French Subtitle Generator
Add French subtitles to any video automatically, with accents, cedillas and French typographic spacing handled correctly, timed line by line.
French is a hard language to transcribe by ear because so much of it disappears in speech: liaison joins words together, elision drops vowels, and most plural endings are silent. Written French has to restore all of it, and that is grammar work, not sound matching.
- ✓Accents and ç
- ✓French punctuation spacing
- ✓European & Québécois
- ✓Free
Launching 10 September 2026. Join the waitlist for early access to French subtitles.
What makes French subtitles different
Every language breaks in its own way. These are the parts that matter for French.
Silent agreement restored
Parle, parles and parlent sound identical. Choosing the right one is a grammatical decision made from sentence context, and it is what separates readable French subtitles from nonsense.
French typographic conventions
The narrow space before ; : ! and ?, and guillemets for quotation, are applied as French typography expects rather than English defaults being carried across.
Metropolitan and Québécois
European French and Canadian French are both recognised, along with the vocabulary and vowel differences that separate them, without needing to be told which is which.
Register left to you
Tu and vous carry real social weight in French. The transcript reflects what the speaker said, and you decide in the editor whether to adjust it for the audience.
How to add French subtitles to a video
Upload, review, export. No timeline scrubbing and no timecodes typed by hand.
- 1
Upload your video
Drop in an MP4, MOV, MKV or audio file containing French speech. There is nothing to install and no account needed first.
- 2
Generate French subtitles
The model transcribes the French audio, restores the silent agreements and elisions that speech leaves out, and times each line to the frame.
- 3
Edit and export
Correct any names or terms in the editor, then download the video with French subtitles burned in, or export a clean .srt or .vtt file.
Why French subtitles are a grammar problem
Spoken French throws away a lot of information that written French requires back. Final consonants go unpronounced, so the singular and plural of most verbs sound exactly the same. Liaison glues the end of one word to the start of the next, so where one word stops and another starts is not audible. Elision contracts je ai into j'ai. A transcription system working purely from sound has no way to resolve any of this.
Getting it right means reading the whole sentence and working out, grammatically, which form has to be there: what the subject is, whether the object is plural, whether an adjective agrees. That is the same context-aware processing that makes punctuation and homophone resolution work, applied to a language where it carries much more weight.
Typography is the finishing touch and the thing French readers notice immediately. French puts a narrow non-breaking space before a semicolon, colon, exclamation mark and question mark, and uses guillemets rather than English quotation marks. Subtitles that follow English spacing rules look foreign on the page even when every word is correct.
Related tools and languages
Other formats, and the other languages people caption most often.
Frequently Asked Questions
Specific to French, not the generic list.
Does it get French verb agreement right?
Yes, and it has to, because parle, parles and parlent are indistinguishable in speech. The correct form is chosen from sentence context rather than from sound, which is why context-aware transcription matters more in French than in most languages.
Does it support Québécois French?
Yes. Canadian French is recognised alongside metropolitan French, including the vowel and vocabulary differences, without you selecting a variety beforehand.
Is French punctuation spacing applied?
Yes. The narrow space before ; : ! and ? is applied, and quotations use guillemets. These are the details that make subtitles read as properly typeset French rather than English rules with accents added.
Will accents and cedillas export correctly?
They will. Files export as UTF-8, so é, è, ê, ë, à, â, ù, û, î, ï, ô and ç all render correctly in YouTube, VLC, browsers and editing software.
Does the transcript use tu or vous?
Whichever the speaker used. The distinction carries social meaning that no tool should decide on your behalf, so the transcript reflects the audio and you adjust it in the editor if needed.
Can I edit my captions before exporting?
Yes. Correct the transcript, adjust timings, choose a caption style and then export the finished video or a clean SRT or VTT file.
When does Caption Maker launch?
Caption Maker launches on 10 September 2026. Join the waitlist to be notified when editing and exports open.
Start subtitling in French
Caption Maker launches on 10 September 2026. Join the waitlist and generate French subtitles from day one.
- ✓No Credit Card Required
- ✓GDPR Compliant
- ✓Secure Upload