Best practice for apostrophes and single quotes?

[renestach]

Hello!

In our French XML translations, we see that translators often use the apostrophe U+0027 (') in sentences like Je t'taime. This character is directly available on their keyboard. When the file is saved, this character is escaped and appears as Je t\'aime in the source (which causes some issues in the apps that are using this).

From a typographic point of view, the correct character would be U+2019 (’), the right single quotation mark, which is also used as the proper apostrophe. However, this character is not directly available on standard French keyboards. The two characters look very similar, but technically and typographically they are different.

U+0027 ASCII apostrophe: Je t'aime.
U+2019 typographic apostrophe: Je t’aime.

Are there any best practice recommendations how to handle this?