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The Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste has filed hundreds of complaints with Quebec’s language watchdog saying too many companies in St-Laurent’s industrial sector have English-only websites.

The Quebec sovereigntist group filed 423 complaints on Tuesday with the Office québécois de la langue française saying that Internet sites violate Quebec’s language laws.

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Earlier this year, language rights activist Jean Archambault, who has a PhD in political science, spent several months collecting data from 1,180 websites operating in the borough’s Technoparc and found that 31 per cent of the sites are English only and an additional 38 per cent of the sites had an English-only home page.

Archambault also found that only 2.5 per cent of the websites were in French only and 20.2 per cent provided information in French as well as English. However, the SSJB said that too many companies are using Google to translate their information from English to French. The companies work in the manufacturing and distribution sectors. The SSJB said the government needs to make sure that companies communicate with their francophone clients in French.

Later this month, new sign laws to ensure trademarks comply with the province’s “linguistic landscape” will go into effect. The new rules will allow businesses to keep their trademark names, even in English, but requires them to add a descriptor in French — not necessarily next to the name but somewhere that is visible.

Existing companies will have three years to comply, but new businesses will have to adopt the new signage immediately.

Presse Canadienne contributed to this report.