French Post-Editing and AI Translation Review
You ran your document through DeepL, ChatGPT, Google Translate or your in-house engine. The French looks plausible. Now you need someone who can tell you whether it is right, whether it will hold up in Quebec, and whether you can put your company’s name on it.
That is the job of our post-editing team. Since 2013, Frenchside has been the reference for French translation in Canada, and for the past several years a growing share of our work has been reviewing machine and AI output rather than translating from scratch. Our reviewers are certified translators, members of OTTIAQ or ATIO, and they read your French machine translation the way a Quebec lawyer, customer or OQLF inspector will read it.
Free quote in 30 minutes
Translation agency specialized in French and English
Certified translators, members of the Association of OTTIAQ, ATIO, ATIA, STIBC, ATIM…
Serving Canadian businesses and institutions since 2014
What French Post-Editing Actually Involves
Post-editing is not proofreading. A proofreader checks spelling, grammar and punctuation on a text that is assumed to be correct. A post-editor starts from the assumption that the machine got something wrong and goes looking for it, sentence by sentence, with the English source open on the other screen.
In practice, a certified reviewer working on AI-generated French will do the following:
- Compare every sentence against the source, because engines drop negations, invert conditions and skip list items without leaving any visible trace in the target text. A machine-translated “the warranty does not cover” becomes “the warranty covers” more often than anyone would like to admit.
- Fix terminology so that it matches your industry and your existing French documents. Engines are inconsistent: the same English term can come out three different ways in a single document. We align the vocabulary with your glossary, your previous translations and the standard terms used in Quebec.
- Replace European French with Canadian French where it matters. Most engines default to French from France. For a contract, a product label or a website aimed at Quebec, that is a real problem, and it is the first thing a Quebec reader notices. Our Quebec French translation page explains why the two varieties are not interchangeable in a business context.
- Rewrite what the engine translated literally. Marketing copy, headlines and calls to action come out grammatically correct and commercially dead. A reviewer who translates for a living rewrites these passages rather than patching them.
- Check the parts the engine did not touch: numbers, dates in Canadian format, units, currency, proper nouns, legal references to Quebec statutes, and the accents that silently disappear during copy and paste.
Two Levels Of French Post-Editing, Priced Separately
We quote two service levels, and we tell you which one your document needs before we start.
Light post-editing produces a French text that is accurate and understandable, with errors of meaning corrected, but without stylistic rewriting. It suits internal documents, knowledge base articles, support tickets, technical documentation with a short shelf life, and any content where the reader wants information rather than persuasion.
Full post-editing produces a French text that is indistinguishable from a human translation. Every sentence is checked for meaning, terminology, register and Canadian usage, and the reviewer rewrites whatever needs rewriting. This is the level we recommend for anything customer-facing, contractual, regulatory or published: websites, contracts, policies, product packaging, marketing, HR documents and anything that will be read by the Office québécois de la langue française.
Full post-editing by a certified translator can also be certified. If your machine-translated document needs to be filed with a court, a government body or a regulator, the reviewer signs a certificate of accuracy in the same way we do for our certified French translations.
Is AI French Translation Good Enough For Bill 96?
This is the question we hear most often, and the honest answer is: it depends entirely on who reviews it.
The Charter of the French language does not prohibit machine translation. What it requires is that French versions of your contracts, signage, packaging, software, websites and employee communications be available, and that they be of a quality at least equal to the English. An unreviewed AI translation that contains a mistranslated warranty clause, a European term on a Quebec label or a gendered job title that Quebec French no longer uses will not meet that standard, and the OQLF does not distinguish between a bad human translation and a bad machine one.
Where machine translation with certified review works well: high-volume, repetitive, structured content such as product catalogues, e-commerce listings, help centres, technical manuals, internal policies and standard correspondence.
Where we recommend human translation from the start: contracts of adhesion and terms of use, anything with legal liability, advertising and slogans, packaging that falls under the trademark rules in force since June 2025, and short high-visibility texts where every word counts. For those, see our French legal translation and Bill 96 compliance translation services.
If you are not sure which category your document falls into, send it to us. We will tell you within a few hours whether the machine output is worth reviewing or whether you would save money by having us translate it directly. Sometimes the answer is the second one, and we would rather say so up front.
What The French Review Costs, And Why It Is Not Always Cheaper?
Post-editing is billed per source word, at a rate that is typically 40 to 60 percent of our translation rate for full post-editing and lower for light post-editing. Our French translation rates page gives current ranges.
The saving is real when the machine output is good. It disappears when the output is poor, because a reviewer who has to rewrite two sentences out of three is translating, not editing, and we bill accordingly. Before quoting, we sample your file and score the raw output. If more than roughly a third of the segments need rewriting, we will quote translation instead, and we will explain why.
Volume, file format and turnaround affect the price. Content delivered in clean, editable files with the English source alongside is quicker to review than a French PDF with no source. For projects with a deadline measured in hours, our urgent French translation service covers post-editing as well.
How We Work With Your Engine and Your Files
Most clients send us the raw machine output plus the English source, in Word, Excel, InDesign, XLIFF, JSON, PO or CSV. We review in a translation environment that keeps the source and target aligned, records every change, and builds a translation memory and termbase you own.
That memory matters. Once we have reviewed your first 20,000 words, your terminology is captured. The next batch of machine output can be pre-checked against it, and our reviewers spend their time on genuine errors rather than the same fixes as last month. For clients with continuous content, such as software and SaaS localization or e-commerce catalogues, we set up a recurring review workflow with a fixed monthly rate.
We can also connect to your engine. If you translate with DeepL Pro, Google Cloud Translation, a custom model or an LLM-based pipeline, we will review directly in your platform or through an API hand-off, and we will feed the corrections back so the engine improves. We do not, however, run your confidential documents through public consumer tools ourselves. Our methodology and quality process page details how files are handled and who has access.
Who Review Your French AI Translation?
Every post-editor at Frenchside is a professional translator with at least five years of experience translating into Canadian French, and most hold certification from OTTIAQ (Quebec), ATIO (Ontario) or another provincial body. Reviewers are assigned by subject matter: a legal reviewer for contracts and policies, a technical reviewer for manuals and specifications, a marketing reviewer for websites and campaigns, a medical reviewer for anything clinical or pharmaceutical.
Frenchside was founded in Montréal in 2013 by Benjamin Beaudor, a professional translator who still reviews high-stakes files personally. The company is a member of the Canadian Language Industry Association (CLIA) and of the Globalization and Localization Association (GALA), and has supported more than 1,200 clients, including law firms, financial institutions, manufacturers and public bodies. Our accreditations and memberships and team pages give the detail.
Common Errors We Correct in Machine-Translated French
A short list, drawn from files we reviewed this year, of the categories that come up in nearly every project:
- Gender and agreement errors when the subject is far from the verb, or when the English noun is ambiguous (“the client” rendered as masculine throughout a document addressed to a mostly female readership).
- Formal and informal address mixed within the same page: “vous” in one paragraph, “tu” in the next, because the engine was trained on both.
- European vocabulary on Canadian documents: “e-mail” for “courriel”, “week-end” for “fin de semaine”, “parking” for “stationnement”, “shopping” for “magasinage”, and dozens of others that mark a text as foreign to a Quebec reader.
- Legal terms borrowed from French law rather than Quebec civil law. A “société à responsabilité limitée” is not a Quebec corporation, and “tribunal de grande instance” does not exist in Quebec.
- Job titles and inclusive language. Quebec institutions expect feminized titles and epicene phrasing in job postings and HR documents. Engines rarely produce them, and our French HR translation team corrects them systematically.
- Untranslated or half-translated user interface strings, placeholders broken by the engine, and text expansion that no longer fits the button.
- Numbers and formats: decimal commas, non-breaking spaces before colons and percentages, the 24-hour clock, and dates written in the Quebec order.
Questions Clients Ask Before Their First Project
Can you review a French translation we did with ChatGPT?
Yes. We treat LLM output the same way as engine output: sampled, scored, then reviewed at the level your document needs.
Can you just tell us whether it is good enough, without editing it?
Yes. We offer a quality assessment on a sample of up to 2,000 words, with a scored report and a recommendation. Many clients use this to decide which engine to license.
Do you sign a certificate on Canadian French post-edited work?
Yes, for full post-editing performed by a certified translator. The certificate is identical to the one we issue for a translation we produced ourselves.
What about confidentiality?
Files are handled by named reviewers under NDA, stored on Canadian servers, and never used to train any model. We sign your NDA or provide ours.
How fast is it?
A certified reviewer handles roughly 6,000 to 8,000 English or French words of good machine output per day at the full post-editing level. Larger volumes are split across a team with a lead reviewer who harmonizes terminology.
Send Us Your AI French Translation
Upload the machine-translated French and the English source through our quote form, or email [email protected]. You will receive a quality assessment, a recommended service level and a firm price, usually within the same business day.