How to do an English to French PDF translation, and what to check

US dates and numbers stay in their US form

LoreAI keeps every date and number written in digits exactly as it is, so nothing on an official record changes by accident. Dates written in words are translated. For a French reader that leaves a few lines to fix by hand, because France writes the day first and uses a decimal comma.

The second and third rows are the dangerous ones. 06/22/1994 looks wrong to a French reader, which at least prompts a question. 04/03/2023 looks right and is read as 4 March. Write the month in words, as in 3 avril 2023, wherever a date in digits could be misread. French also separates thousands with a no-break space, as in 12 480[1].

Punctuation spacing in the French Word file

French puts a space before the colon, semicolon, question mark and exclamation mark, and inside guillemets. LoreAI's file had all of them, as in Date de délivrance : 30 septembre 2026, and the English quotation marks became « guillemets ».

They were ordinary spaces, though. France's language office, the DGLF, says the space before ; : ! and ? should be a no-break space, so the sign never ends up alone at the start of the next line[1]. In Word, open Find and Replace, search for a space followed by the sign, and replace it with ^s followed by the sign. ^s is Word's code for a no-break space.

Readers in Québec follow other rules. The Office québécois de la langue française recommends no space before the semicolon, question mark and exclamation mark, a no-break space before the colon, and no-break spaces inside guillemets[2]. LoreAI has one French target, so adjust the spacing for a Canadian reader yourself.

What else our English to French test showed

We ran specimen-enrollment-verification-en.pdf, a scanned US enrollment and degree verification with invented names, through LoreAI twice. Names, the student ID, the e-mail address and every digit came through as written. The wording needed a closer look.

Gender

"The student" became l'étudiant, the masculine form, in both runs, although the student is Emily. French needs l'étudiante here.

Degree

Bachelor of Science in Biology, cum laude became Licence ès sciences en biologie, avec mention bien in one run and avec mention in the other.

Office names

The Registrar became le registraire, the word Québec universities use. A French university calls that office the service de la scolarité.

Date range

August 26, 2019 to May 14, 2023 became 26 août 2019 au 14 mai 2023, without the opening du.

English rarely marks gender, so read every word that refers to a person and make it agree. Keep the English degree title in brackets after the French one, because Licence is a French degree with its own meaning. The official comparison of a US degree with French levels is the attestation de comparabilité (page in French).

How to translate an English PDF to French with LoreAI

1. Create a free account. Your first document is free, up to 3 pages and 3 MB.
2. Upload the English PDF. A PDF with text, a scan and a phone photo saved as JPG or PNG all work.
3. Choose French. LoreAI detects English on its own.
4. Download the Word file. Tables and headings keep the layout of the PDF.
5. Make it read as French. Rewrite numeric dates, switch decimals to commas where the reader expects them, fix gender agreement and set no-break spaces.

When a French office asks for a traducteur agréé

In France, an official translation is made by a traducteur agréé, an expert judiciaire on the list of a cour d'appel or on the national list of the Cour de cassation[3]. If you have the translation made abroad, some consulates publish the translators approved by the local authorities, and the consulate certifies the translator's signature[3].

LoreAI is not a sworn or certified translation service. Its Word file is for reading, for a draft to share, or for the traducteur agréé to start from. The sworn translation guide explains how sworn translation works in other countries.

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