How to Translate Videos to French with AI

GeckoDub offers four French variants — France, Canada, Belgium and Switzerland — which covers the split that matters: European French for France, Belgium, Switzerland and most of Francophone Africa, and Canadian French for Quebec. A Parisian voice in a Quebec campaign is noticed immediately, and the reverse is just as jarring.

Which variant for which market

• France — Europe's third-largest e-commerce market and the default for European and African campaigns.
• Canada — Quebec combines high purchasing power with language legislation that requires French in commercial advertising, so a French version isn't optional there.
• Belgium — reaches Wallonia and Brussels; European French is standard.
• Switzerland — a small but affluent Romandy audience.

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 — different variants, different media costs, different creative expectations.