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French Translation

Professional translation service (free service available for charities)
Machine translation (free service for quick "gisting")

You may use this page to translate French into English or translate English into French. The tool is mainly designed to translate French or English text rather than translating single French or English words, for which you should use the dictionary. Enter the French or English text to translate into the other language, then hit the Translate button.

Note that as this is an automatic machine translation, you should bear in mind that the translation may not be perfect. But it should be useful for quickly getting the gist of a given text, or as a guide to how to translate it. If you require an accurate translation, please see the human translation service.

NEW! Translation examples

Typing accents:

The following shortcuts work with all vowels:

e/ = é
e\ = è
e^ = ê

NEW! These shortcuts are available as an embeddable text accentuation tool: see the accent tool instructions.

Need lots of translations?: advantages of translation software

If you frequently need automatic translations, then translation software may make the job more efficient for you. Dedicated translation software typically includes features such as:

translation of texts of an arbitrary size;
integration with Microsoft Word and other document processing software;
facilities for translating web pages.

(You should of course check the description of the particular product in question to check that it meets your needs before ordering!)

Tips for better translations

don't forget accents (see box to right);

punctuate your text– e.g. put a question mark if you want to translate a question– and don't miss out apostrophes that separate words in French (l'air, d'autres), or full stops between sentences;

don't miss spaces between words;

try to use correct spelling;

see the page on getting the most out of machine translation and preparing your document for machine translation.

Related tools: French dictionary Language identifier Translation example search

Where indicated, machine translation results are powered by Google.
Web tool written by Neil Coffey. Copyright © Javamex UK 2009. All rights reserved.