French to English Translation

Translate the meaning, not the exact words

English and French are both Indo-European languages, that are also geographically close and have deep historical connections. On the one hand, this makes French to English a little bit easier: there are a lot of cognates, similar expressions, and grammatical structures. However, you shouldn’t always rely on that when you translate French to English.

There are a lot of phrases in French, especially idiomatic expressions, that don’t have a literal translation in English. For example, ‘une bonne fourchette’ is literally ‘a good fork’ but it actually means a hearty eater.

When you translate documents or other texts from French to English, it is important to be aware of such expressions and translate what they mean, not what the words literally say.

Watch out for false cognates

As mentioned above, English and French share quite a few cognates: words that have similar form and meaning in the two languages. This makes French to English translation a bit easier. However, this also creates the danger of false cognates or the so-called false friends: words that have the same form but very different meanings.

For example, the French word ‘actuellement’ looks very similar to the English ‘actually’ but it means ‘currently, at the moment’.

When you translate French to English, it is important to be aware of the existence of such word and double-check in a good dictionary when in doubt.

Hire experienced translators

Using machine translation may be very tempting. And it can be OK if you need to translate a short message from a friend on social media. When you translate in a business context, translate documents and other important types of text, using machine translation is out of the question. 

Despite English and French being related and sharing some similarities, French to English translation has a lot of nuances. To be able to translate such nuances correctly, you need an experienced translator and not a machine.

A daughter of Latin

At the height of the Roman Empire, Latin was practically the world language, the language of religion, law, medicine, and many other areas. In around the 7th century CE, different varieties of Vulgar Latin, spoken in Italy, France, and Spain, begins to change rapidly and eventually becomes separate languages: Italian, French, Spanish.

There are still ‘traces’ of Latin in the French language, such as some vocabulary of Latin origin and some grammatical structures.

One of the world’s most spoken languages

French is easily one of the most wide-spread languages on our planet. It is the official language of 28 countries, with the highest number of speakers in France, Canada, Belgium, and Switzerland. It is also widely spoken in parts of Western and Central Africa, on several Caribbean islands, and even on the South American mainland.

French to English translation in business as well as other contexts has always been in high demand and still is nowadays. Our translation company in Singapore offers high-quality French to English translation.

A large number of homophones

Homophones are words that have the same pronunciation but different spelling and different meanings. There are quite a lot of homophones in the French language, partly due to the fact that final letters of French words are often dropped in pronunciation, and, for example, the singular and plural form of a word (femme – femmes) sound exactly the same. However, even a little context is usually enough to distinguish between French homophones.