Your translation is finished. Every word is right, every sentence sounds natural.
And then you write lundi with a capital, close a French quotation with American quote marks, forget the space before the question mark, and turn 1,500 into 1.500.
The text is linguistically correct and visibly foreign. Typography is the accent you cannot hear — and the last thing standing between a correct translation and an authentic one.
Why typography matters
Typographic conventions are not decoration. They are a marker of cultural authenticity, and readers register them before they read a single word. Worse, some of them are not conventions at all: writing a date or a decimal number in the wrong system does not look foreign, it means something different.
This article covers the rules that actually cause errors between English and French. None of them is difficult; all of them are invisible until broken.
1. Spaces: the rule that betrays every translation
This is the single most frequent typographic error in French translated from English.
French requires a space before certain punctuation marks, English never does.
- Space before (non-breaking): ; : ! ? % and the currency symbol
- Space inside guillemets: « comme ceci »
- No space before: the comma, the full stop, the apostrophe, the ellipsis
So Vraiment ? and not Vraiment?; 50 % and not 50%; 20 € and not 20€ or €20.
The space must be non-breaking, so the punctuation never falls alone at the start of a line. In a word processor it is inserted automatically; in HTML, a CMS or a subtitle file it usually is not, which is why so many websites in French show an exclamation mark stranded on the following line.
English, for its part, puts a single space after a full stop — the double space belongs to the typewriter era and to no current style guide.
2. Numbers, dates and times: where errors become factual
- Decimals. English: 3.14. French: 3,14. The separator is a comma, and a mistake here changes the number.
- Thousands. English: 1,500. French: 1 500, with a non-breaking space — never a full stop, and never a comma.
- Dates. 04/07/2026 is 4 July in Britain and France, 7 April in the United States. In translation, spell the month out whenever the format is ambiguous.
- Times. English: 2:30 p.m. French: 14 h 30 (spaces around the h), on a 24-hour clock.
- Currency. The symbol precedes in English (£50, $20) and follows in French (50 £, 20 $), after a non-breaking space.
- Ordinals. English: 1st, 2nd, 3rd. French: 1er, 1re, 2e, 3e — and 2ème is incorrect, however common it is.
3. Capitalisation
English capitalises, French does not
- Languages: English, French, Latin ↔ l'anglais, le français, le latin
- Days: Monday, Tuesday ↔ lundi, mardi
- Months: January, February ↔ janvier, février
- Adjectives of nationality: a Japanese student ↔ une étudiante japonaise
- Job titles and ranks: President Macron ↔ le président Macron
Both languages capitalise
Proper nouns, brand names, place names, holidays (Christmas ↔ Noël), and demonyms used as nouns: a German ↔ un Allemand, a Parisian ↔ un Parisien, a South African ↔ un Sud-Africain.
The rule to remember: in French the noun keeps its capital, the adjective loses it. Un Japonais but un étudiant japonais. English capitalises both.
Titles: title case versus sentence case
English uses title case — every significant word capitalised: The Old Man and the Sea, How to Train Your Dragon.
French uses sentence case: only the first word, plus any proper nouns. Le vieil homme et la mer. The one traditional exception: when the title opens with a definite article followed by an adjective and a noun, the adjective takes a capital too — Le Petit Prince, Les Misérables.
Applying English title case to a French heading is one of the most visible marks of a translated website.
Accents on capitals
French capitals take their accents: École, À bientôt, Élysée. Dropping them is a typewriter limitation, not a rule, and the Académie française is explicit on the point.
4. Quotation marks
- French: guillemets « … », with non-breaking spaces inside. Nested quotation uses double quotes “ … ”.
- British English: single quotes ‘ … ’ outside, double “ … ” nested.
- American English: double quotes “ … ” outside, single ‘ … ’ nested — the exact reverse of British practice.
Two further divergences that matter in American English: the comma and the full stop go inside the closing quotation mark whatever the logic (“I don't know,” he said.), whereas British and French practice places them according to sense.
And in all three, the straight typewriter marks " and ' are wrong. They exist because of keyboards, not because of typography.
5. Direct speech
English
Quotation marks only, opening and closing on every turn, with a new paragraph for each speaker. No dashes.
'Put that in another bag!'
'Sorry about that. Stray cats are always ripping bin bags.'
'You have no excuse.'
French
The standard system combines guillemets and dashes:
- the dialogue opens with «, and the first line takes no dash;
- each change of speaker is marked by an em dash (—);
- the dialogue closes with » at the very end, not on each line.
« Mettez ça dans un autre sac !
— Désolé… Les chats errants éventrent constamment les sacs-poubelles.
— Vous n'avez pas d'excuses. »
A second system, common in contemporary publishing, uses a dash on every line including the first and no guillemets at all. Both are correct; mixing them is not.
Note also that a French speech tag is inserted without additional punctuation and with inversion: « Désolé, répondit-il, je n'ai pas vu. »
6. Commas, dashes and italics
Commas. French punctuates its clauses more heavily, and its syntax invites insertions that English would leave unmarked. Going into French, expect to add commas around inserted elements; going into English, expect to remove some. A separate point: the Oxford comma before the final and in a list is optional in English and does not exist in French.
Dashes. English uses them freely for parenthetical remarks — like this. American practice uses an unspaced em dash, British practice a spaced en dash. French prefers parentheses or commas for the same job, and reserves the dash mainly for dialogue.
Italics. Same three functions in both languages: emphasis, titles of works, and foreign words. The last is worth watching, since a word that is foreign in one direction is not in the other: un faux pas is italicised in English and perfectly ordinary in French, while le week-end is now naturalised in French and needs no italics at all.
7. Abbreviations that do not match
- Mr, Mrs, Ms ↔ M., Mme, Mlle — note that Mme takes no full stop, because it ends with the last letter of the word, while M. does.
- e.g. ↔ p. ex.; i.e. ↔ c.-à-d.; etc. is identical, and never follows an ampersand in French.
- Acronyms take no full stops in modern French: ONU, SNCF.
Conclusion
Typography is the detail that separates a correct translation from an authentic one. It costs nothing to get right and it is noticed instantly when wrong — by readers who could not name the rule they are reacting to.
A finished translation does not only say the right words. It writes them the right way: the right capitals, the right quotation marks, the right spaces, the right decimal point.
That is where the translator's last step toward invisibility is taken.