Translate the documentation into French

[helmihyo]

Adds French as a third language. All 21 pages translated.

Read this before reviewing

Nobody who reads French has read this. That was decided rather than overlooked: the question was raised before any page was translated, and the answer was to publish without a French reviewer. Flagging it here so it is visible to whoever merges, not buried in a chat log.

What that means in practice: everything below is a mechanical check. None of it can tell you whether a sentence says the right thing. The pages carry fuse ratings, voltages, current limits, polarity instructions and ABYC references — a mistranslated "must" or an inverted polarity would pass every check in this PR.

Terminology

Fixed up front in solutions/translation/french-glossary.md, before any page was translated — the order that kept terms from drifting in Finnish.

carrier board → carte porteuse, which is a deliberate divergence from Finnish. Finnish uses emolevy (literally motherboard), chosen for familiarity over accuracy; French takes the accurate term. The glossary records this as a decision so nobody "harmonises" the two languages later, and notes the practical consequence: the Finnish glossary tells translators to spell out the CM5/board relationship in passages where emolevy would invert it, and French does not need that warning.

Two rules the Finnish glossary does not cover, because they are specific to French: the address form is the vouvoiement imperative, and French typography needs a narrow no-break space before ; : ! ? and guillemets for quotations.

The machinery earned its keep

This is the first language added since #30, and it behaved as intended on first real use: French built and fell back to English from the first commit, and the status report listed all 21 pages as missing with the stamp each would need.

Anchors: 20 broke, four more than the Finnish pass. In French the daemon and REST API headings also change slug, where the Finnish ones happened to coincide with English by luck. Without check_anchors.py these would have shipped — mkdocs build --strict reports nothing. All 2925 anchors in the built site now resolve.

Verified

• uv run mkdocs build --strict passes
• 2925 anchors resolve across all three languages
• 2570 local resource references resolve; per-page image counts on French pages match the English originals exactly, on every page
• Structure compared page by page: headings, list items, numbered steps, images, admonitions, table rows and code fences match on all 21 pairs
• Code fences byte-identical — no command, config snippet or terminal output drifted
• No numeric value invented: no number appears only in the French text. Numbers appearing only in English are English repeating a term where French uses a reference — 3.3V rail … from the 3.3V rail becomes la ligne 3,3 V … cette ligne, and one NMEA 2000 of thirteen is carried by a pronoun. Both checked by hand.
• All 21 pages stamped and reporting current

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

[helmihyo]

Self-review

I wrote this branch and I do not read French, so this is a mechanical pass. It cannot tell you whether a sentence says the right thing — the limitation already stated in the description stands.

One real defect, found by testing a claim I made rather than re-reading it.

This PR adds a typography rule and breaks it 334 times

french-glossary.md, added in this same PR, says:

Narrow no-break space before ; : ! ? and inside « »

The 21 translated pages contain 334 plain spaces before those characters and zero narrow or non-breaking ones. Every Symptômes :, every deux modes : le mode solo. The rule and its violation land in the same change.

It is not cosmetic. A plain space before a colon lets the line break in front of it, which is exactly the "sloppy-looking translated page" the glossary warns about — and it is the first thing a French reader notices.

One thing worth deciding rather than assuming, since I wrote the rule too: U+202F (narrow no-break) is typographically correct but renders inconsistently across fonts. U+00A0 (ordinary no-break) is universally supported and is what most French technical documentation uses in practice. I would fix to U+00A0 and amend the glossary to say so, rather than chase the narrower character. Either is a scripted change over the same 334 sites; leaving them plain is the one option I would argue against.

Everything else I could check is clean

• No carte mère anywhere — not in the pages, mkdocs.yml or the glossary. The divergence from Finnish is applied consistently.
• Guillemets are used in prose (29). The 68 straight quotes are !!! type "Title" markdown syntax, which requires them; the remaining 12 are inside code fences. No straight quotes in French prose.
• Footnotes survived — [^ssh] and [^rs422] are present with both reference and definition.
• ## CAN FD / NMEA 2000 and ## RS-485 (NMEA 0183) kept their English form, so links to them resolve without rewriting. That is the glossary's protocol-names rule doing useful work, not luck.
• No en/ or fr/ segment leaked into any in-page path.
• Two bare !!! note admonitions left bare, so admonition_translations supplies the French title rather than the page hard-coding it.

Still unverified

The French prose itself. No one who reads French has looked at it, by decision. Everything above is structure and characters.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code