🗣️ Translating from French

This manual is about reading French as a source: what a translator must notice in a French text before writing English, Ukrainian or another target. French makes some things explicit that English leaves open (gender, tu and vous, the kind of past) and leaves open some things English makes explicit (on: "we", "they", "people" or "you"?). It also has a steep register scale, from the written literary tenses to the spoken French that drops ne and dislocates every subject. Writing French as a target is in Translating into French; the contrasts are in English and French: the pair manual and French and Ukrainian: the pair manual. The grammar of French is in the French manual.

1. Principles for a French source

1. Place the text on the register scale first. French written norms and spoken usage diverge more than English ones (fr 13): the same speaker writes Nous ne savons pas and says On sait pas. The tenses, the negation, nous/on, the questions and the vocabulary each tell where the text stands.
2. Read the variety. France, Belgium, Switzerland, Québec, Acadia and francophone Africa differ in vocabulary, numbers (septante, nonante in Belgium and Switzerland), meal names (dîner is lunch in Québec, Belgium and Switzerland) and some grammar. A Québec char is a car, not a chariot.
3. French is explicit about relations English leaves implicit, and implicit about agents. French spells out what a preposition relates (la clé de la porte), agrees every adjective, and marks every past as perfective or imperfective; but its on hides who acts, and its nominal style hides the verb.
4. Typography is information. Guillemets and dashes mark dialogue and turns; italics mark titles and foreign words; capitals are fewer than in English, so a capitalised word is often a name or an institution.

2. Meaning before form in a French source

2.1 On

On is a subject pronoun with no fixed person. Each occurrence must be read:

Agreement after on follows the meaning in speech (On est partis, plural participle, when on = nous), and that agreement is itself a clue: On est contentes tells that "we" are all women.

2.2 The nominal style

Formal French prefers nouns where English and Ukrainian prefer verbs: la mise en œuvre, la prise de conscience, le renforcement de la coopération. Read through the noun to the verb, and render by the target's preference (see Translating into English §2.1 and Translating into Ukrainian). Note that Ukrainian official prose has its own nominal style (здійснення, забезпечення), and the French nominal chain can be carried into Ukrainian further than into English, though not as far as a word-for-word version.

2.3 Implicit relations in noun phrases

French joins nouns with de and à, and the relation must be read: un verre de vin (a glass of wine, filled) vs un verre à vin (a wine glass); la peur du loup (fear of the wolf, or the wolf's fear?); le vélo de Paul (Paul's bike). English renders by compounds, 's or of; Ukrainian by case (склянка вина, келих для вина, страх перед вовком).

2.4 Doublets and register in the lexicon

French has many Latinate doublets: a popular form that went through sound change and a learned form borrowed later (frêle/fragile, loyal/légal, hôtel/hôpital) (fr 14.2). The learned form is usually more formal, and its English look-alike may be a false friend (§5).

3. Register and style in a French source

3.1 The register signals

Tatoeba keeps a matched pair at the colloquial end: I dunno if it's a bug or what, but this software doesn't work right / J'sais pas si c'est un bug ou quoi, mais ce logiciel ne marche pas correctement (tatoeba:459808-459852): the elided J'sais, the dropped ne and ou quoi match English dunno, or what and right. Tatoeba also shows register drift: The car is ready rendered La bagnole est prête (tatoeba:46819-1797589), slang for a neutral source. Read in the other direction, a French bagnole in a source must become a colloquial English word (motor in British slang, ride or wheels in American), not car alone, if the colloquial tone matters.

3.2 The literary tenses

The passé simple is the tense of written narrative; it is not "more past" than the passé composé, only more written. The imperfect is background, habit, description, an action in progress. The plus-que-parfait and the passé antérieur order events. The imperfect and pluperfect subjunctive (qu'il fût, qu'il eût été) are literary; the pluperfect subjunctive also serves as a literary conditional past: Passepartout … eût volontiers embrassé le pilote = aurait volontiers embrassé, "would willingly have embraced" (gut-verne-80-days:1341).

Into English: passé simple and passé composé of events become the simple past; imperfect becomes the simple past, past progressive, used to or would by sense. Into Ukrainian: events → perfective past; background, habit and process → imperfective past (see French and Ukrainian: the pair manual). The literary flavour of the passé simple is not translated as such; it is kept by the target's literary narrative style.

3.3 Tu and vous

French tu and vous map directly onto Ukrainian ти and ви, with differences of use (§ French and Ukrainian: the pair manual): Ukrainian uses ви to parents in traditional rural speech, where French uses tu. Into English the contrast is lost, and the moment a pair of characters moves from vous to tu (On pourrait se tutoyer ?) needs an English equivalent: first names, an explicit line (Call me Jean), a change of tone.

3.4 The subjunctive

The French subjunctive is often grammatical, not meaningful: it is required after il faut que, bien que, pour que, avant que, verbs of wanting and feeling. Il faut que tu l'aides is just "You must help her" (tatoeba:10731-435872). Do not translate it as an English subjunctive or a may. Where the subjunctive is a choice it means something: Je cherche un livre qui soit en français ("one that is in French, if there is one") vs qui est en français ("a specific one").

3.5 Expletive ne

The ne after avant que, à moins que, craindre que and comparisons (plus grand qu'il ne pensait) is not a negation: Je rentrerai le linge avant qu'il ne pleuve is "I'll take in the washing before it rains" (tatoeba:26852-457151). A translator who renders it as a negation reverses the sense; this is a critical accuracy error.

4. Terminology in French sources

• Official terms. France publishes official equivalents for new technical terms (FranceTerme, in the Journal officiel); Québec's Office québécois de la langue française publishes its Grand dictionnaire terminologique. A French source in a public body's style may use them (courriel, mot-dièse, infonuagique in Québec), and the translator should recognise them as the terms for e-mail, hashtag, cloud computing.
• EU French. EU French has a stable vocabulary that the DGT translation memory shows: État membre, règlement, directive, considérant (recital), dispositif, alinéa (unnumbered subparagraph), paragraphe (numbered paragraph) (commission-1982).
• Legal and administrative realia: préfet, mairie, conseil général / départemental, Conseil d'État, Cour de cassation: kept, explained or matched, never look-alike-translated.

5. False friends out of French

The French manual lists false friends with English (fr 14.4); the most damaging in translation:

With Ukrainian, look-alikes are fewer but exist through shared Latin and through French borrowings into Ukrainian: la comédie (comedy, but also "play, drama" in older French) vs комедія; le magasin and магазин agree ("shop"), and both disagree with English magazine.

5.1 The pair lists and the most frequent traps

The full lists, both directions, by domain and measured, are False friends: English and French and French and Ukrainian: false friends; the context-dependent renderings of French words are in English and French: renderings by context and French and Ukrainian: renderings by context. Into English the traps met most often in the corpora (2026-11-06) are politique, demander, disposition, informations, contrôler, traitement, dans le cadre de, nouvelle, société, réaliser, délai and propre (see Translating into English §5); into Ukrainian they are the gender of nouns (l'enfant / дитина, le problème / проблема), the French words Ukrainian also borrowed with another meaning (journal / журнал, cabinet / кабінет, régime / режим, cadre / кадри, concours / конкурс), and the government of verbs (penser à / думати про, aider qqn / допомагати кому).

6. Grammar transfer from French

6.1 Gender and agreement

French tells the gender of people through adjectives, participles and determiners: Je suis heureuse tells that the speaker is a woman. This information must be carried: into Ukrainian easily (Я щаслива), into English only where English has means (she, a name, a role noun) or by compensation. Europarl shows the case: je suis heureuse de pouvoir m'exprimer (europarl-v8:1484) has I am happy to take the floor on the English side, where nothing says the speaker is a woman.

The French masculine generic (les étudiants, le candidat) may be specific or generic, and current French also uses the inclusive point médian (les étudiant·es) and doubled forms (celles et ceux). Read which is meant; render a generic in English with a neutral plural, and in Ukrainian per Translating into Ukrainian.

6.2 Clitic pronouns: y, en, le

Y and en stand for prepositional phrases (à cela, de cela, là), and le can stand for a whole clause or adjective: Tu es fatigué ? — Je le suis ("I am"). Resolve each to its antecedent before translating; J'en ai deux is "I have two (of them)"; Ukrainian: У мене їх два / дві, with gender and case from the antecedent.

6.3 Present with depuis, recent past with venir de, near future with aller

• J'attends depuis des heures → I've been waiting for hours (tatoeba:2314-4169); Ukrainian present with вже: Я чекаю вже кілька годин.
• Je viens d'arriver → I've just arrived / I just arrived (tatoeba:257520-6531); Ukrainian Я щойно приїхав.
• Je vais partir → I'm going to leave; Ukrainian perfective future Я зараз піду or Я збираюся йти.

6.4 Clefts and dislocation

French clefts (C'est moi qui suis en tort, tatoeba:32552-2109218) and dislocations (Mon frère, il travaille à Lyon) mark focus and topic. English renders the cleft (It's me who's wrong), stress, or nothing; Ukrainian uses word order and particles (Це я винен, Винен саме я). Dislocation in colloquial French is the normal way to state a topic; rendering it literally into English (My brother, he works in Lyon) marks a dialect, which may or may not be intended.

6.5 Infinitives and nominal clauses

French uses the infinitive where English uses an -ing or a clause: Avant de partir, Après avoir mangé, Sans le savoir. English: before leaving, after eating, without knowing it; Ukrainian: перед тим як піти, поївши, не знаючи цього.

7. Idioms, culture-bound items and songs

• Idioms: many French idioms have English counterparts with other images (avoir d'autres chats à fouetter = "have other fish to fry"; poser un lapin = "stand someone up"; coûter les yeux de la tête = "cost an arm and a leg"). Ukrainian has its own (мати інші клопоти; не прийти на побачення, no idiom; коштувати шалених грошей).
• Culture-bound items: school (collège, lycée, le bac, les grandes écoles), administration, food (le goûter), holidays (la Toussaint, le 14 Juillet). General manual §7.2.
• Bible and liturgy: the Louis Segond translation renders the divine name as l'Éternel where English traditions write the LORD: L'Éternel est mon berger: je ne manquerai de rien for The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want (bible-kjv-lsg:PSA_23:1). A translator from a French Protestant text must render l'Éternel by the target tradition's form (the LORD; in Ukrainian Господь), not by "the Eternal".
• Songs: French song elides and drops ne, counts the sung mute e as a syllable (u-ne bel-le), and rhymes on the final syllable. Its grammar is the spoken grammar plus poetic inversions. A gloss renders the meaning; a singable translation recounts syllables, because English and Ukrainian have no sung mute e. The public-domain round Frère Jacques is the classic case of a singable English version that keeps the tune and the bells and changes who rings them (general manual §9.2).

8. Names, numbers, dates, typography in French sources

• Typography carries structure (fr 12): « » with no-break spaces; dialogue opened by « and continued by dashes; 19th-century editions use -- for the dialogue dash, as in --Vous croyez donc maintenant à ce singulier voyage autour du monde? (gut-verne-80-days:1257). A dash at the start of a line is a new speaker.
• Numbers: 3,5 is three and a half; 1 000 is a thousand; 1.000 in some older texts too. Un milliard is 10⁹; un billion is 10¹² (English trillion). Belgian and Swiss septante, nonante (and Swiss huitante) are 70, 90 (80).
• Dates: le 6 juin 2026; 06/06/2026 is day/month/year. The French quinze jours is two weeks and huit jours one week.
• Times: 14 h 30 is 2.30 p.m.
• Abbreviations: M. Monsieur, Mme, Mlle, Me (Maître, for lawyers and notaries), Dr, St (saint); cf., p. ex., etc.
• Capitals: le président de la République (lowercase président), l'État, le Sénat; nationality adjectives lowercase (les Français as nouns are capitalised).

9. Quality checks for translations out of French

Add to the general checklist:

1. Every on has a decided reference.
2. Every expletive ne is read as no negation.
3. Every subjunctive was read as grammatical or meaningful.
4. Every y, en, le has its antecedent.
5. Gender information given by French agreement is carried, or its loss is deliberate.
6. Register: dropped ne, on for "we", elisions and slang are matched by target means; literary tenses are rendered by the target's literary style, not by archaism.
7. Numbers: decimal comma, milliard/billion, Belgian and Swiss numerals.

Typical labels: accuracy / mistranslation / negation (expletive ne negated); accuracy / mistranslation / false friend; style / register (spoken French made formal, or the reverse); accuracy / omission (the speaker's gender lost where it mattered).

10. Worked examples: French sources into Ukrainian and English

The French–Ukrainian Tatoeba pairs (pairs.tsv, CC BY 2.0 FR, authors in each row) show what a French source makes explicit and what it leaves to the translator. The French sentences here have the lower ids and were written first.

10.1 Agreement as information

The past participle's agreement with a preceding direct object (vue) is the one place where French gives a gender English would not; it is easy to miss when reading quickly.

10.2 Tense, aspect and venir de

10.3 On, register and idioms

10.4 The partitive

Je veux du lait et des biscuits ! → Хочу молока та печива! (tatoeba:2532549-5718295); Donne-moi du lait aussi. → Дай мені ще й молока. (tatoeba:433404-502116): the French partitive is the Ukrainian partitive genitive, as French and Ukrainian: the pair manual §2.1 says. Je n'ai pas de famille. → В мене немає родини. (tatoeba:1038158-3516727): de after negation is the genitive of negation.

11. French sources by domain

• EU French. EU legal French uses the present for obligation (Les États membres veillent à ce que …: "Member States shall ensure that …"), considérant for recitals, dispositif for the enacting terms, and its own terms: État membre, autorité compétente, mise sur le marché, règlement d'exécution. The DGT memory (dgt-tm-v2021) gives the English; for Ukrainian, the translations of the EU acquis used for legal approximation give держава-член, компетентний орган, розміщення на ринку, імплементаційний регламент (here імплементаційний is the established term).
• French administrative and legal French (France): arrêté, décret, circulaire, préfecture, mairie, conseil municipal, tribunal judiciaire, Cour de cassation, Conseil d'État. Ukrainian: наказ / розпорядження, указ / постанова, циркуляр, префектура (kept), мерія, муніципальна рада, суд, Касаційний суд, Державна рада (kept, explained).
• Québec and Canadian French in federal texts is co-drafted with English, not translated (general manual §12.4); terms come from TERMIUM Plus and the OQLF (courriel, clavarder, infonuagique, magasiner). A Québec source uses char, dîner (lunch), souper (dinner), fin de semaine: read them in the Québec sense.
• Medical French: médecin traitant (GP), ordonnance (prescription), posologie (dosage), effets indésirables (side effects), notice (leaflet). Abbreviations: IDM (myocardial infarction), TA (blood pressure), AVC (stroke).
• Scientific French uses nous or on, and the conditional for unconfirmed results (la molécule serait active): render as hedging (appears to be, ймовірно), not as a conditional.

12. Reading non-standard French sources

The two Bible traditions show the same verse in two archaic deltas: Louis Segond's Que la lumière soit! Et la lumière fut. and Kulish's Настань, сьвіте! І настав сьвіт. (bible-lsg-kulish:GEN_1:3): French uses que + subjunctive (a third-person command), Ukrainian a second-person imperative addressed to the light, in the spelling of 1905 (сьвіт).

13. How Mova handles it

Today.

• Mova reads French with its English tree parser after a treebank's tags are mapped (en xpos-fill): on UD French GSD (UD 2.18, train → dev, 2026-10-22) LAS 87.00 with the parser's own tags and 89.78 with gold tags; 7.2% of development tokens are unknown to the tagger, which tags them right 84.8% of the time (French manual, fr 14). There is no French lexicon, no French morphology and no French frames reader, so on, the expletive ne, the subjunctive and clitics are parsed as trees but not interpreted.
• tools/translate does not translate from French. Its design says how a French reader would plug in: a French text read into its own world and a reader learned into the same meta-world on verse pairs, aligned by IBM Model 1 (ibm.rs), as the Hebrew reader is (hebrew.rs). The French manual names the French–English concept map this needs, to be learned from the parallel texts.
• tools/parallel has built the English–French corpora quoted here: Tatoeba with sentence ids and authors, Europarl, DGT-TM, the Louis Segond Bible against the WEB and the KJV, and Gutenberg book pairs aligned with the Gale–Church length model.

Planned and being built. The Eel's round tr-fr-en (being built) would train a French reader into the meta-world on these pairs and measure it on held-out pairs, with the Gutenberg books (French originals with English translations) as data of known direction. The French Nightingale 🐦 (tools/nightingale, being built; under the Eel, with its own Sol consultant) would model French naturalness from the French Wikipedia, to be fetched; for translation from French its use is to place a source on the register scale (§3.1): a sentence far from encyclopaedic French in a known direction (dropped ne, on, elisions) is colloquial.

Where Mova stops. No interpretation of on, y, en, the subjunctive or the expletive ne; no register reading of French; no French translation.

Sources

The French manual and its sources (chapters 6, 8, 12, 13, 14); (commission-1982) (EU legal French terms paragraphe, alinéa); the general manual's sources. Corpus examples: Tatoeba EN–FR and FR–UK (CC BY 2.0 FR), Europarl v8, Project Gutenberg (Verne trans. Towle), Louis Segond 1910 with the KJV and with the Kulish/Puluj Bible (1905).

The Elamur team

This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/translation/from-fr/