French Document Translator — English ↔ French

How French documents come out

French uses the same Latin alphabet as English, written left to right, so nothing needs mirroring — but French documents follow their own typographic rules, and a translation that ignores them looks careless to a French reader. Accented letters (é, è, ê, à, ç, ù) and the œ ligature (cœur, œuvre) are everywhere, including on capitals: SOCIÉTÉ, not SOCIETE — dropping accents on capitals is a typing shortcut, not correct French, and it can change meaning. French punctuation puts a space before colons, semicolons, question marks, and exclamation points, and quotes with guillemets (« … ») rather than curly quotes. Numbers flip too: French writes the decimal comma and spaces out thousands (1 234,56 €, currency sign after the amount), and dates run day-month-year with lowercase month names (13 juillet 2026). Finally, expect the text itself to grow: French runs roughly 15–20% longer than the same content in English, which is exactly why our output is clean translated text and HTML with a PDF download rather than a forced copy of your original layout — readable pages beat overflowing text boxes.

What people translate to and from French

What to watch for in French document translation

Most English–French document errors aren't vocabulary — they're register and convention. French business and administrative writing is formulaic: a letter closing with « Je vous prie d'agréer, Madame, Monsieur, l'expression de mes salutations distinguées » should become "Yours sincerely", not a word-by-word "I beg you to accept the expression of my distinguished salutations"; going the other way, an English memo turned into French must commit to vous and hold it, because slipping into tu mid-document reads as unprofessional. False friends do real damage in exactly the documents people translate: actuellement means currently (not actually), éventuellement means possibly (not eventually), demander is to ask (not demand), and a société is simply a company. Conventions trip up machines and humans alike: 03/07/2026 is 3 July in a French document, 1 234,56 uses a decimal comma, and a notaire is a full civil-law legal officer, not an American notary public. Careless translation also imports English capitalization — months, languages, and nationality adjectives are lowercase in French (les investisseurs américains). These traps are what the Advanced tier exists for; whichever tier you use, proofread dates, amounts, and anything above a signature line first.

French document translation FAQ

Is the document translator free?

Yes — upload files up to 4MB free, which covers most certificates, letters, and article-length PDFs. Pro raises the limit to 20MB, and Scholar to 50MB and up to 1,000,000 characters, which is dissertation or full-book territory. You can translate in either direction, English to French or French to English, on the same page.

Can it translate a scanned document or a photo of paper?

Yes. Upload a JPG, PNG, or HEIC (iPhone) photo, or a scanned PDF, and we read the text before translating. A flat, well-lit, straight-on shot gives the best result. Accents are the first thing a blurry image loses, and in French they carry meaning — ou is "or" while où is "where", a is "has" while à is "to" — so give the output a quick read and check proper names and dates against the original.

How accurate is it? What's the difference between Fast and Advanced?

Fast is built for volume: getting the gist of a report, reading correspondence, triaging a stack of files. Advanced runs on a frontier model and is the tier for documents where wording matters — it keeps formal French register (vous throughout, correct letter formulas), handles legal and administrative phrasing, and reads idioms instead of translating them word by word. For a contract, an application document, or anything another person will judge you by, use Advanced.

Will the translated file keep my original layout?

You get your document's full content — headings, paragraphs, lists, tables — as clean translated text and HTML, with a PDF download. It is deliberately not a pixel-for-pixel copy of the original design: French text runs about 15–20% longer than English, so forcing it back into the exact original boxes produces overflowing tables and shrunken type. We'd rather hand you a readable document you can restyle than a broken replica.

Can I submit this translation to USCIS, IRCC, or a French préfecture?

Not on its own. US immigration requires a certified translation with a signed accuracy statement, and French authorities generally require a traducteur assermenté — a sworn translator registered with a cour d'appel. What our translation does is let you read every line of your own file, fill out forms correctly, and confirm a document says what you need before you pay for certification.

Does it handle Canadian French, or only France French?

Any regional French, in both directions. Formal written French is close to uniform across France, Quebec, Belgium, Switzerland, and francophone Africa, so a translated document reads correctly in all of them. Where everyday vocabulary splits — courriel vs e-mail, Belgian septante vs soixante-dix for 70 — we default to the international standard forms every reader understands, and Quebec-specific terms in source documents (cégep, RAMQ) are rendered in plain English rather than left behind.

What file formats can I upload?

PDF, DOCX (Word), PPTX (PowerPoint), XLSX (Excel), and EPUB, plus photographed or scanned documents as JPG, PNG, or HEIC. Text is extracted from slides and spreadsheets and translated the same way as any document; everything comes back as clean translated text and HTML with a PDF download. If you have a paper document, a phone photo is enough — no scanner needed.

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