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# Translating from French

**On this page**

1. [1. Principles for a French source](#1-principles-for-a-french-source)
2. [2. Meaning before form in a French source](#2-meaning-before-form-in-a-french-source)
3. [3. Register and style in a French source](#3-register-and-style-in-a-french-source)
4. [4. Terminology in French sources](#4-terminology-in-french-sources)
5. [5. False friends out of French](#5-false-friends-out-of-french)
6. [6. Grammar transfer from French](#6-grammar-transfer-from-french)
7. [7. Idioms, culture-bound items and songs](#7-idioms-culture-bound-items-and-songs)
8. [8. Names, numbers, dates, typography in French sources](#8-names-numbers-dates-typography-in-french-sources)
9. [9. Quality checks for translations out of French](#9-quality-checks-for-translations-out-of-french)
10. [10. Worked examples: French sources into Ukrainian and English](#10-worked-examples-french-sources-into-ukrainian-and-english)
11. [11. French sources by domain](#11-french-sources-by-domain)
12. [12. Reading non-standard French sources](#12-reading-non-standard-french-sources)
13. [13. How Mova handles it](#13-how-mova-handles-it)
14. [Sources](#sources)

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](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/translation/into-fr/); the contrasts are in [English and French: the pair manual](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/translation/pairs/en-fr/) and [French and Ukrainian: the pair manual](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/translation/pairs/fr-uk/). The grammar of French is in the [French manual](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/).

## 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](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/08-national-varieties/)): 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:

| use | example | English | Ukrainian |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| "we" (spoken, very common) | *On y va ?* | Shall we go? / Let's go | *Ходімо?* |
| "people, they" | *On dit que …* | They say …, People say … | *Кажуть, що …* |
| "someone" | *On a sonné.* | Someone rang. / The bell rang. | *Хтось подзвонив.* |
| "you, one" (generic) | *On ne sait jamais.* | You never know. | *Ніколи не знаєш.* |
| passive substitute | *On m'a dit que …* | I was told … | *Мені сказали, що …* |

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](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/translation/into-en/) §2.1 and [Translating into Ukrainian](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/translation/into-uk/)). 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](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/19-lexicon-mwe-register/)). 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

| signal | written, formal | neutral | spoken, colloquial |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| negation | *ne … pas*, *ne … point* (literary, archaic) | *ne … pas* | *pas* alone: *Je sais pas* |
| "we" | *nous* | *nous* in writing, *on* in speech | *on* |
| questions | inversion: *Parlez-vous français ?* | *est-ce que* | intonation: *Tu parles français ?* |
| past narrative | passé simple: *il entra* | passé composé in speech, passé simple in written narrative | passé composé |
| subordinate past subjunctive | imperfect subjunctive: *qu'il vînt* (literary) | present subjunctive | present subjunctive |
| subject | full noun phrase |  | dislocation: *Moi, je …*, *Mon frère, il …* |
| vocabulary | *demeurer*, *se rendre*, *néanmoins* | *rester*, *aller*, *pourtant* | *bosser*, *bagnole*, *boulot*, *truc*, *mec* |
| elision |  |  | *t'as*, *j'sais*, *y a* |

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](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/translation/pairs/fr-uk/)). 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](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/translation/pairs/fr-uk/)): 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](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/19-lexicon-mwe-register/)); the most damaging in translation:

| French | means | ✗ English | ✓ English | Ukrainian |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| *actuellement* | currently | actually | currently | *нині, зараз* |
| *éventuellement* | possibly, if need be | eventually | possibly | *можливо, за потреби* |
| *assister à* | attend | assist | attend | *бути присутнім* |
| *une formation* | training | formation | training | *навчання, підготовка* |
| *sensible* | sensitive | sensible | sensitive | *чутливий* |
| *sympathique* | nice | sympathetic | nice, friendly | *симпатичний, приємний* |
| *demander* | ask | demand | ask | *просити, питати* |
| *la librairie* | bookshop | library | bookshop | *книгарня* |
| *une affaire* | business, case, deal, matter | affair | case, deal | *справа* |
| *contrôler* | check, inspect | control | check | *перевіряти* |
| *achever* | finish | achieve | finish, complete | *завершити* |
| *ignorer* | not know | ignore | not know, be unaware of | *не знати* |
| *rester* | stay | rest | stay | *залишатися* |
| *une déception* | disappointment | deception | disappointment | *розчарування* |
| *une décade* | ten days | decade | ten days | *декада* |
| *le crayon* | pencil | crayon | pencil | *олівець* |

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](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/translation/false-friends/en-fr/) and [French and Ukrainian: false friends](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/translation/false-friends/fr-uk/); the context-dependent renderings of French words are in [English and French: renderings by context](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/translation/context/en-fr/) and [French and Ukrainian: renderings by context](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/translation/context/fr-uk/). 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](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/translation/into-en/) §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](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/translation/into-uk/).

### 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](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/07-punctuation-typography/)): « » 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

| id | French | Ukrainian | what the French told |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| `tatoeba:9442-1565890` | *Je l'ai vu.* | *Я бачив його.* | *vu*: the object is masculine (or unknown); the speaker's gender is not given: the translator chose a man (*бачив*) |
| `tatoeba:133634-587744` | *Je l'ai vue jouer du piano.* | *Я бачив, як вона грає на піаніно.* | *vue*: the object is a woman, so *вона*; the speaker again unknown |
| `tatoeba:487949-1653358` | *Je suis heureuse d'accepter votre invitation.* | *Я рада прийняти ваше запрошення.* | *heureuse*: the speaker is a woman, kept in *рада* |
| `tatoeba:182024-5162238` / `-530315` | *Si j'avais assez d'argent, je pourrais m'acheter ce livre.* | *… я б міг купити …* / *… я б могла купити …* | French says nothing of the speaker; two translators chose two genders |
| `tatoeba:3640-2804867` | *Tu as raison.* | *Ти правий.* | the Ukrainian adjective forces a masculine addressee; *Маєш рацію* (`tatoeba:3640-2804864`) avoids the choice |

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*

| id | French | Ukrainian | note |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| `tatoeba:4169-6450180` | *J'attends depuis des heures.* | *Я чекаю вже кілька годин.* | ✓ present + *вже* |
| `tatoeba:4169-3984009` | *J'attends depuis des heures.* | *Я чекав кілька годин.* | ✗ past: "I waited for several hours" (and stopped); the *depuis* + present was misread |
| `tatoeba:10978-911927` | *Je viens du Canada.* | *Я - з Канади.* | *venir de* + place = origin, not the recent past |
| `tatoeba:3655161-5719352` | *Il est en train de peindre sa maison.* | *Він фарбує свій будинок.* | *être en train de* → plain imperfective present |
| `tatoeba:2514114-6395306` | *Je vais le faire demain.* | *Я зроблю це завтра.* | *aller* + infinitive → perfective future |
| `tatoeba:453690-517157` | *Le médecin examina ma gorge.* | *Лікар оглянув моє горло.* | passé simple → perfective past; *le médecin* → *лікар* (gender not known) |

### 10.3 *On*, register and idioms

| id | French | Ukrainian | note |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| `tatoeba:131391-596725` | *On dit qu'il est encore à Paris.* | *Кажуть, що він поки що в Парижі.* | *on* "people" → subjectless 3rd plural |
| `tatoeba:181506-1582767` | *On m'a volé mon sac.* | *У мене поцупили сумку.* | *on* "someone" → 3rd plural; *mon* dropped; *поцупили* ("nicked") raises the register over neutral *вкрали* |
| `tatoeba:332090-7255858` | *On y va ?* | *Ходімо?* | *on* "we" → 1st plural imperative |
| `tatoeba:14970-494157` / `-723987` | *Ça va ?* | *Як ся маєш?* / *Як справи?* | two equivalents: the first traditional and western, the second current everywhere |
| `tatoeba:1176495-6291214` | *Ma grand-mère a la main verte.* | *Моя бабуся — природжена садівниця.* | idiom ("has a green hand") → paraphrase with a feminitive |
| `tatoeba:1184492-517105` | *Le médecin lui a conseillé de lever le pied sur la boisson.* | *Лікар порадив йому менше пити.* | idiom ("lift the foot") → plain paraphrase |
| `tatoeba:3316-725535` | *C'est pas possible !* | *Це неможливо!* | dropped *ne* (spoken) → neutral Ukrainian: the colloquial mark is lost; *Та не може бути!* keeps it |

### 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](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/translation/pairs/fr-uk/) §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

| voice | how to recognise it | what it means for the target |
| --- | --- | --- |
| spoken French in writing | dropped *ne*, *on*, *ça*, elisions (*t'as*, *j'sais*), dislocation | everyday closeness: target colloquial deltas (general manual §13) |
| *verlan* and youth slang | syllable inversion (*meuf* < *femme*, *relou* < *lourd*, *chelou* < *louche*), borrowings | group membership and age; target slang of the right group and period, used sparingly |
| French rap | the above, dense rhyme, code-switching | a gloss or an adaptation (general manual §13.4) |
| Québec French | *tu* question particle (*Tu viens-tu ?*), *chu* (*je suis*), *icitte*, *char*, swear words from church vocabulary (*tabarnak*) | a place and an identity: signal, do not substitute another country's dialect |
| literary French | passé simple, imperfect subjunctive, inversions | the target's literary register, not its archaisms |
| classical and biblical French | *point*, *tu* to God, older spellings | archaic delta in the target if the edition wants one (Louis Segond: *Tu ne tueras point*, `bible-kjv-lsg:EXO_20:13`; Kulish: *Не вбивати меш*, `bible-kjv-kulish:EXO_20:13`) |
| *français populaire* | *si j'aurais su*, *malgré que*, *je m'en rappelle* | the speaker's social place; non-standard but non-local target speech, or surzhyk in Ukrainian where the social signal matches ([Translating into Ukrainian](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/translation/into-uk/) §3.6) |

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](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/), [fr 14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/19-lexicon-mwe-register/)). 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](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/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](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/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](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/) 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*

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