One article, three sites: what trilingual content actually costs

VieauQc is not a bilingual site with a language switch. It is three sites: French at the root, English at /en, and Simplified Chinese at /zh. They share components and one source file per guide, but each language is treated as a primary reading experience.

That decision was made on 29 July 2026, and it explains most of the editorial work that followed.

A guide is one MDX file with three layers. The title and summary use a FR | EN | ZH format. Section headers carry French children plus descriptionEn and descriptionZh. Quick answers have en and zh props. Checklist items have Chinese labels. The French narration has its own audioText. On the English site, the English props are not a footnote: they are the body. On the Chinese site, the Chinese props are the body.

The rule inside the project is a four-way mirror: any change to the French body must also update descriptionEn, descriptionZh and audioText. Audits check English parity, Chinese guides and audio text separately. Structural presence is not quality parity — the English parity audit still flags a small number of guides. The point is not that the audit is perfect; the point is that drift is visible.

News and readings use a different format. One French body, with translated blocks marked by HTML comments: <!-- en:start --> and <!-- zh:start -->. Guides keep a shared French slug across languages. News uses independent French and English slugs. The Chinese site uses English path words (/zh/tools, /zh/learn), not French or pinyin.

Chinese is not a full translation of the website. The editorial rule is to explain in Chinese how to do things in a French environment. Official links point to French pages. When something is not translated, it falls back to French, never English, because English would introduce a third language that belongs to neither the URL nor the surrounding content.

Source links follow the reader's language where possible: French and Chinese pages link the French official page, English pages link the English one. If an official source exists in only one language, link that language rather than substituting a different source.

The cost is real. Every body change is a four-way edit. Every new guide needs three titles, three summaries, English and Chinese section descriptions, and an audio script. The site needs separate route trees, a custom sitemap and a language-mapping layer. None of that is free.

But the alternative is worse: a translation toggle that quietly produces a second-class page. Treating each language as a site makes the gaps visible, and visible gaps can be fixed.