Should you use a canonical tag on translated content in a multi-language country?

[Zanox]

A customer of ours has a website in Belgium. There two main languages in Belgium: Dutch and French.
At first there was only a Dutch version with a .be extension. Right now they are implementing the French Belgium version on the URL website.be/fr. All of the content and comments will be translated. Also the URL’s will change from Dutch to French, so you've got two URL’s with the same content but in another language. Question: Should you use a canonical tag on translated content in a multi-language country?

I think Google will understand this is just for the usability for a Multilanguage country. What do you guys think???

[Mike.Goracke]

You shouldn't have to worry about it.

I would reference this article where Matt Cutts explains that if you are professionally translating it for usability... you are good; however, if you use Google translate to spam your content in a bunch of languages... that is bad.

Hope this helps and answers your question.

Mike

[Zanox]

Hi Mike,

Thanks for your reply and the linking

Just as I thought we don't have to worry about that as long we're optimizing the usability for the visitor. That's Google's way of thinking in all cases.

In addtion, I want to make a crazy skeptical statement:
After listening to Matt, we can conclude that:
It's perfectly fine by Google for a Dutch website (website.nl) to republish hand-translated content from a foreign website!

I don't think it will work like this. What do you think? (I know... this is a little bit of an other subject )

This is a Question that's coming into my mind right now. I know enough through your link for my main question. Thanks for that

[Aleyda]

Hi Wesley,

If you enable a new language version totally optimized in another language (From the URLs, to titles, descriptions, text content, comments, etc.) there shouldn't be any problem. If you want to help Google to identity that this is your French version (in this case algo specifically targeted to a Belgium language), you can use the hreflang tag specifying the language and country, as explained here, in your pages html head section. Additionally, you can add the hreflang annotations in your XML sitemap as described here. You can also use this tool to facilitate the process.

Best regards,

Aleyda

[Zanox]

Hi Aleyda,

Thanks for your answer and thanks for the links. As written in the description everything will be translated, so also the title, desc, comments etc.). So we don't have to worry about anything "everything is gonna be alright" (Bob Marley) :-).

In addition the hreflang annotations are a good way to communicate with Google about what is what

Thanks!

Best regards, Wesley