Does google penalize you if you post content in french and english on a website

[EstherBrice]

I'm trying to encourage content editors to only  post content in either English or French. For example we have a French press release but the team are wanting it on our site in French and English.  I thought this would fall under duplicate content rules.

Does google penalize you if you post content in French and English on a website?

[effectdigital]

No - translations don't count as duplicate content, but you should ensure that your site has a proper multiregional build-out (e.g: site.com/press-releases/artice (EN) vs site.com/fr/press-releases/artice (FR)

You should properly 'build out' the site in an international way, don't use low quality auto-translate plugins or live-translation features. You will need all your hreflang tags set up properly, so Google knows they are alternate language page variants (see: https://yoast.com/hreflang-ultimate-guide/)

See this from 2011: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=UDg2AGRGjLQ&feature=emb_logo where Matt talks about whether translations are duplicate content. AFAIK Google's stance hasn't changed loads. The translation must add value and you must use human-translated content (written by someone competent enough, that it doesn't read as if it was written by a machine)

More recently John Mu (from Google) has said that auto-translated content won't gain penalties but the rankings will suck so basically still get humans to write stuff: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-auto-translating-content-penalty-28413.html

Interestingly Google recently said that they think there may come a time in the future where auto / machine-translated content is acceptable: https://www.seroundtable.com/machine-written-content-google-guidelines-28338.html

... but as of now, it's still considered poor and against guidelines!