I have a French Chateau site that I did a couple of years ago for an English couple targetting other English tourists - the site is at the top of Google for most English keywords. They now want to keep the English version but also have an additional French version of the same site to attract French customers.

What is the best way to achieve this? - the budget will be minimal!!

Do I need to recreate each page with French keywords in the urls and French keywords in the alt text etc and a French translation of the content? Or will this get the pages dumped into the supplemental because of duplicate content?

Also, is there some form of programme that will do things for you?

Would appreciate any advice as this is all new to me.

French is not English so how can it be duplicate?

Ask somebody who speaks both languages to translate it properly. There must be some some language students around who want some practice and "beer tokens"

Do I need to recreate each page with French keywords in the urls and French keywords in the alt text etc and a French translation of the content?

If you have your text written in the page, yes.
If you have the texts coming from a db, it depends of the structure of your db.

Also, is there some form of program that will do things for you?

Oh, there are. But don't wait for miracles.
The result is always almost crap for a native french speaking person.
French is way more complex on the grammar side than English, and the context of the words do have an impact on the meaning of the sentences.

Don't rely on automatic translation tools more than to give a merely rough literal translation. But the sentences will always look like being written by a toddler.

I think a Google Translation add-on would help you for this purpose. I use such add-on for my zen-cart site. When visitors want to use your site in French, they would only need to click the Google translation box and choose French from there.

think a Google Translation add-on would help you for this purpose. I use such add-on for my zen-cart site. When visitors want to use your site in French, they would only need to click the Google translation box and choose French from there.

Does this mean than you DON'T need to recreate all the pages in French? Google will just automatically do so each time a page is loaded?

If so, this could be the cheapest solution - the customer concerned has a very small budget - but it won't do much for their SEO for French searches I assume?

Translate does an "on the fly" translation BUT I wouldn't rely on it.

here's an example

Original

My dog has no nose!

How does he smell?

Terrible!

to French

Mon chien n'a pas de nez!

Comment fait-il sentir?

Terrible!

back to English

My dog has no nose!

How does it feel?

Terrible!

Hmm! It may have lost something along the way.

Auto translate tools are more likely to LOSE you the business than gain some.

And even, the sentence

Comment fait-il sentir?

Sounds like Yoda have written it.
I'd translate it back to english as

How does he make smell

"Sentir" has 2 meanings in French.
One is "feeling", and the other is "smelling". You can only determine which one it is by taking the whole sentence in account.

And the sentence "how does he smell" could be translated to either "what odor does my dog has" or "how do my dog smells (with no nose)".
Here again, translation engines are usually lost.

So, don't bother.
Google translate is here just to give you an little help if you want the translation of a word.
But for whole sentences, it can only be used as a hint, not as the truth.

Many thanks for your info all. I shall feed this info back to the customer.