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French subtitles · Free

Add French subtitles to a video, free

Translate your captions to French without recutting a single line.

  • Free to start
  • In your browser
  • Up to 500 MB
How it works

How to add French subtitles

  1. Upload or record

    Drop a file into the editor, or record straight from the browser. Nothing installs.

  2. Generate the English captions

    Whisper transcribes the audio and cuts it into timed lines you can edit as text.

  3. Translate to French

    Pick French in the captions panel. The timings stay put; only the words change.

  4. Export, burn in or dub

    Download an SRT, burn the French captions into the video, or generate a French voiceover.

French expands about 15 to 20%, and punctuates differently

French takes roughly 15 to 20% more characters than English for the same sentence, so expect some captions to gain a line. Less obvious is the punctuation: French puts a space before a colon, semicolon, question mark and exclamation mark, and that space counts toward the line.

Those spaces are non-breaking in good typography, which matters here because a line break landing between a word and its question mark is the kind of thing nobody notices until it is burned into the video.

Quotation marks are guillemets, and they are wider

French quotes with « and » rather than inverted commas, with a space inside each. On a caption that is already near the wrap width, a quoted line can be the one that tips over.

Both characters are in the caption fonts, so they render in the file and in the burn. What they cost you is width, which is worth knowing before you translate a dialogue-heavy edit.

FAQ

French subtitle questions

Does the French translation keep my caption timings?

Yes. The words inside each caption change and the start and end times do not move.

Are guillemets and accents safe in the burned-in version?

Yes. « » and the full set of French accents are in the caption fonts, so they burn as themselves rather than as boxes.

Can I get a French voiceover too?

Yes. French has an AI dubbing voice, so you can generate a spoken track alongside or instead of the subtitles.

What if a translated line is too long?

Edit it in the captions panel. Shortening the text does not move the timing, and the editor re-wraps on what you leave.

Add French subtitles now

Free, in your browser, and the file stays open in a full editor afterwards.