French (fr) — translation instructions

Target language: French as written in France (français, fr-FR conventions), directory and URL code fr, page language tag fr. This file is sent verbatim with every translation request for this language, on top of the shared rules in ../general-prompt.md. The termbase in glossary.json is sent alongside it and wins any terminology conflict with this file.

1. Register

Address the reader as vous, always — verb forms, votre / vos and object pronouns to match. French developer documentation does not use tu.

Never tu / toi / ton, never a mix. A page that drifts between vous and tu, or between direct instructions and an impersonal administrative voice, is wrong even when each sentence is acceptable on its own.
Steps are imperatives in the second person plural: "Install the SDK, then run the server" → Installez le SDK, puis lancez le serveur — not Veuillez installer … before every step, not the infinitive Installer le SDK in running prose. Obligations take the present: vous devez, not vous devrez, unless the English is explicitly about the future.
Headings, table headers, tab labels and admonition titles are infinitives or noun phrases, never conjugated imperatives: "Declare a tool" → Déclarer un outil, "Handling errors" → Gérer les erreurs, "Running your server" → Exécuter votre serveur, "The Context" → L’objet Context. A question heading may stay a question (Où placer ce code ?). No full stop after a heading.
Requirement strength stays exact: must → devez / il faut, should → devriez / il est recommandé de, may / can → pouvez, must not → ne devez pas.
The authorial "we" is nous (Nous recommandons). The impersonal on is fine for a genuinely general statement (on obtient alors un schéma), never as a substitute for addressing the reader, never mixed with nous for one referent.
"The user" — the human in front of the host — is l’utilisateur, the generic form French documentation uses; no typographic inclusive forms (utilisateur·rice). Where a sentence is really about the reader, say vous.

2. Voice

The English source is warm, direct and confident: short sentences, the occasional one-line payoff. Aim for an experienced French engineer explaining a library to a colleague — professional, warm, plain-spoken; not stiff, not chatty.

Keep the payoff sentences short: "That's the whole API." → C’est toute l’API. — not a formal summary sentence. Split a long English sentence rather than mirroring its clause chain; never merge, drop or reorder the technical claims themselves.
Verbs, not nominal chains: procéder à l’installation de → installer; effectuer la configuration → configurer. Active voice: "The tool is called by the model" → Le modèle appelle l’outil.
No administrative French (il convient de, il est à noter que, dans le cadre de, afin de pouvoir, ledit, ce dernier as an all-purpose pronoun) and no hype (puissant, en toute simplicité, révolutionnaire).
No English-shaped French: supporter for "support" (→ prendre en charge), retourner une valeur (→ renvoyer), consistant for "consistent" (→ cohérent), adresser un problème (→ traiter), faire sens (→ avoir du sens), définitivement for "definitely", and bare en 2026-07-28 (→ en version 2026-07-28).
Body prose uses cela rather than the spoken ça; ça is tolerable only in a deliberately conversational payoff line, never in reference material.
Example — "You don't construct it and you don't configure it. You ask for it." → Vous ne le construisez pas, vous ne le configurez pas. Vous le demandez. Not the administrative Il n’est pas nécessaire de procéder à son instanciation ni à sa configuration ; il suffit d’en effectuer la demande. — nor the calque Tu ne le construis pas … Tu le demandes, c’est tout !

3. Humour and idioms

The English is friendly and dry rather than jokey; French technical prose tolerates warmth but less wit than English. Never translate a pun, idiom or aside literally: say what it means as a short, natural French sentence in the same register; a French idiom at home in technical prose is welcome (sous le capot for "under the hood"). An aside with no information may go — a technical caveat phrased lightly never does.
Recurring English tags get fixed renderings: "X has the whole story" / "The whole story is in X" → Tous les détails sont dans X; "That's the whole API." / "That's the whole protocol." → C’est toute l’API. / C’est tout le protocole.; "That's it. It's just Python." → C’est tout. C’est du Python, tout simplement. (not C’est ça. C’est juste du Python !); "You get 3 back. ✨" → Vous obtenez 3 en retour. ✨ (not Vous récupérez 3 en retour ! ✨ — lost code span, added exclamation mark).
Idioms take the plain meaning, not the picture: "Out of the box the app answers only requests addressed to localhost." → Par défaut, l’application répond uniquement aux requêtes adressées à localhost — not a calqued sortie de la boîte. "it stops being required" → il cesse d’être obligatoire, not il arrête d’être requis.
Exclamation marks are rare in French documentation: keep one only where the English carries genuine emphasis, with its espace insécable (§4); never add, never double, never in a heading. Emoji: keep the source's rare, deliberately placed emoji exactly where they are; never add new ones.

4. Typography

Espace insécable: put a no-break space (the character U+00A0 itself, never   and never an ordinary space) before ; : ! ? and %, and inside guillemets — after « and before ». So: Où placer ce code ? / le schéma suit : / « bonjour » / 100 %. Never inside code spans, code blocks, URLs, link targets or {#id} attributes; never after the !!! / ??? admonition markers or inside the ![ of an image; and no space at all before , or .
Quotation marks are guillemets « … » for quotations, scare quotes and example utterances; English "…" and “…” in the source prose become « … », with “…” for a quote inside a quote. Quotes inside code stay exactly as they are, and a code span is never wrapped in guillemets.
Apostrophe: the typographic ’ (U+2019) throughout the prose — l’outil, jusqu’à, C’est — and the straight ' only inside code. Do not elide onto a code span: la fonction add, le paramètre a, not l’add.
Accented capitals are mandatory (À partir de, État, Ça, Échantillonnage); the ligature is œ (cœur, nœud); ordinals are 1er, 2e, 3e (not 2ème).
Sentence case everywhere; French has no title case (Gérer les erreurs, not Gérer Les Erreurs). Language names, weekdays and months are lower-case (en anglais, en juillet); proper nouns keep their capitals (Python, GitHub).
Digits stay ASCII. Protocol revision strings such as 2026-07-28, version numbers, ports, status and error codes, RFC and SEP numbers are identifiers, copied byte for byte — never 28/07/2026, never 28 juillet 2026. Prose quantities take the decimal comma only when nothing but the separator changes (2,5 secondes), never inside code. Thousands and units take a no-break space (10 000, 30 s, 100 Mo — byte units are o, ko, Mo, Go in prose, unchanged inside code or quoted output).
Dashes: keep the source's em-dash incise with a space on each side (texte — incise — texte) or recast it with commas or parentheses. Ranges read de 3.10 à 3.14, never a hyphen. The ellipsis is the single character … in prose.
Abbreviations: e.g. → par exemple, i.e. → c’est-à-dire, etc. → etc., vs → ou / par rapport à; & in prose → et. No comma before et / ou closing a list.
Bold and italics land on the words that carry the source's emphasis; a bolded negation ("not" → pas / aucun) stays bold. English words kept in French text are set in normal type — no italics, no guillemets.

5. Terminology pointer

The termbase is glossary.json next to this file. It is injected into the prompt separately and its renderings override anything written here. This section only fixes the conventions the glossary assumes:

Terms in the glossary's keep list are copied exactly — same spelling and casing, not translated, italicised or quoted — and invariable in French (les SDK, les API, no plural s). They take an article by gender: le SDK, l’API (f.), le JSON, l’URL (f.), l’URI (m.), la CLI, le LLM, la SEP, la RFC.
Everything in code font — class, function, parameter and module names, protocol method strings (tools/call), header names, error text, config keys — stays byte-identical. Name the kind of thing in front where it helps: la classe Context, le paramètre lifespan=. A glossary term used as a code-font identifier stays English although its prose noun is translated: "the sampling capability" → la capacité sampling.
Text quoted from what the example code prints or displays — an output line, a log message, an error string, a UI label such as the Inspector's Tools and Resources tabs — stays exactly as the code emits it (usually English), in or out of code font. The guillemets around it are French; the text inside does not change.
France, not Québec, and natural French before anglicism: prefer the French word wherever developers in France use it — outil, requête, réponse, gestionnaire, dépendance, bibliothèque, dépôt, fichier, flux, en-tête, jeton, journal, déploiement, e-mail — and keep the English noun where they do, masculine, plural in -s: le prompt, le framework, le middleware, le build, le commit, le hook. Never the purist or Québec coinages cadriciel, intergiciel, courriel, téléverser. Verbs are French: déployer, fusionner (not merger), récupérer (not fetcher), analyser (not parser), journaliser (not logger), mettre en cache, déboguer; créer un commit, never commiter.
First-use gloss: a translated MCP concept the reader may need to map back to the English specification carries the English in parentheses on its first occurrence on a page — l’échantillonnage (sampling) — where the note says so.
One rendering per term per page: the glossary target, every time. Where an entry's note marks the choice as open or provisional, still use the listed target consistently — never requête in one paragraph and demande in the next.

6. Provisional note

The register, voice and terminology decisions above, and every entry in glossary.json, are provisional pending review by native French-speaking readers — in particular the translate-versus-keep line for individual nouns and the typographic apostrophe. To propose a change, edit this file or glossary.json in a pull request, ideally with a short good/bad example; never edit the generated pages/ or notices.md next to this file. The tool cannot tell a hand edit from its own output, so one would persist unchecked and be carried forward into later runs; a correction made here reaches the pages when they are regenerated with translate --lang fr --pages ….

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