Free English to French Translations - Free French Translator

Looking for free English to French translations? Here's a free French translator that you can use to help you understand texts and web pages. At the bottom of the page, you'll also find information about prices and options for professional French translation.

Machine translators can create French translations that sound strange, incoherent or silly, or even mean something totally different from the original. It is therefore a big risk to use a machine, for example, to translate a letter you will send to your client or information you will post on your website.

What happens when free English to French translations go wrong?

Here is part of a French Wikipedia article discussing the life of the actor Al Pacino. We have used one of the most popular free online translation tools to translate it to English. The result:

“As from this moment, Pacino becomes insomniac. It also accumulates many odd jobs after having left the school system at 17 years. Its successive odd jobs allowed him d' to come into contact with all kinds of characters. It was dispach rider, salesman of shoes, cash clerk of supermarket, deliveryman of newspapers. It waxed shoes and was remover. It s' grouillot in an office tested. It made shine of the fresh fruits in a grocer."

Machine translators are basically advanced multilingual dictionaries. They do not form sentences the way a human does or understand what the sentences mean. What they do is substitute words in English with words in French, and vice-versa. But some words have more than one meaning. Think of the word "sink." It can mean the thing in your kitchen. Or it can mean what happened to the Titanic. These two meanings will have totally different translations in French. And the free French translator might choose the wrong one. So you can see how machine translations can end up sounding like nonsense or meaning something different from the original.

We are not knocking machine translators. They are incredibly useful tools. For example, if you want to find your way around a French website, a free French translator can be the perfect solution. Or, let's say you just want to look up a word in a French to check how it's spelled. Or you received a mysterious French language e-mail, and you want to know if it's spam or from a client. You can't beat a free French translator for speed, convenience, or price, but these tools have their limitations.

We asked the French translator Perrine Souffez to explain the difference between a free French translator and a CAT [Computer Assisted Translation] tool like Trados or WordFast.
"A CAT tool is a tool for computer assisted translation. They help with translation, but they don't actually translate.
For example, if I put a text I am translating in my tool (I currently work with one called Déjà Vu, which is the same as Trados), what the program does is that it starts recognizing words or phrases that I am translating. So if I translate a phrase once, and the same phrase comes up again, the program says, "Ah, I know that one," and it will automatically write in the translation.
Of course, you have to revise that afterward since it's a machine and it doesn't translate. But it helps because it saves time by recognizing words that you have already translated. And then you have a ton of tools in the program. It has what is called a memory, and you can put words there so that you always have them. CAT tools help, but they don't translate.
The automatic translators that you find online have a dictionary behind them. It's as if I tried to translate something to Greek by taking a Greek dictionary and looking up all the words."

- Perrine Souffez, French Translator

Free English to French Translations: Free French Translator