France is Back! In Website Form!

France.fr might just be the best thing to come out of France since Renault's Le Car, but is that a good thing?

Just like Alf, France is back! (Though not, thankfully, in Pog form.) Remember that ill-fated website they tried to launch last month? Remember how we mercilessly mocked the French both for cause and out of petty jealousy over their generous social welfare system which includes lengthy August holidays? Well, apparently in the new France things happen a little faster, because here we are, barely in the second half of August and lo and behold–france.fr is back and actually (somewhat) functional.

Of course, now that they website itself is up, we can’t make fun of it being unavailable. But we can make fun of the site itself, or at least point out some shortcomings. For example, although the homepage is fairly snappy, orderly-looking and well translated (we’ll get to that in a second), once you click a couple of links deep, you end up getting sent to other French government websites that aren’t in English. For example, if you want to know how internships work in France, you might end up on this page at france.fr, which offers a basic explanation of how internships work. The problem is that all the links on the page direct you, without warning, to French-only sites like this one, which we think is a list of questions you should ask about internship openings ( or “vacancies on offer” in the parlance of their translator. This is true throughout the site and is a major shortcoming considering the site’s ambition to be the world’s source for just this kind of information.

Speaking of translating, about halfway down the site’s homepage, on the left in blue text there’s a link entitled “Becoming an auto-entrepreneur.” Our immediate thought was “Wow, the French must have an amazing program to encourage automotive startups.” Imagine our surprise when we clicked the link to discover that it has something to do with an official government status sought by the unemployed. Since the the (French language) links on the page didn’t help to explain anything, we consulted Google Translate, which taught us that the French term auto-entrepreneur has nothing to do with cars or the auto industry and in fact means simply, “self-contractor.” In this context, of course, the whole page makes much more sense. Maybe the French government needs to rethink who they hire to translate.

Hilariously, the more things change at france.fr, the more they stay the same. At least we’ll always have Paris.