🗣️ English and French: the pair manual

English and French have shared vocabulary for nine centuries: a large part of the English vocabulary came through Norman and later French, and French has taken English words since the 18th century. The two languages look alike and are built differently. English is analytic, with fixed order, few endings, phrasal verbs and stacked nouns; French has gender and agreement everywhere, clitic pronouns before the verb, a richer set of past tenses, the subjunctive, and a stricter written norm. This manual sets them side by side, in both directions, construction by construction, with examples from the open parallel corpora Mova holds. The general rules are in general.md; the one-sided manuals are from-en.md, into-en.md, from-fr.md, into-fr.md.

0. The corpora and how to read the examples

So the direction of an example is known only for Gutenberg (and, by intention, for the Tatoeba translations of a sentence). The pair manual's points hold both ways; where direction matters, it says so. All examples are quoted as published, including their spelling (Tatoeba's piqure follows the 1990 rectifications) and their 19th-century punctuation.

1. The contrasts at a glance

2. The noun phrase

2.1 Articles

Generic statements take the French definite where English has zero: I like coffee / J'aime le café (tatoeba:3524072-916677); Children like playing / Les enfants aiment jouer. A French generic les rendered the into English makes the statement specific (✗ The children like playing).

Mass and unspecified quantity take the partitive: I need some water / Il me faut de l'eau (tatoeba:1887578-2497389); after besoin de the article drops: I need some bread and milk / J'ai besoin de pain et de lait (tatoeba:34943-409524). After negation, de: Je n'ai pas de pain. English some has no French word of its own here; French du has no English word of its own (I bought bread).

Professions and nationalities after être take no article in French: His mother used to be a singer / Sa mère était chanteuse (tatoeba:285295-539808); Tom's a doctor / Tom est médecin (tatoeba:2549597-4128699). With an adjective the article returns: C'est un bon médecin.

Body parts take the definite article and a reflexive or indirect pronoun in French where English has a possessive: I washed my hands with soap and water / Je me suis lavé les mains avec de l'eau et du savon (tatoeba:6683457-6683584); She raised her hand / Elle a levé la main. Keeping the English possessive (✗ j'ai lavé mes mains) is understandable and unidiomatic.

2.2 Possessives: whose gender?

English possessives agree with the owner (his, her, its, their); French with the thing owned (son, sa, ses). So the owner's gender disappears into French: His mother is an English teacher / Sa mère est prof d'anglais (tatoeba:285296-130172); Her father passed away last week / Son père est décédé la semaine dernière (tatoeba:308975-1592674). French → English, the translator must recover the owner from context; where French is ambiguous (Marie a vu Paul avec sa sœur: whose sister?), English is too (her or his must be chosen), and the context must decide.

2.3 Noun chains and compounds

English stacks nouns; French rebuilds with prepositions from the head outwards:

French → English, a de-chain is often best as a compound (la politique de l'énergie de l'Union → EU energy policy), but chains of four or more nouns are heavy in English too.

2.4 Adjectives

Most French adjectives follow the noun (un livre rouge); a short common set precedes (beau, bon, grand, petit, jeune, vieux, nouveau, mauvais), and some change meaning by position (un grand homme "a great man" / un homme grand "a tall man"; mon ancien professeur "my former teacher" / un meuble ancien "an antique"; ma propre chambre "my own room" / une chambre propre "a clean room"; un pauvre homme "a poor (pitiable) man" / un homme pauvre "a poor (penniless) man") (fr 5). English → French, choose the position by the meaning; French → English, read the position.

Comparison: Tom is taller than his mother / Tom est plus grand que sa mère (tatoeba:37307-433090); English than I (formal) or than me is French que moi (tatoeba:37109-584601).

3. Pronouns

3.1 You: tu or vous

Each English you addressed to someone gets tu or vous (general manual §3.3). Tatoeba often keeps both: I miss you / Tu me manques (tatoeba:1308-3124) and Vous me manquez (tatoeba:1308-385358); Do you speak French? / Parlez-vous français ?, Parles-tu français ?, Tu parles français ? (tatoeba:415441-14077, -1031677, -7281436). Choose once per relationship and keep it; mark the switch when a story has one.

French → English, the switch from vous to tu (Tu peux me tutoyer) needs an English equivalent: Call me Paul, a first name, a warmer tone.

3.2 On

On is "we" in speech, "people / they" in general statements, "someone" for an unknown agent, and a passive substitute. English → French, use it for we in colloquial dialogue (Shall we go? / On y va ?), for generic you (You never know / On ne sait jamais) and for agentless passives (I was told that I should see a doctor / On m'a dit de consulter un médecin, tatoeba:256026-1592669). French → English, read each on (from-fr.md §2.1).

3.3 Clitics

French object pronouns precede the verb (and the auxiliary): I gave it to him / Je le lui ai donné; I'm going to go / Je vais y aller (tatoeba:1312-378541). Y and en replace à + thing and de + thing or quantity: I've got two / J'en ai deux; Think about it / Pensez-y. English → French, a missing y or en is a grammar error (✗ J'ai deux). In older French the clitic stands before the infinitive's governing verb: Rendez-moi le service de l'aller chercher / Do me the service to go and fetch him (gut-hugo-les-miserables:5428): l'aller chercher is the classical order, modern d'aller le chercher.

3.4 It, this, that: il, ce, ça, cela

English it is + adjective about a situation is French c'est (It's difficult / C'est difficile); it for a named masculine or feminine thing is il / elle (The table? It's in the kitchen / Elle est dans la cuisine). Il est + adjective + de + infinitive is written French (Il est difficile de …); C'est difficile de … is spoken.

4. The verb

4.1 Tense map

Tatoeba also shows a tense error worth seeing: I washed my hands / Je me lavais les mains (tatoeba:2206395-2206391) renders a completed act with the imperfect, which reads "I was washing my hands" or "I used to wash my hands"; Je me suis lavé les mains is the default. Both are grammatical, so only a tense check against meaning catches it.

4.2 The subjunctive

English → French, the subjunctive is required after il faut que (You must help her, and soon! / Il faut que tu l'aides, et vite !, tatoeba:10731-435872; Il faut que vous l'aidiez, et tout de suite !, tatoeba:10731-1256139), avant que (with optional expletive ne), pour que, bien que, vouloir que, avoir peur que, emotions. English It is necessary for you to start now / Il faut que tu commences maintenant (tatoeba:16139-1441046) shows how far the English construction is from the French. French → English, a grammatical subjunctive is not translated as such.

4.3 Modals

4.4 Argument structure: when the roles swap

Some verbs distribute the roles the other way round, and a literal translation reverses who does what:

✗ Je te manque for I miss you means "you miss me": a reversal, a critical accuracy error in a love letter.

4.5 Motion: the chassé-croisé

English puts manner in the verb and path in a particle; French puts the path in the verb and the manner in an adverbial: He swam across the river / Il traversa la rivière à la nage (tatoeba:291092-135951); She ran out of the room / Elle est sortie de la pièce en courant; He limped in / Il est entré en boitant; The bottle floated away / La bouteille s'est éloignée au fil de l'eau. French → English, the manner adverbial is often best folded back into an English manner verb: Il entra en courant → He ran in. Where the manner is unimportant, French drops it (Il est sorti for He hurried out), and the loss is a choice.

5. Voice

English passives become, in French, in order of preference: on (I was told / On m'a dit), a pronominal verb (This wine is drunk cold / Ce vin se boit frais), an active with the agent as subject (The report was adopted by Parliament / Le Parlement a adopté le rapport), or the passive (formal, legal, agent unknown). French → English, French passives and pronominal passives may stay passives in English; on becomes we, you, they, people, someone or the passive.

6. The clause

6.1 Questions

Hugo's stableman question Mon ami, … il y a un charron ici? is the spoken intonation question in a 19th-century novel; the English is there a wheelwright here? is neutral, and the colloquial flavour is lost.

6.2 Negation

French ne … pas (written), pas (spoken); ne … point (literary, archaic: Il n'y a point d'amours sans jalousie, tatoeba:2371-4248; Tu ne tueras point, bible-kjv-lsg:EXO_20:13); negative concord (Je n'ai jamais rien dit = I never said anything); ne … que = "only"; expletive ne = no negation (tatoeba:26852-457151). English → French, not + any is ne … aucun / ne … rien; There's no doubt / Il n'y a aucun doute (tatoeba:2361-4238).

6.3 Focus and topic: clefts and dislocation

French uses c'est … qui / que more than English uses it is … who: It is me that is wrong / C'est moi qui suis en tort (tatoeba:32552-2109218). Spoken French dislocates topics (Moi, je pense que …; Mon frère, il habite à Lyon); Hugo's narrator does so in writing: L'homme qui se hâtait ainsi, c'est celui que nous venons de voir se débattre … / The man thus hastening on was the one whom we have just seen struggling … (gut-hugo-les-miserables:5374): the English translator kept a fronted subject without the resumptive c'est, which English does not have.

6.4 Adverb position

French puts adverbs after the finite verb (Il parle souvent de toi; Il a souvent parlé de toi), and so between the verb and its object (Il lit souvent des livres), where English puts them before the verb and never between verb and object (He often reads books; ✗ He reads often books). Sentence adverbs begin the French sentence with a comma: Heureusement, ….

7. The lexicon

7.1 False friends

Europarl v8 counts show what the corpus's translators did with some notorious pairs (English side matched, French side read; 2026-11-06):

The full list, both directions:

What the Europarl translators did with the look-alikes (English side matched, French side counted; a sentence may contain both renderings or neither; counted 2026-11-06):

The lesson is double. Professional translation avoids most false friends; and an institution's own terminology can legitimise a look-alike (contrôle), while non-native source English can invert the problem (pretend for "claim").

7.2 Semantic anglicisms in French

French words used in an English sense, judged by register usage (into-fr.md §4.2; Europarl counts of 2026-11-06): réaliser que "realise" (360, against se rendre compte que 352: established in this register, avoided in careful prose); en charge de (573, against chargé de 2 306: tolerated); adresser un problème (9: an error; traiter, aborder); faire du sens (0; avoir du sens 132: an error in France); opportunité for "opportunity" (established); supporter for "support (a team)" (colloquial; soutenir in writing); initier for "initiate (a project)" (common, criticised; lancer, engager); digital for "numérique" (common, criticised in France; numérique is the official and dominant term).

7.3 Borrowings

Borrowings run both ways and are judged in the target by usage: week-end (742) against fin de semaine (37, the Québec word) in Europarl French; défi (11 590) against challenge (14) (general manual §4.3). Into English, French borrowings carry a register of their own: rendezvous, déjà vu, faux pas, raison d'être are established; others are pretentious in plain prose (soi-disant, au contraire).

7.4 Words with two English equivalents, and the reverse

8. Register

Every non-standard voice in this pair is handled as the standard plus a grammar delta and a lexicon delta (general manual §3.7): read the source's deltas and what each is for, translate through the standard, then apply the target's own deltas that serve the same purpose at a similar density. The tables below are examples of deltas with matching functions in English and French, not word-for-word dialect equivalents.

8.1 Matching the colloquial

Avoid register drift both ways: The car is ready / La bagnole est prête (tatoeba:46819-1797589) raises a neutral English sentence to slang.

8.2 Formal speech and formulas

Parliamentary and ceremonial formulas have fixed equivalents: Mr President / Monsieur le Président (europarl-v8:465, europarl-v8:1243); Madam President / Madame la Présidente (20 135 times in Europarl's French, against Madame le Président 6 483, counted 2026-11-06); I would like to congratulate the rapporteur / je voudrais féliciter le rapporteur (europarl-v8:465); ladies and gentlemen / Mesdames et Messieurs; I give the floor to / Je donne la parole à; on behalf of my group / au nom de mon groupe. Gender appears in French where English said nothing: Mr President, I am happy to take the floor / Monsieur le Président, je suis heureuse de pouvoir m'exprimer (europarl-v8:1484).

8.3 Letters

The French closing formula is longer and more formal than any English one, and an English Best regards becomes Cordialement, not a literal phrase.

9. Literary translation: the 19th-century evidence

The Gutenberg pairs are French originals with English translations of the 1870s–1880s, and they show both good practice and the conventions of the age:

• Speech verbs varied in French, plainer in English: «Ah!» fit Mr. Fogg / “Ah!” said Mr. Fogg (gut-verne-80-days:1340); reprit-il / he resumed (gut-hugo-les-miserables:5354), where Hapgood keeps the French variation.
• Exclamations and register: --Voilà un homme diablement pressé! dit le courrier / “That man is in a devilish hurry!” said the postman (gut-hugo-les-miserables:5373): voilà disappears, diablement is kept as devilish. Farceur! / “You're a sly dog!” (gut-verne-80-days:1261): one word becomes an idiom.
• Foreignizing titles: Hapgood keeps Monsieur le Maire untranslated: --Le cocher dit qu'il vient chercher monsieur le maire / “The coachman says that he has come for Monsieur le Maire” (gut-hugo-les-miserables:5349). It keeps the French setting audible (Schleiermacher's first way, general manual §1.1). A modern translator might choose the Mayor or Monsieur le Maire by the edition's policy, and keep it.
• Literary subjunctives: Si la vieille femme l'eût pu voir en ce moment, elle eût été épouvantée / If the old woman could have seen him at that moment, she would have been frightened (gut-hugo-les-miserables:5355): the French pluperfect subjunctive in both clauses is English could have and would have.
• Transposition: rose de bonheur, le regard brillant, elle contemplait son fils Jean / was gazing at her son Jean with sparkling eyes; happiness had brought a colour to her cheeks (gut-maupassant-pierre-jean:699).
• Restructured relatives: qui était présent, eût volontiers embrassé le pilote, auquel Fix aurait voulu tordre le cou / who heard what passed, would willingly have embraced the pilot, while Fix would have been glad to twist his neck (gut-verne-80-days:1341); note qui était présent became who heard what passed, a modulation (being present → hearing).
• Additions and cuts: «Mais, en fin de compte, demanda Fix, est-ce que votre maître …» / “But does your master propose …” (gut-verne-80-days:1207): en fin de compte and demanda Fix are not translated in the aligned sentence; 19th-century translations often cut, and an aligned corpus of them is not a gold standard.
• Dialogue typography: the French editions open with « and continue with --; the English use quotation marks. Each target's convention, not the source's.

10. Legal and EU texts

• Obligation: English shall / French present or doit: the following maximum rates shall apply / les taux maximum suivants sont applicables (dgt-tm-v2021:874); shall not be less than 50 % / ne doivent pas être inférieurs à 50 % (dgt-tm-v2021:1343); shall not exceed / ne dépasse pas (dgt-tm-v2021:1385). French → English, the French present of a provision becomes shall in EU English; the EU guide forbids may not for prohibitions (commission-1982).
• Structure: Article 3(1) / article 3, paragraphe 1; French alinéa (unnumbered) is English paragraph or subparagraph (commission-1982); recital / considérant; whereas / considérant que.
• Dates and figures: as from 1 January 2007 / à compter du 1er janvier 2007 (dgt-tm-v2021:1343); 85 % in 2007 / 85 % en 2007 (dgt-tm-v2021:874; EU English style writes 85%).
• Terms: one concept, one term, checked in the DGT memory: Member State / État membre; competent authority / autorité compétente; placing on the market / mise sur le marché.

11. The Bible: two translations of a third text

The KJV and the Louis Segond are not translations of each other, but they show how two traditions render the same Hebrew and Greek:

Two lessons: a fixed religious formula is translated by the target tradition's own formula, not anew; and an archaic source (KJV) is not best rendered in archaic French unless the edition wants an archaic voice (Segond 1910 itself keeps point and the passé simple).

12. Idioms and proverbs

13. Names, numbers, dates, typography

Historical and royal names have exonyms both ways; modern personal names do not.

14. Songs

Singable translation between English and French meets the sung mute e: French counts it as a syllable before a consonant (u-ne bel-le cho-se = 5 syllables), English has nothing like it, so a French line of eight syllables may need an English line of seven or nine words to fill the notes, or a melisma. French stress falls at the end of the group, English stress is lexical; an English singable version must put stressed syllables on strong beats, which a French lyric did not need to do.

The classic case is Frère Jacques (public domain): French Frère Jacques, dormez-vous ? … Sonnez les matines asks the friar to ring the bells; the traditional English Are you sleeping, Brother John? … Morning bells are ringing keeps the tune and the bells but reports the bells as already ringing, and Jacques becomes John. Au clair de la lune (public domain) shows the opposite trade: a gloss (By the light of the moon, my friend Pierrot, lend me your pen to write a word) keeps every image and loses the song; a singable version must fit Au clair de la lune (six sung syllables) with six English syllables (By the moonlight shining) and choose what to drop.

Song grammar both ways (constructed examples):

A gloss keeps meaning line by line; a singable version keeps tune, rhyme places and register first (general manual §9).

15. Quality checks for English–French

English → French

1. tu/vous decided and consistent.
2. Determiners: generic le, partitive du, de after negation, no article after être + profession, definite article with body parts.
3. Gender and agreement: adjectives, participles (avoir + preceding direct object), the speaker's gender in first-person adjectives.
4. Clitics placed and y/en present.
5. Tense by meaning: depuis + present; passé composé vs imperfect; venir de; subjunctive after its triggers.
6. Role reversals checked (manquer, plaire, falloir).
7. Chassé-croisé applied to manner-of-motion verbs.
8. False friends and semantic anglicisms checked.
9. Typography: spaces, « », decimal comma, lowercase.

French → English

1. On, y, en, le resolved.
2. Expletive ne not negated; ne … que = "only".
3. Owner's gender restored in possessives where context gives it.
4. Literary tenses → simple past; pluperfect subjunctive → would have, could have.
5. Articles: generic le → zero; partitive → zero or some.
6. Formal/informal you contrast compensated where it matters.
7. Speech verbs and dialogue made English.
8. Numbers, milliard, dates, capitals.

16. More corpus evidence: one English sentence, several French translations

Tatoeba's multiple translations (pairs.tsv, CC BY 2.0 FR) are a catalogue of the choices English leaves open.

17. EU legal formulas: English and French in the DGT memory

The DGT translation memory (dgt-tm-v2021, Commission Decision 2011/833/EU) records how EU English and EU French render the same provisions. The formulas are fixed; a translator uses them, not a fresh rendering.

The patterns: English shall → French present (entre en vigueur, veille à ce que, soumettent, est applicable); shall be deemed → sont réputés; Article 4(1) → l'article 4, paragraphe 1; Regulation (EC) No → règlement (CE) no; capitals differ (Regulation / règlement, Directive / directive, Treaty / traité); Member States (plural) often → tout État membre or l'État membre (singular distributive). Note also Whereas: → considérant ce qui suit: with French spacing before the colon omitted in the memory's typography.

18. Terminology by domain

18.1 IT and software

Usage counts for several of these in the French Wikipedia are in into-fr.md §11.

18.2 Medicine

18.3 Law: common law and civil law

18.4 Canadian bilingual practice

Canadian federal law is co-drafted in English and French (general manual §12.4), and Canada's bijural vocabulary pairs common-law and civil-law terms in both languages: real property / biens réels and immovables / immeubles; personal property / biens personnels and movables / meubles. TERMIUM Plus holds the agreed equivalents; for Canadian texts it outranks a France-French dictionary.

19. How Mova handles it

Today.

• The corpora above were built by tools/parallel: Tatoeba's exports joined with ids and authors (parallel tatoeba), Europarl, DGT-TM and other OPUS corpora converted (parallel moses), the eBible WEB and KJV against Louis Segond 1910 (parallel bible, chapters with different verse counts set aside), and Gutenberg book pairs aligned by chapters, then paragraphs and sentences with the Gale–Church length model (parallel align), with per-row bead probabilities for filtering. The alignment is by length only; a cut or mistranslated passage can drift until the next anchor (see gut-verne-80-days:1207, where the English sentence lacks two French phrases).
• French reading: the English tree parser after tag mapping, LAS 87.00 own tags on UD French GSD dev (2026-10-22); no French lexicon or morphology (French manual).
• Translation: tools/translate does not translate between English and French. The parts it would reuse exist for its English and Hebrew work: IBM Model 1 alignment (ibm.rs), the interlingua lexicon learned by longest-common-subsequence anchors and judged by the residual it saves (meta.rs), the standard encoder and author deltas (profile.rs), the function-word tables between authors (fwt.rs), the reorder table of clause parts against the predicate (fwt::ReorderTable, off by default), the logic comparison of events with its sensitivity control (logic.rs), and the exact residual code by class (measure.rs). The Bible pairs with Segond are the natural first test, since translate many already reads eBible's USFM and splits by book.

Planned and being built.

• The Eel's rounds tr-en-fr and tr-fr-en (being built): rounds that would train an English–French reader and encoder on these corpora and measure them on held-out books and sentences, with the same development gates as the Eel's parser rounds. The Gutenberg pairs give the one direction that is known (French → English).
• The English and French Nightingales 🐦 (tools/nightingale, being built; one per language, under the Eel, building naturalness models from Wikipedia on the CPU, each with its own Sol consultant) would judge the target side: whether a French draft reads as French (the anglicism verdicts of §7.2, the determiner and clitic errors of §15), whether an English draft reads as English. Their Wikipedia slices are encyclopaedic neutral prose; registers such as speech, law and song need the other corpora above.

Where Mova stops. No English–French translation; no gender, article, clitic, tense or chassé-croisé transfer; no false-friend detector (the Europarl counts here are by hand, and co-occurrence is not alignment); the corpora's direction is unknown for Europarl, DGT and most Tatoeba rows.

Sources

The general manual and the four one-sided manuals; the French manual (chapters 5, 6, 12, 13, 14); (commission-1982); Vinay and Darbelnet 1958 (card only); Schleiermacher 1813 (schleiermacher-1813). Corpora: Tatoeba (CC BY 2.0 FR; per-sentence authors in prov), Europarl v8 (Koehn 2005), DGT-TM 2021 (Steinberger et al. 2012), eBible WEB and KJV with Louis Segond 1910, Project Gutenberg (Verne trans. G. M. Towle 1873; Hugo trans. I. F. Hapgood; Maupassant trans. C. Bell), aligned with Gale and Church 1993 (all logged in docs/usage.tsv by the corpus build). Frère Jacques and Au clair de la lune: traditional, public domain. Counts: pairs.tsv, 2026-11-06.

The Elamur team

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