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# Translating into French

**On this page**

1. [1. Principles for a French target](#1-principles-for-a-french-target)
2. [2. Meaning before form in a French target](#2-meaning-before-form-in-a-french-target)
3. [3. Register and style in a French target](#3-register-and-style-in-a-french-target)
4. [4. Terminology and anglicisms: decided by usage](#4-terminology-and-anglicisms-decided-by-usage)
5. [5. False friends into French](#5-false-friends-into-french)
6. [6. Grammar into French](#6-grammar-into-french)
7. [7. Idioms, culture-bound items and songs](#7-idioms-culture-bound-items-and-songs)
8. [8. Names, numbers, dates, typography](#8-names-numbers-dates-typography)
9. [9. Quality checks for translations into French](#9-quality-checks-for-translations-into-french)
10. [11. Measured usage in the French Wikipedia](#11-measured-usage-in-the-french-wikipedia)
11. [12. Worked examples into French](#12-worked-examples-into-french)
12. [13. French targets by domain](#13-french-targets-by-domain)
13. [14. French deltas for non-standard sources](#14-french-deltas-for-non-standard-sources)
14. [15. How Mova handles it](#15-how-mova-handles-it)
15. [Sources](#sources)

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](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/translation/from-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/). French grammar is in the [French manual](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/).

## 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](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/08-national-varieties/)); 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](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/07-punctuation-typography/)).

## 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:

| English | ✗ literal | ✓ French | procedure |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| *after he returned* | après qu'il soit revenu (and a wrong subjunctive) | *après son retour* | transposition: verb → noun |
| *He swam across the river* | il nagea à travers la rivière | *il traversa la rivière à la nage* | chassé-croisé: the manner becomes an adverbial, the path the verb |
| *It is not unlikely* | ce n'est pas improbable | *c'est assez probable* | modulation |
| *No smoking* | pas de fumer | *Défense de fumer* | equivalence |
| *the man at the door* | l'homme à la porte | *l'homme qui attend à la porte* | explicitation |
| *I was told* | j'ai été dit | *on m'a dit* | modulation of voice |

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):

| English concept | borrowing | count | native form | count | verdict for formal French |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| challenge | *challenge* | 14 | *défi* | 11 590 | *défi*; *challenge* is an anglicism to avoid |
| weekend | *week-end* | 742 | *fin de semaine* | 37 | *week-end* in France; *fin de semaine* in Québec |
| marketing | *marketing* | 270 | *mercatique* | 1 | *marketing* |
| e-mail | *e-mail* | 79 | *courriel* / *courrier électronique* | 104 / 273 | the native forms, *courriel* rising; *e-mail* acceptable in speech |
| start-up | *start-up* | 29 | *jeune pousse* | 15 | *start-up* in business French, *jeune pousse* in official texts |
| leadership | *leadership* | 631 | (*direction*, *conduite*, *rôle moteur*) |  | *leadership* is established; the native phrases are often better in context |
| lobbying | *lobbying* | 298 | (*représentation d'intérêts*) |  | *lobbying* in debate; *représentation d'intérêts* is the legal term in France |

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

| French word | English sense taken over | count / native competitor | verdict |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| *réaliser que* | "realise, understand" | 360 / *se rendre compte que* 352 | both now common in this register; *se rendre compte* is safer in careful prose |
| *en charge de* | "in charge of" | 573 / *chargé(e)(s) de* 2 306 | *chargé de* in formal French; *en charge de* is widespread and tolerated |
| *opportunité* | "opportunity" (its older French sense is "timeliness") | 4 752 (both senses) | the English sense is established in institutional French; do not overuse |
| *adresser un problème* | "address a problem" | 9 | an error; write *traiter*, *aborder*, *s'attaquer à* |
| *faire du sens* | "make sense" | 0 (*avoir du sens* / *un sens*: 132) | an error in France (heard in Québec); write *avoir du sens* |
| *au final* | "in the end" | 260 / *finalement* 4 177 | colloquial; *finalement*, *en fin de compte* in formal prose |

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

| English | ✗ French look-alike | ✓ French |
| --- | --- | --- |
| *actually* | actuellement | en fait, en réalité, effectivement, vraiment |
| *eventually* | éventuellement | finalement, à terme |
| *to attend* | attendre | assister à |
| *library* | librairie | bibliothèque |
| *sensible* | sensible | raisonnable, sensé |
| *to support* (a cause) | supporter (= put up with; "support a team" is colloquial) | soutenir |
| *to control* | contrôler (= check; in established EU terms also "control": *contrôle des frontières*) | maîtriser, diriger, gérer |
| *to assume* | assumer (= take on) | supposer |
| *to realise* (carry out a plan) | réaliser | réaliser (fine) |
| *to realise* (understand) | réaliser (contested, see §4.2) | se rendre compte |
| *a decade* | une décade | une décennie |
| *the minister* |  | le ministre / la ministre by the person |

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

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

| item | rule | example |
| --- | --- | --- |
| high marks | a no-break space (narrow before `; ! ?`, normal or narrow before `:`) | *Vraiment ?* · *Attention : danger* |
| guillemets | « » with no-break spaces inside; “ ” for quotes within | « Il a dit “non”. » |
| dialogue | guillemets to open, dashes for each new speaker |  |
| numbers | decimal comma, thin no-break space for thousands | *3,5* · *15 000* |
| percent | space before % | *25 %* (`dgt-tm-v2021:874`: *85 % en 2007*) |
| currency | after the amount | *2 400 €*, *2 400 euros* |
| dates | lowercase month, no comma | *le 6 juin 2026*; *le 1er janvier* (DGT: *à compter du 1er janvier 2007*, `dgt-tm-v2021:1343`) |
| times | *h* | *14 h 30* |
| ordinals | superscript abbreviations | *1er*, *1re*, *2e*, *XXe siècle* |
| capitals | lowercase days, months, nationality adjectives, languages | *lundi*, *juin*, *un écrivain français* |
| titles of persons | lowercase function, capital in address | *le président*, *Monsieur le Président* |

**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

| concept | borrowed form(s) | count | native form(s) | count | reading |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| e-mail | *e-mail(s)* | 4 449 | *courriel(s)* / *courrier(s) électronique(s)* | 13 696 / 2 964 | *courriel* has won in this register (Europarl: native forms ahead too) |
| weekend | *week-end(s)* | 37 117 | *fin(s) de semaine* | 1 953 | *week-end* in France; *fin de semaine* is the Québec word |
| marketing | *marketing* | 33 109 | *mercatique* | 508 | *marketing* |
| start-up | *start-up(s)*, *startup(s)* | 18 556 | *jeune(s) pousse(s)* | 1 650 | *start-up*, about 11 : 1 |
| podcast | *podcast(s)* | 39 081 | *balado(s)* / *baladodiffusion(s)* | 1 314 / 307 | *podcast* in France; *balado* is Québec |
| smartphone | *smartphone(s)* | 14 472 | *téléphone(s) intelligent(s)* / *ordiphone(s)* | 340 / 70 | *smartphone*; the official *ordiphone* is a curiosity |
| hashtag | *hashtag(s)* | 2 547 | *mot-dièse* | 112 | *hashtag* |
| spoiler | *spoiler*, *spoilé* | 2 620 | *divulgâcher*, *divulgâchage* | 31 | *spoiler*, though *divulgâcher* is known |
| fake news | *fake news* | 2 406 | *infox* | 1 072 | the official *infox* has a real share |
| feedback | *feedback(s)* | 3 349 | (*retour*: not countable separately) |  |  |
| challenge | *challenge(s)* | 119 752 | *défi(s)* | 49 112 | **misleading**: most *challenge* hits are names of sports competitions and trophies (*Challenge de France*, *Challenge Tour*); in running prose *défi* is the word (Europarl: 11 590 to 14) |
| deadline | *deadline(s)* | 54 423 | *date(s) limite(s)* | 3 076 | **misleading**: *Deadline* is a much-cited American trade publication in references; in French prose *date limite* is the word |
| digital | *digital(e)(s)* | 112 226 | *numérique(s)* | 164 358 | inflated by English titles; *numérique* leads even so, and is the official and dominant term |
| software | *software* | 34 352 | *logiciel(s)* | 124 414 | *software* hits are mostly names and English titles; *logiciel* is the word |
| cloud | *cloud* | 41 518 | *informatique en nuage* / *infonuagique* | 167 / 49 | names and titles inflate *cloud*; in prose *le cloud* is common and the native terms rare |

### 11.2 Semantic anglicisms and calques

| construction | anglicism or calque | count | native or norm | count | reading |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| realise (understand) | *réaliser que* (all forms counted) | 4 535 | *se rendre compte que* (all forms) | 9 827 | the norm leads 2 : 1 here (Europarl: equal); *se rendre compte* is the safe choice |
| in charge of | *en charge de* | 4 744 | *chargé(e)(s) de* | 140 564 | *chargé de* by far |
| make sense | *faire du sens* | 49 | *avoir du sens* / *un sens* | 2 283 | *faire du sens* is an error in this register |
| in the end | *au final* | 6 197 | *finalement* | 245 929 | *finalement* |
| address a problem | *adresser* + *problème/question/défi* | 47 | (*traiter*, *aborder*: not countable here) |  | rare: an error |
| impact (verb) | *impacter* (all forms) | 3 086 | (*avoir un impact sur*, *affecter*, *toucher*) |  | present and criticised; prefer *affecter*, *toucher* in careful prose |
| initiate | *initier* / *initié(e)* | 26 817 | (*lancer*, *engager*) |  | common; partly the old sense "introduce someone to" |
| opportunity | *opportunité(s)* | 19 133 |  |  | established in both senses |
| support (a team) | *supporter* | 15 191 | *soutenir* | 48 554 | *supporter* counts include the noun *un supporter* (a fan); for the verb, *soutenir* |

### 11.3 Feminine forms of titles

| form | count | competitor | count | reading |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| *autrice(s)* | 28 901 | *auteure(s)* | 25 817 | both established; *autrice* now slightly ahead |
| *professeure(s)* | 26 334 |  |  | established |
| *la ministre* | 9 091 |  |  | established |
| *Madame la Ministre* | 103 | *Madame le Ministre* | 44 | the feminine leads 2 : 1 |
| *la rapporteure* | 84 | *la rapporteur* | 10 | *-e* form leads |

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

| English | French (id) | what the French had to decide |
| --- | --- | --- |
| *I'm tired.* | *Je suis fatiguée.* (`tatoeba:1705-531744`) | the speaker is a woman |
| *Are you ready?* | *Êtes-vous prêt ?* (`tatoeba:376424-550353`) | *vous*, one man |
| *I don't care.* | *Ça m'est égal.* / *Je m'en fous.* (`tatoeba:2323-4177`, `-557867`) | neutral or vulgar-colloquial |
| *Can you help me?* | *Pourriez-vous m'aider ?* (`tatoeba:434410-884838`) | *vous* and the polite conditional |
| *I was told that I should see a doctor.* | *On m'a dit de consulter un médecin.* (`tatoeba:256026-1592669`) | passive → *on*; *should see* → *de* + infinitive |
| *He swam across the river.* | *Il traversa la rivière à la nage.* (`tatoeba:291092-135951`) | chassé-croisé; passé simple (written narrative) |
| *I washed my hands with soap and water.* | *Je me suis lavé les mains avec de l'eau et du savon.* (`tatoeba:6683457-6683584`) | reflexive + definite article for the body; the order of *soap and water* reversed to the French binomial *de l'eau et du savon* |
| *It's raining cats and dogs.* | *Il pleut des cordes.* (`tatoeba:384559-181055`) | equivalent idiom |

### 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

| Ukrainian (from Tatoeba FR–UK, French written first) | French | added in French |
| --- | --- | --- |
| *Хочу молока та печива!* | *Je veux du lait et des biscuits !* (`tatoeba:2532549-5718295`) | the subject; the partitive articles |
| *У цій кімнаті є телевізор.* | *Il y a une télévision dans cette pièce.* (`tatoeba:139616-614155`) | *il y a*; the article |
| *На стіні сидять мухи.* | *Il y a des mouches posées sur le mur.* (`tatoeba:139580-503440`) | *il y a* + participle for a verb of position |
| *Все ще дощить.* | *Il pleut encore.* (`tatoeba:13443-480998`) | the impersonal subject *il* |
| *Ніхто мене не розуміє.* | *Personne ne me comprend.* (`tatoeba:3299-490603`) | clitic *me* before the verb; *ne* |

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

| source voice | function | French delta | avoid |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| English colloquial (*gonna*, *kinda*, contractions) | everyday ease | spoken French: dropped *ne*, *on*, *ça*, elisions in dialogue | transcribing every elision; Québec features in a France brief |
| English rap and AAE (*ain't*, zero copula, habitual *be*) | rhythm, identity | French rap grammar: elision, *verlan*, slang, English loanwords common in French rap | a banlieue accent for every Black character |
| English archaic, KJV | the old, the sacred | the Segond register: *tu*, *point*, passé simple | modern slang |
| Ukrainian colloquial (particles, dropped subjects) | closeness | *bon*, *ben*, *quand même*, *donc*, *hein* | adding *voyons* to every line |
| surzhyk | social place, warmth, comedy | non-local *français populaire*: *si j'aurais su*, *malgré que*, *ça* everywhere, popular vocabulary, at low density | Marseille, Québec or Belgian features; a narrator's judgement |
| Ukrainian folk song | the timeless | French folk-song diction: fixed epithets, simple syntax, inversion | modern colloquial |
| Ukrainian army slang | shared war experience | French military slang for soldiers' speech (*les bleus*, *le casse-pipe* are dated; current slang varies), glosses for terms | euphemism the source did not use |

A constructed example, the surzhyk line of [Translating into English](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/translation/into-en/) §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](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/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](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/)). The parallel corpora of [tools/parallel](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/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](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/) (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*

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