Why English to French is harder than it looks
Tu or vous is the first decision, and it is visible. English hides the relationship; French states it in every sentence. Vous to a friend reads as cold, tu to a prospective employer reads as careless. Set the tone before translating and the pronoun follows it, instead of leaving the choice to a guess.
French nouns have gender and adjectives agree with them. “I’m ready” is prêt or prête depending on who is speaking, and short chat messages rarely tell a translator which. It is the most common thing to check in the preview when you are writing about yourself.
English keeps piling on words; French does not. “Just wanted to quickly check whether you’d had a chance to look at this yet” is normal English and painful French. Running Concise over the message before translating usually produces French that reads the way a French speaker would write it.
Accents change meaning, not just spelling. Ou is “or” and où is “where”; a is “has” and à is “to.” A message that drops accents looks careless in French even when the words are right, which is a reason to let the keyboard produce the text rather than typing around a missing layout.
Written by Hardik Vegad, Co-founder, Translatify. Last updated .
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