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I'm working in web development and want to tell my users to go look for an item in the sidebar.

Google translate returns me "Barre latérale" but, as a French speaker, that doesn't feel right to me.

Just like a header is "une entête", is there a proper way to say "a sidebar" in French?

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Word reference has pulled up these results:

  • encadré (for a webpage)

http://www.wordreference.com/enfr/sidebar

This word can also be seen in popular use here: http://www.linguee.fr/anglais-francais/traduction/sidebar.html

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I'd say un menu latéral, if looks somewhat like a menu. But it seems that barre latérale, which sounds maybe more like a toolbar, is nevertheless the most common name for a sidebar.

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    As a developer I would understand "menu latéral" while I would not feel sure of my understanding of "encadré". To me it is best to keep it untranslated though ("il faut qu'il y ait un lien vers la home page dans la sidebar"): even though this is actually bad French, this is not ambiguous on a technical standpoint.
    – Shlublu
    Jul 25, 2013 at 21:33
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If for some reason I wanted to avoid barre latérale or plain sidebar, I would probably use “la barre de gauche/droite”, though it loses some generality. If it needs to stay generic, why not “le bloc latéral”?

Or if you want to stay in the tone of entête, you can dig in publishing idiom and say les marges.

Or you could also specify the function of the bar, as in “les flux latéraux” or “le menu latéral”,

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