> Am 10.04.2015 um 11:51 schrieb <joasyannick@gmail.com> <joasyannick@gmail.com>:
> 
> Dear everyone,
> 
> I am writting a French document.
> I would like to turn off the French character spacing temporarily in order to
> typeset English document title or URL. For instance, I would like to define the commands
> 
> \def\englishtitle#1{\turnofffrenchcharacterspacing{\em #1}\turnonfrenchcharacterspacing}
> \def\url#1{\turnofffrenchcharacterspacing{\em #1}\turnonfrenchcharacterspacing}

You can use the \resetcharacterspacing command to disable the spacing.

\setcharacterspacing[frenchpunctuation]

\definestartstop
  [EnglishTitle]
  [commands=\resetcharacterspacing,
   style=italic]

\starttext

text: «text» \EnglishTitle{text: «text»}

\stoptext

> so that a title link “Example: English Title” will be italicised and will not have a space before “:”;
> and a URL like “http://www.example.com <http://www.example.com/>” neither.

The \url and \hyphenatedurl need to be fixed.

Wolfgang