🗣️ Translating into French

This manual is about writing French as a target: what a French text translated from English or Ukrainian must look like to read as French. French is less tolerant than English of repetition, of loose attachment, of the passive and of noun stacks, and it has fixed typographic rules that a translator must follow to the space. Its relation to anglicisms is contested; this manual takes the position of the whole folder: neither borrowing nor purism is a rule, measured usage in the right register decides. Reading French as a source is in Translating from French; the contrasts are in English and French: the pair manual and French and Ukrainian: the pair manual. French grammar is in the French manual.

1. Principles for a French target

1. Choose the variety and the register. France, Belgium, Switzerland, Québec and Africa differ in vocabulary and some usage (fr 13); the brief decides. Then choose the place on the register scale: written French is more formal than written English at the same purpose, and a French translation of a casual English web text is usually neutral-written, not spoken French, unless the source imitates speech.
2. French builds the noun phrase from the head outwards. English road safety awareness campaign is read backwards and rebuilt with prepositions: campagne de sensibilisation à la sécurité routière.
3. French dislikes the bare repetition English accepts. The Commission … the Commission … the Commission becomes la Commission … celle-ci … l'institution, or a restructured sentence. But terms are not varied (§4).
4. French marks relations English leaves implicit: a verb where English has a preposition (the man in the car → l'homme qui se trouvait dans la voiture, when the location is the point), a connective where English juxtaposes.
5. Typography is part of the language. Spaces before ; : ! ?, guillemets with spaces, the decimal comma, lowercase days and nationality adjectives (fr 12).

2. Meaning before form in a French target

2.1 Transposition and modulation

Vinay and Darbelnet's procedures were named on the English–French pair (general manual §2.2), and French targets need them constantly:

The chassé-croisé is the signature English → French shift: English puts the manner in the verb and the path in a particle (run out, swim across, limp in); French puts the path in the verb and the manner in an adverbial (sortir en courant, traverser à la nage, entrer en boitant). Ukrainian, like English, can put the manner in the verb and the path in a prefix (вибігти, перепливти), so the chassé-croisé is a French problem, not a Ukrainian one.

2.2 Verbs, nouns and connectives

French official prose is nominal (la mise en œuvre), but French journalism and fiction are not; a translation from English may use the French nominal style only where the register is official. French joins sentences with explicit connectives (or, donc, en effet, toutefois, ainsi) more than English; adding them where English juxtaposes is often the right explicitation, not an addition.

3. Register and style in a French target

3.1 Spoken French in writing

When the source imitates speech (dialogue, chat, interviews, comics), the target can use the written marks of spoken French: dropped ne (J'sais pas), on for "we", elisions (t'as, y a), dislocation (Moi, je …), colloquial vocabulary (bosser, boulot, truc). Tatoeba pairs the registers well: 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). Do not raise the register past the source's (The car is ready → La bagnole est prête, tatoeba:46819-1797589, makes a neutral sentence slang).

3.2 Tu and vous

Every English you addressed to someone gets tu or vous (general manual §3.3): vous for strangers, customers, official texts, most instructions (Appuyez sur …) and the plural; tu for children, family, close friends, the informal internet, and in many company cultures and brands that address their customers with tu deliberately. A brand's choice is house style. Tatoeba offers Parlez-vous français ?, Parles-tu français ? and Tu parles français ? for one English question (tatoeba:415441-14077, -1031677, -7281436).

3.3 Legal and administrative French

• Obligation in the present indicative. French legislative drafting states obligations in the present: English shall apply is sont applicables; shall not exceed is ne dépasse pas. DGT: the following maximum rates shall apply / les taux maximum suivants sont applicables (dgt-tm-v2021:874); the sulphur content shall not exceed 3,00 % by mass / la teneur en soufre ne dépasse pas 3,00 % en masse (dgt-tm-v2021:1385). French also uses doit / doivent: shall not be less than 50 % / ne doivent pas être inférieurs à 50 % (dgt-tm-v2021:1343). Never the future sera, which reads as a prediction.
• Formulas: Mr President → Monsieur le Président (europarl-v8:465); honourable Members → Mesdames et Messieurs les députés, chers collègues; I would like to → je voudrais, je tiens à.
• Subdivisions: paragraphe for a numbered paragraph, alinéa for an unnumbered one; point, sous-point, tiret for list items (commission-1982).

4. Terminology and anglicisms: decided by usage

4.1 Official lists and living usage

France fixes official equivalents for English technical terms (FranceTerme, published in the Journal officiel) and requires them in its administration; Québec's Office québécois de la langue française does the same for Québec. These lists are house style for those bodies and binding in their texts. Outside them, the question is what French speakers of the register and domain actually write.

4.2 Measured cases

In the French side of Europarl v8 (2 051 014 sentence pairs, debates of 1996–2011; counted 2026-11-06 with whole-word matches; part of this French is itself translated):

The same counts show semantic anglicisms, French words used in an English sense:

Two lessons. First, the verdicts differ word by word, and nothing but usage decides them. Second, the measurement must be of the right slice: a formal parliamentary register in this table; a tech blog or a novel's dialogue would give other figures, and Québec French others again. The French Nightingale is being built to make these measurements over the French Wikipedia (§15).

4.3 Terms

Terms are not varied for style. Inside a document, one concept keeps one term, even though French avoids repeating ordinary words. Check terms against the DGT translation memory for EU texts, TERMIUM Plus for Canadian usage, FranceTerme and the OQLF's Grand dictionnaire terminologique for official equivalents.

5. False friends into French

The traps are English words with French look-alikes (the full list is in English and French: the pair manual):

In Europarl v8, English actually is rendered réellement or vraiment (2 077 sentences), en fait (1 328) and effectivement (999); co-occurrence with actuellement (197) is almost always an unrelated "currently" in the same sentence (general manual §5).

5.1 The pair lists and the most frequent traps

The full lists are False friends: English and French and French and Ukrainian: false friends; the context-dependent renderings are in English and French: renderings by context and French and Ukrainian: renderings by context. From English the traps met most often in Europarl and DGT (2026-11-06) are institutional: regulation (règlement for an EU act), implement (mettre en œuvre; implémenter is IT jargon), support (soutenir), provision (disposition), application (demande, candidature), policy (politique), data (données), control (maîtriser, contrôle in EU terms), issue (question), relevant (pertinent, compétent), people (personnes) and company (société); the everyday classics (actually, eventually, library, sensible, sympathetic) are rarer in these corpora but just as real. From Ukrainian, watch the words Ukrainian took from French with another meaning (кабінет, журнал, кадри, режим, бюро), the Russian-channel readings (час is "time", not heure), and gender (проблема is feminine, le problème masculine).

6. Grammar into French

6.1 Determiners

Every French noun phrase normally needs a determiner, and French uses them differently from English:

• Generic definite: I like coffee → J'aime le café; Children like playing → Les enfants aiment jouer.
• Partitive for mass and unspecified quantity: I bought bread → J'ai acheté du pain; de after negation: Je n'ai pas de pain.
• No article in some predicate nouns: He is a doctor → Il est médecin; Tatoeba has both Tom est médecin and Tom est docteur (tatoeba:2549597-4128699, -4128696), the second colloquial.
• From Ukrainian, which has no articles, every French noun phrase needs a decision: given or new, specific or generic, count or mass (French and Ukrainian: the pair manual).

6.2 Agreement

• Adjectives and determiners agree with the noun in gender and number.
• The past participle agrees with the subject after être, and with a direct object placed before it after avoir: les lettres que j'ai écrites. Translators who draft out of order forget the second rule.
• People's gender: the speaker's gender shows in Je suis heureux / heureuse; English sources rarely say it (general manual §6.1; europarl-v8:1484).
• Role nouns of women: current French uses feminine forms: la ministre, la présidente, la rapporteure, l'autrice or l'auteure, la professeure. Institutional usage moved during the Europarl period and is not uniform: the French side has Madame la Présidente 20 135 times against Madame le Président 6 483, and la rapporteure 1 279 times against la rapporteur 64, while le rapporteur (14 796) is also used for women (europarl-v8:465) (counted 2026-11-06). Current French institutional practice in France favours the feminine; the brief's house style decides.
• Inclusive writing (the point médian, les étudiant·es; doubled forms celles et ceux) is a house-style choice; French official texts in France avoid the point médian.

6.3 Clitic pronouns

French object pronouns go before the verb in a fixed order (me te se nous vous > le la les > lui leur > y > en) and before the auxiliary in compound tenses: Je le lui ai donné. Y and en replace prepositional phrases and must be used where French needs them: Did you think about it? → Tu y as pensé ?; I have two → J'en ai deux.

6.4 Tenses

• English present perfect of a continuing state → French present with depuis: I've been waiting for hours → J'attends depuis des heures (tatoeba:2314-4169).
• English simple past → passé composé in speech, letters, journalism; passé simple in written narrative (novels, tales, history); imperfect for background, habit, state.
• English just + past → venir de: I just arrived now → Je viens d'arriver (tatoeba:257520-6531).
• English used to → imperfect.
• Ukrainian aspect → French tense: perfective past → passé composé / passé simple; imperfective past → imperfect (or passé composé for a completed process stated as a whole).
• The subjunctive is required after il faut que, bien que, pour que, avant que (with optional expletive ne: avant qu'il ne pleuve, tatoeba:26852-457151), vouloir que, emotions. You must help her → Il faut que tu l'aides (tatoeba:10731-435872).

6.5 The passive

French uses the passive less than English. Prefer:

1. on: I was told → On m'a dit;
2. a pronominal verb: This wine is drunk cold → Ce vin se boit frais;
3. an active with the agent as subject: The report was adopted by Parliament → Le Parlement a adopté le rapport;
4. the passive where the agent is unknown or irrelevant in formal prose, and in legal French, which uses it freely: Le règlement est modifié comme suit.

6.6 Questions and negation

• Questions: inversion in formal writing (Avez-vous …?), est-ce que in neutral, intonation in speech.
• Negation: ne … pas in writing; pas alone only in written imitation of speech. Negative concord with personne, rien, jamais (Je n'ai jamais rien vu) is standard French, and English I never saw anything maps to it directly.

7. Idioms, culture-bound items and songs

• Idioms: French equivalents with other images (It's raining cats and dogs → Il pleut des cordes; to have other fish to fry → avoir d'autres chats à fouetter; to stand someone up → poser un lapin à quelqu'un). From Ukrainian, Ллє як з відра is also Il pleut des cordes.
• Proverbs: French has a rich stock; prefer the French proverb in dialogue (Petit à petit, l'oiseau fait son nid for Помалу, та вдало or Slow and steady wins the race).
• Bible names and the divine name: in a French Protestant target, the LORD is l'Éternel in the Louis Segond tradition (bible-kjv-lsg:PSA_23:1); Catholic and ecumenical traditions use le Seigneur. Ukrainian Господь is le Seigneur or l'Éternel by tradition.
• Songs: a singable French version counts the sung mute e as a syllable before a consonant and drops it before a vowel and at the line end; it rhymes on the last vowel and alternates masculine and feminine rhymes in traditional song. French song grammar is spoken French plus inversions: dropped ne, on, elisions written with apostrophes (j'suis, p'tit). An English song in ain't and double negatives becomes French spoken song grammar (J'ai jamais rien eu), not standard written French. A Ukrainian folk song's fixed epithets (червона калина) become fixed French phrases (l'obier rouge), kept the same each time.

8. Names, numbers, dates, typography

French typography (fr 12):

Names: foreign names keep their spelling in Latin script; Cyrillic names are transliterated by French conventions, which differ from English ones (Volodymyr Zelensky in the French press, with Kyiv or Kiev, Kharkiv, Odessa or Odesa by house style; ch for ш, ou for у in older French transliteration: Chevtchenko for Шевченко). Follow the publication's style and, for a person, their own Latin spelling when known.

9. Quality checks for translations into French

Add to the general checklist:

1. Every you is tu or vous, consistently per relationship.
2. Every noun phrase has the right determiner; partitives and de after negation are correct.
3. Every past participle after avoir with a preceding direct object agrees.
4. Every English motion verb with a particle was checked for the chassé-croisé.
5. Every English passive was considered for on, a pronominal or an active.
6. Every anglicism, lexical or semantic, was judged by the register's usage and the house style.
7. Typography: no-break spaces before ; : ! ? and inside « »; decimal comma; lowercase where French requires.

Typical labels: linguistic conventions / grammar / agreement; style / unidiomatic / calque (adresser un problème); locale conventions / typography (missing space before ?); style / register (vous and tu mixed).

11. Measured usage in the French Wikipedia

The French Wikipedia (dump of 2026-10-01, 7.3 GB compressed) was streamed and counted for this manual on 2026-11-06: whole-word, case-insensitive matches over the full text with its markup. The slice is encyclopaedic neutral French, written mostly in France, with Belgian, Swiss, Québec and African contributors mixed in, and partly translated from English. Its markup includes reference titles, many of them in English, and proper names; some words are therefore inflated by English titles and names, and those are marked below. Europarl figures (§4.2) are a second slice.

11.1 Borrowings against native forms

11.2 Semantic anglicisms and calques

11.3 Feminine forms of titles

The lessons for a French target, in neutral written prose:

1. Most battles are settled, in different directions: courriel, se rendre compte, chargé de, avoir du sens, finalement, numérique, logiciel (the native or normative form) and week-end, marketing, start-up, podcast, smartphone, hashtag (the borrowing).
2. Some official equivalents have a real share (infox, courriel), others none (ordiphone, mot-dièse, divulgâcher). An official equivalent is house style for public bodies, not the general norm.
3. Raw counts on a web encyclopaedia lie where names and English titles sit in the markup (challenge, deadline, software, cloud, digital). Read samples before believing a count; this is the work the French Nightingale is being built to do with the article text separated from references and names (§15).

12. Worked examples into French

12.1 From English: choices visible in Tatoeba

12.2 From English institutional texts

From Europarl (direction unknown) and DGT, the French institutional voice: Mr President, I too would like to congratulate the rapporteur on her excellent work → Monsieur le Président, je voudrais également féliciter le rapporteur pour son excellent travail (europarl-v8:465) shows the formula, the conditional of politeness and the gender lost by le rapporteur + son; current French institutional usage would write la rapporteure and keep it. This Regulation shall be binding in its entirety and directly applicable in all Member States → Le présent règlement est obligatoire dans tous ses éléments et directement applicable dans tout État membre (dgt-tm-v2021:139003) shows the present of obligation and the distributive singular tout État membre.

12.3 From Ukrainian: what French must add

13. French targets by domain

• Legal and EU: present indicative for obligation; considérant ce qui suit; l'article 4, paragraphe 1; règlement (CE) no …; sans préjudice de; par dérogation à; sont réputés (DGT examples in English and French: the pair manual §17).
• Administrative letters: Madame, Monsieur,; Je vous prie d'agréer …; Veuillez trouver ci-joint …; Suite à votre courrier du ….
• Medicine: posologie, effets indésirables, contre-indications, notice; dosages 500 mg, 3 fois par jour; the French space before the unit.
• Software: infinitives on buttons (Enregistrer, Annuler); vous in messages unless the brand chose tu; typography with no-break spaces even in UI (Supprimer le fichier ?).
• Science: nous or on; the conditional for unconfirmed results (la molécule serait active); decimal comma, SI units with a space (5 kg).
• Journalism: nominal headlines (Démission du ministre); present for recent events in headlines; Kyiv or Kiev by house style.

14. French deltas for non-standard sources

Each source delta is rendered by a French delta of the same function (general manual §3.7):

A constructed example, the surzhyk line of Translating into English §12 into French:

— Ну шо, канєшно поможу, тіки ти мені скажи, шо робить. ✓ — Ben quoi, bien sûr que j'vais t'aider, mais dis-moi c'qu'il faut faire. ✗ — Eh bien, certainement je vais vous aider, mais veuillez m'indiquer ce qu'il faut faire. (normalised up)

15. How Mova handles it

Today. Mova does not write French. tools/translate has standard encoders for English and, for the Tanakh pages, a Hebrew encoder learned as its Hebrew reader turned round (heb_enc.rs); a French encoder would be learned the same way, from the alignments of a French reader. The French side of Mova is a parser: French trees read by the English parser after tag mapping (LAS 87.00 own tags on GSD dev, 2026-10-22), with no lexicon, no morphology, no agreement model (French manual). The parallel corpora of tools/parallel (Tatoeba, Europarl, DGT-TM, the Louis Segond Bible, Gutenberg) are what a French encoder and its author deltas would learn from: DGT for the legal register, Europarl for formal speech, Tatoeba for everyday and colloquial French, Segond and Gutenberg for literary French.

Planned and being built.

• The French Nightingale 🐦 (tools/nightingale, being built; one per language, under the Eel, with its own Sol consultant) would build a naturalness model of French from the French Wikipedia on the CPU. For a French target it is the instrument of §4.2: the frequency of défi against challenge, of se rendre compte against réaliser que, per domain (by the article's category) and per period (by revision date), and a score of how far a translated sentence lies from French written in French. Its limits travel with every figure: Wikipedia is encyclopaedic neutral French, not speech, law or a novel; some French articles are translated from English and carry its anglicisms; France, Belgian, Swiss and Québec French are mixed in it; and Wikipedia is CC BY-SA, so its models measure and do not ship.
• The Eel's round tr-en-fr (being built) would train and measure English → French on the parallel corpora, with author deltas for the registers above.

Where Mova stops. No French generation, no agreement, no clitic placement, no typography; the anglicism verdicts of §4.2 and §11 are counts made by hand for this manual.

Sources

The French manual (chapters 6, 7, 12, 13, 14); (commission-1982) (EU French legislative terms); Vinay and Darbelnet 1958 (card only: the procedures and the chassé-croisé); the general manual's sources. Corpus examples and counts: Tatoeba (CC BY 2.0 FR), Europarl v8, DGT-TM 2021, Louis Segond 1910; counts made 2026-11-06 on the French side of pairs.tsv and on the French Wikipedia dump of 2026-10-01 (CC BY-SA, counted only); Tatoeba FR–UK examples.

The Elamur team

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