Prompt to translate a content after creating a new content
In the answer to "How to implement side-by-side translation?", I describe how to do side my side translation by adding an entity reference field and linking back to the original English article.

For your case, you could use rules to create a French node when an English node is created, save the entity reference and redirect to node/*/translate where the French node would be displayed next to the English one.

If you want to take this approach, I can add more details. I think it would give a very nice workflow.