How to Translate Videos to French with AI

GeckoDub has four French options: France, Canada, Belgium and Switzerland. Each one sets the voice, and where the region's French differs, the translated script follows it: French (Canada) uses Quebec words such as courriel and fin de semaine. European French (France) suits France and most of Francophone Africa.

France, Belgium, Switzerland and Quebec

• France — Europe's third-largest e-commerce market and the default for European and African campaigns.
• Belgium and Switzerland — French (Belgium) and French (Switzerland) give you a local voice for Wallonia, Brussels and Romandy. Numbers are the difference most likely to show in an ad: Belgian and Swiss French say septante and nonante where France says soixante-dix and quatre-vingt-dix, so check spoken prices and figures in the script.
• Quebec — high purchasing power, and language legislation that requires French in commercial advertising, so a French version isn't optional there. A Parisian accent is noticed immediately in Quebec, so use French (Canada): a Quebec voice and Quebec vocabulary. Have a native Québécois speaker read the script before you scale spend.

What's specific about dubbing into French

• French runs roughly 15–20% longer than English. The same idea simply takes more words, and that's the main reason a translated ad drifts out of sync. Tighten the script in Smart Translation Control rather than letting the voice speed up.
• Liaison and elision blur word boundaries. French is delivered as continuous phrases rather than clearly separated words, so subtitles should break on grammatical units — never mid-phrase — or they read as jarring.
• tu or vous. DTC and creator-led ads normally use tu; finance, B2B and luxury usually keep vous. Choose one and hold it all the way through, including the CTA.
• Anglicisms carry risk. Words English speakers assume are universal can read as lazy in France, where audiences are notably sensitive to translation quality — while Quebec French often uses a French equivalent exactly where France has adopted the English word.
• Formatting differs. French uses a comma as the decimal separator and a space before certain punctuation marks, which is worth checking on price overlays and subtitles.

Tips

• Keep brand and product names untranslated via the Brand Kit glossary.
• French audiences respond well to storytelling and understatement; hard-sell American hooks usually need reframing rather than translating.
• Run France and Quebec as separate campaigns, each with its own French version: different voices, different media costs, different creative expectations.