producing French SEO/GEO copy where the target keyword and phrasing must be researched natively, not transposed from English.

Do not use when

• The language routing, URL structure, hreflang, or sitemap question is the task — that belongs to i18n.
• The cross-language tone policy or three-language consistency question is the task — that belongs to language-standards.
• The copy is English or Kiswahili. For Kiswahili use swahili-native-copy.

Required inputs

• The source material the French copy must convey: the approved English copy, the brand brief, or the raw client facts.
• The audience and market: France, francophone Africa (and which country), Canada, or a mixed francophone audience. This sets vocabulary, register defaults, and currency/date conventions.
• The register decision for the brand: vous (default for commerce and services) or tu (youth, lifestyle, peer-to-peer brands). If unspecified, default to vous.
• The page goal and any conversion or SEO targets the copy must hit.

Workflow

1. Fix the register and audience first. Choose vous or tu and the francophone market, then hold that choice across the whole page. Mixed register inside one experience is the clearest tell of amateur copy. See references/register-and-address.md.
2. Write the French from the meaning, not the English words. Express the idea as a French speaker would frame it, then check it carries every required fact. Translating word-for-word produces calques; see references/anglicisms-to-avoid.md.
3. Apply the grammar that machine translation gets wrong as you write: partitive articles, gender and adjective agreement, negation scope, pronoun placement, relative pronouns, and verb-preposition collocations. See references/grammar-pitfalls.md.
4. Raise it from correct to native: idiomatic connectors, natural collocations, French CTA verbs, and rhythm. See references/idiom-and-flow.md.
5. Apply French typography: narrow non-breaking space before ; : ! ?, guillemets « », decimal comma, € after the number, lowercase days/months/nationalities. See references/typography-and-formatting.md.
6. Run the revision checklist and the back-translation test before sign-off. See references/revision-checklist.md.

Quality standards

• A French native reader finds nothing that signals translation: no calques, no anglicisms, no English word order, no English punctuation spacing.
• Register is consistent end to end. Where vous is chosen, every verb, pronoun, and possessive agrees with it; the same for tu.
• Every adjective agrees in gender and number with its noun; every partitive (du, de la, de l', des) is correct and collapses to de after negation and quantity.
• Typography follows French rules, not English: Découvrir nos services carries the correct spacing and punctuation; prices read 1 250,00 €, not €1,250.00.
• SEO terms are researched in French, not transposed: the slug and target phrase are what a French speaker actually searches, per i18n slug rules.
• The copy passes the back-translation test: translating the French back to English reproduces the intended meaning without distortion.

Anti-patterns

• Running English copy through translation and lightly editing the output. Write from meaning.
• Mixing tu and vous, or switching gender of address mid-page.
• Calques such as Nous offrons des solutions, pour plus d'informations cliquez ici, or réalisez votre potentiel where idiomatic French differs. See the anglicism table.
• English punctuation spacing (Bonjour! with no space, straight quotes "...", €50, 3.50).
• Inventing French marketing adjectives banned by glossary.md#banned-terms in their French equivalents.
• Keeping English slugs or English keyword phrasing on French pages without research.

Outputs

• Native-quality French copy for the requested artefact (page, section, CTA, email, metadata).
• A short register-and-audience note recording the tu/vous and market decision so downstream copy stays consistent.
• Review findings with concrete corrections when the task is a review rather than fresh authoring.

References

• references/register-and-address.md — tu vs vous, politeness, conditional softening, formal commercial register.
• references/grammar-pitfalls.md — partitive articles, gender and agreement, negation, pronouns, relative pronouns, verb-preposition collocations.
• references/idiom-and-flow.md — connectors, collocations, CTA verbs, sensory and premium language, sentence rhythm.
• references/anglicisms-to-avoid.md — calques and anglicisms with native French alternatives.
• references/typography-and-formatting.md — spacing, guillemets, numbers, currency, dates, capitalisation.
• references/revision-checklist.md — native-speaker QA checklist, concord audit, and back-translation test.

Notes

• This skill is the French execution layer under language-standards, which owns the cross-language tone policy. Read language-standards for the three-language consistency rules, then apply this skill for French.
• Pair with i18n for routing and localized slugs, and with seo/google-ai-search for French keyword research.
• Source material distilled from: Sylvie Poisson-Quinton, French Grammar in 44 Lessons (Level A1); 2000 French Phrases and 50 Most Used French Verbs (French Hacking); Conversational French Dialogues (Touri Language Learning); and Read & Think French, Premium (Think French magazine).