# Lutrakit is now available in French

Lutrakit’s complete public site becomes available in French on Tuesday, 8 September 2026. The release covers navigation, tool interfaces, supporting pages, error recovery and every article that is public on launch day. French pages use their own stable `/fr/` addresses, while English remains at the root and Spanish and Japanese keep their existing URLs.

This is a language release, not a tool release. The same 26 tools available before 8 September remain available afterwards. Their processing model is unchanged: supported files are handled inside the browser, and Lutrakit’s no-upload browser tests continue to guard that boundary.

<figure class="guide-visual">
  <img src="/guides/french-site-launch-fr.jpg" width="1440" height="900" loading="lazy" decoding="async" alt="French Lutrakit home page with the French language selected and the localized tool workbench visible">
  <figcaption>The French home page uses the same workbench, privacy boundary and navigation as the other public versions.</figcaption>
</figure>

## What is translated on launch day

The release is site-wide rather than a translated landing page. The build published on 8 September contains the following French surfaces:

| Surface | French launch scope |
| --- | --- |
| Main navigation and discovery | Home, tool directory, local search, categories, language menu and footer |
| Tools | All 26 tools public on 8 September, including their controls, limits, progress, success and error states |
| Editorial content | The ten existing guides plus this release article, with French titles, summaries, bodies and dates |
| Supporting information | About, privacy and legal pages |
| Recovery and offline support | Localized 404 and offline fallback pages, with French pages included in the progressive cache |
| Search metadata | Self-canonical URLs, reciprocal `hreflang`, French language metadata and sitemap entries |

Future scheduled tools and their companion articles do not appear early. When each one reaches its own publication date, its reviewed French version joins the other three languages in the same dated build.

## French has explicit, shareable URLs

The language switcher changes the address as well as the visible text. For example, the PDF Merge tool is available at `/pdf-merge/` in English and `/fr/fusionner-pdf/` in French. The guide index is `/blog/` in English and `/fr/guides/` in French.

These distinct URLs make a language choice shareable and predictable. They also avoid changing a page silently according to an IP address. Google’s current multilingual-site guidance recommends separate URLs for language versions and explicit links that let a visitor choose another language. Lutrakit follows that model and keeps the root URL as the `x-default` fallback.

Each public version lists itself and the other live translations with reciprocal `hreflang` links. Google’s localized-page documentation says those return links are required for the annotations to be understood reliably. The French release is therefore atomic: the links appear in English, Spanish, Japanese and French only when all four destinations exist in the same build.

## A route you can verify yourself

Take the PDF Merge page as a reproducible example:

1. Open `/pdf-merge/` and use the language menu to choose **Français**.
2. Confirm that the destination is `/fr/fusionner-pdf/`, not the English route with a cookie or query parameter.
3. View the page source and check that the document declares `lang="fr-FR"`.
4. Check the canonical link: it must point back to the same French URL.
5. Check the alternate links: `en`, `es`, `ja`, `fr` and `x-default` must all be present, and the language switcher must open each matching page.

The W3C recommends declaring the document language on the HTML element. That declaration helps browsers and assistive technologies process text using the right language conventions; it is separate from the links used to connect localized URLs.

## The privacy boundary has not changed

Translation does not introduce an upload service, account or remote conversion API. Tool code still processes supported inputs in the page, a browser worker or a local WebAssembly module. The release checks exercise every public file tool at selection time and representative processing paths while blocking unexpected network requests that could carry selected bytes.

You can repeat a smaller check with a harmless sample: open the browser Network panel, clear it, select the sample in a French tool, complete the operation and inspect requests made after selection. A request for an application asset is not the same as an upload; look for a request body containing the selected sample. The broader method and its limits are documented in [How Lutrakit processes files in your browser](/blog/browser-local-processing/).

## What this first public French version does not claim

The French catalog received automated parity checks and AI-assisted language review. The release does not claim a native-speaker review of every line. If a term is awkward or a control and its explanation disagree, the About page provides the project contact.

The launch also does not promise immediate search-engine indexing. The sitemap and language annotations make the new routes discoverable, but crawlers decide when to visit and index them. Nor does the site force a French redirect: a visitor can keep or share any of the four explicit language versions.

Finally, “complete” means parity with the public site on 8 September. It does not publish future tools ahead of their reviewed dates, and it does not turn internal prototypes into routes. That boundary keeps this language release separate from the next scheduled tool-and-article pair on 29 September.