French
Français
French subtitling breaks in ways generic tools do not anticipate: elision glues words together, guillemets take their own spacing, and a line that ends on an article reads as a mistake even when every character is correct. Hello8 runs a French-specific segmentation engine that knows the difference.
310 million
Native speakers
5 Regions
France, Canada...
≤5% WER
Word Error Rate
AI Reviewer
On every subtitle
French Transcription Features
Popular Use Cases
Documentary & Film
Preserve narrative voice and cultural nuances in French subtitles for documentaries and films targeting France audiences.
Corporate Training
Deliver accurate French training content with consistent terminology across your global workforce.
Marketing & Social
Reach French-speaking audiences with professionally subtitled marketing and social media content.
French-speaking Regions
Line breaks that follow French grammar
Our segmenter carries a French model of where a subtitle may end. It breaks before conjunctions and connectors (mais, car, donc, pourtant, cependant, néanmoins, toutefois) and before relative pronouns (qui, que, dont, où, lequel), because those start a new clause and the eye expects the break there. It refuses to end a cue on an article, a preposition, a possessive, a subject pronoun, or an elided form such as qu', d', l', n', j'. Those words need what follows them to mean anything, and stranding one at the end of a line is the single most common tell of machine subtitling.
Guillemets and typographic spacing
French quotation uses « » with a narrow no-break space inside each guillemet, and the high punctuation marks (: ; ! ?) take a space before them. Straight quotes imported from an English workflow are wrong twice over: wrong glyph, wrong spacing. Our sentence-boundary detection recognises a closing guillemet as part of the sentence end, whether the period sits inside or outside it, so quoted dialogue does not get split mid-quote.
The AI Reviewer knows which of these is an error
Not every French convention is a mistake worth flagging. Our reviewer classifies guillemet formatting, optional commas, the dropped ne in spoken negation, and typographic spacing as stylistic, and keeps grammar, agreement, and mistranslation as errors. You see the ones that matter first instead of a wall of undifferentiated warnings.
Common French subtitle mistakes
Generic engine
Il a dit qu'il ne viendrait pas parce que le train était en retard.
Hello8
Il a dit qu'il ne viendrait pas parce que le train était en retard.
Breaking after the article le strands it from its noun. The engine breaks before parce instead, a connector it knows about.
Generic engine
"Je ne sais pas", répondit-elle.
Hello8
« Je ne sais pas », répondit-elle.
Straight quotes and missing narrow no-break spaces. The AI Reviewer flags this as stylistic, not as an error, so it never buries a real mistranslation.
Frequently asked questions
- Do you handle Canadian French differently from metropolitan French?
- The segmentation engine is shared, since the grammar it models is shared. Vocabulary and register are handled at translation time, and you can state the variant you want in the project briefing so the reviewer applies it consistently.
- Can I keep straight quotes if my client's style guide asks for them?
- Yes. Guillemet formatting is classified as stylistic, so you can accept or dismiss those suggestions in bulk without touching the substantive corrections.
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French transcription and translation, with the AI Reviewer doing the final read.
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