French Subtitle Generator

French speech, French subtitles

French transcribes well, including Québécois and African French accents. Elisions and liaisons such as "l'homme" and "c'est" are written correctly in most cases. The words most likely to need a fix are names and English loanwords, which can be spelled the French way or the English way depending on how they were pronounced. To turn French speech into English instead, see the French to English video translator.

French typography in a subtitle file

French puts a space before the two-part punctuation marks : ; ? and !, and uses guillemets « » for quotations. Machine output doesn't always follow this. If your audience expects French typography, add the spaces in a subtitle editor, and use a non-breaking space (U+00A0) so a lone question mark never wraps onto a line of its own. Canadian French style often leaves the space out before ; ? and !, so follow your audience's convention rather than one fixed rule.

Translating into French: tu or vous

A translation into French has to choose between "tu" and "vous", and between a masculine or feminine form whenever the source doesn't say. In a single file the choice can drift, especially when one speaker addresses different people. Read the translated subtitles once for consistency, and decide how brand names take their gender ("la" or "le") so it doesn't change from cue to cue. Translations are written in standard French; for a Québec audience, check vocabulary that differs between France and Canada.

Longer lines than English

French usually runs longer than English, so subtitles translated from a quick English speaker carry more text per cue. Each cue is a single line covering one stretch of speech; where one is crowded, split it at a pause and keep the times in order. Subtitle readability suggests limits for line length and reading speed.

Using French subtitles

Upload the SRT in YouTube Studio under French, or import it into an editor as a caption track. Accented letters (é, è, à, ç, œ) are stored as UTF-8, so they display correctly in modern players.

What French subtitles cost

Subtitles cost 1 credit per minute with a 5-credit minimum per file, and the 100 free credits from signing in with Google cover 100 minutes. Top-ups are charged in Indian rupees at the day's exchange rate through Cashfree Payments (UPI, cards or netbanking), about ₹96 for 1,000 credits.

Using the tool on this page

• The spoken language is detected automatically; you select the output language — the spoken language itself for an untranslated transcript, or another language for a translation. Files can be up to 2 hours long.
• Only the audio is sent for processing — the video stays on your device — and audio and text are deleted within 30 minutes of delivery (how files are protected).
• You can download a timestamped transcript, subtitles (SRT and VTT) and plain text. Every output, step and limit is explained on the subtitle generator page.