Generate subtitles for your French videos

About French transcription

French (Français) is written in the Latin alphabet and spoken principally in France, Belgium, Switzerland, Canada and much of West and Central Africa. Subtitles generated here come back in that script, as ordinary written French, ready to use in an SRT or VTT file.

French elides heavily in speech — words run together in ways the written form does not show — which makes word boundaries the hard part rather than the vocabulary. African and Québécois French are both well handled.

What a French subtitle file looks like

Four lines as they come out of the exported SRT, in the Latin alphabet with the timings taken from the speech itself.

1
00:00:01,000 --> 00:00:03,240
Bonjour à tous.

2
00:00:03,600 --> 00:00:06,120
Je partagerai les détails dans un instant.

3
00:00:06,480 --> 00:00:09,300
Écrivez vos questions ci-dessous.

4
00:00:09,700 --> 00:00:12,040
C'est tout pour aujourd'hui.

What people caption in French

The French material that comes through most often is lectures, corporate video, documentaries and podcasts. All of it works the same way — upload the file, check the transcript, export the subtitle track.

Getting a better French transcript

• Set the language to French rather than leaving detection on, particularly for clips under a minute where there is little audio to judge from.
• Upload the highest-quality audio you have; compression artefacts cost more accuracy than most people expect.
• Check proper nouns, place names and numbers first — recognition errors concentrate there.
• Read the transcript before exporting. French subtitles are editable up until you download them.

French subtitles in another language

The same French audio can produce subtitles in any of the 76 supported languages instead of in French itself. English is the most common target, but every pair works, and the translated file keeps the original timings so it drops onto the same video unchanged.