Writing French with AI as a non-native: how not to give yourself away
AI writes French without spelling mistakes, yet a French reader can often tell from the first line that the author is not French. It is not the mistakes that give you away but the details: the wrong tone, a sentence translated from English, a Québécois turn of phrase. In a letter to the tax office it hardly matters; on your website and in emails to clients, it does. Here is where AI goes off track, how to prompt it, and how to check a text when your French is not good enough to hear what sounds off.
The examples below come from experience, not from a study. If a text matters — a contract, your terms of sale (conditions générales de vente), your website’s home page — show it to a native speaker.
Where AI gives you away as a foreigner
The wrong tone
- « tu » instead of « vous » with a client
- Too formal for a short email, or too casual
A translation, not a text
- English phrases carried over word for word
- False friends such as « excité » for “excited”
Someone else’s norms
- Québécois or Swiss formulas
- American-style pleasantries at the start of an email
English is the main source of these slips, and not only for native English speakers. A pilot study at MGIMO (Moscow State Institute of International Relations) with 54 Russian-speaking students found that they were worse at spotting made-up words modelled on English than those modelled on Russian, because English was usually the first foreign language they had learnt. AI makes this bias stronger: most of the text it was trained on is in English.
Seven phrases that give you away
| What AI wrote | What the French write | Why |
|---|---|---|
| J’espère que ce message vous trouve bien. | Je vous contacte au sujet de… / Suite à votre demande, … | A translation of “I hope this email finds you well”. In France, emails do not open like this: get straight to the point. |
| Cher Monsieur Dupont, (in a first email) | Monsieur, / Bonjour Monsieur Dupont, | « Cher » is for people you know. In a formal letter, write « Monsieur, » without the surname; in an email, « Bonjour Monsieur Dupont, » is fine. |
| Meilleures salutations | Cordialement / Bien cordialement | Common in Switzerland and Belgium; in France it sounds clumsy. In business emails, people write « Cordialement ». |
| Je suis très excité de commencer ce projet. | J’ai hâte de commencer ce projet. | A false friend: « excité » does not mean “excited” in the English sense and sounds odd, even awkward, in a business email. |
| Nous offrons des services de haute qualité. | Pose de carrelage, devis sous 48 h. | An empty phrase AI adds by default. A French client expects specifics. |
| Ça fait sens. / adresser un problème | C’est logique. / traiter un problème | Calques of “it makes sense” and “to address a problem”; the Académie française explicitly rejects « faire sens » in its « Dire, ne pas dire » column. |
| Tu peux m’envoyer les photos du chantier ? | Pourriez-vous me transmettre les photos du chantier ? | With clients and the administration, always « vous » until you are invited to switch to « tu ». |
How to prompt AI
The key is to say who the text is for and where you are writing from. Without this, AI defaults to a generic, middle-of-the-road French. You can write the prompt in English:
Write an email in French [to a business client / to the town hall / to a private client] about [subject]. French as written in France, professional tone, using « vous ». No Québécois or Swiss formulas, no translations of English phrases such as « j’espère que ce message vous trouve bien ». Keep it short. Then, separately and in English, explain which formulas you chose and why, and flag the parts you are unsure about.
The last sentence of the prompt is the most useful: AI is more honest about its doubts when asked directly. And by comparing two or three versions, you will more quickly get a feel for which one sounds natural. Ready-made prompts for a payment reminder, a reply to a review and a service description are in “Five tasks AI can take off your hands today”.
Greetings. In an email, « Bonjour Madame Martin, » is standard. « Madame, Monsieur, » is for when you do not know who will read it (a letter to an organisation, the town hall, the tax office).
How to check a text when your French is limited
2. Grammar checkerRun the text through a French grammar checker: it will catch agreement, prepositions, punctuation, and the spaces French puts before « : », « ; », « ? », « ! » and inside « » quotation marks. Not sure about a word? Look it up in the Académie française’s « Dire, ne pas dire » column or in FranceTerme, the official terminology database. The guides from the OQLF (Québec’s French language office) are handy, but they follow Québec usage.
3. A “French client” chatOpen a new chat, ideally a temporary one (in Claude: incognito mode), so it remembers neither this conversation nor earlier ones. A saved assistant with this role also works: a Gem in Gemini, a project in Claude, a custom GPT in ChatGPT. Paste in the text and ask it to read it as the French person it is addressed to (prompt below). A fresh chat spots calques and an “off” tone that the author can no longer see.
You are French and run a small business in France, and this email [website] is addressed to you. Read the text below. Point out, in English: which phrases sound like a translation or like they were written by a foreigner; where the tone is off (too curt, too formal, too casual); what is unclear; what you do not believe. For each phrase, suggest how a French person would put it. Text: […]
4. Back-translationTranslate the finished French text back into English with a different tool from the one that wrote it. If the meaning has drifted or an odd sentence appears, a French reader will stumble over it too.
5. Native speakerYour website’s home page, terms of sale, contract, a long email to an important client: show them to someone whose first language is French. A template proofread once will serve you for years.
Tools
| Tool | What it does | Free? |
|---|---|---|
| DeepL and DeepL Write | Translation and rewriting in the style you need, including business | Up to 50,000 characters of translation a month; free users’ texts are used for training — do not paste in client data |
| LanguageTool | Grammar, style, punctuation | Up to 2,000 characters per check |
| Scribens | French grammar checker, browser and Word extensions | Yes; detailed check of the first 6,000 characters |
| Grammalecte | Open-source French checker for LibreOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird | Yes, entirely; no Chrome version at present |
| Antidote, Le Robert Correcteur | Professional checkers used by French speakers themselves | No, paid |
What you should never paste into chatbots and online services: see “What never to feed an AI”.
What the law requires
- French is mandatory wherever you offer services in France: service descriptions and offers, advertising, invoices — this is required by the Toubon law (loi Toubon). A translation into other languages alongside is allowed, as long as the French version is just as legible.
- The law does not check language quality: penalties are for leaving out French, not for a calque. But quality is what your client reads.
- You do not have to write “text prepared with the help of AI”. The EU AI Act requires a label only for texts on matters of public interest, and even then not if the text has been reviewed in substance by a person responsible for publishing it (running it through a grammar checker does not count). Service descriptions and emails to clients are not covered — details in our article on the AI Act.
The limits
AI is good at smoothing out grammar, but it does not know your clients or the conventions of your trade: a hairdresser in Lyon and an accountant in Paris use different words. It takes no responsibility for the legal meaning — a contract or terms of sale must be checked by a specialist. And it is no substitute for learning the language: the more French you read in your own field, the sooner you notice what sounds off. Letters to the administration are covered in “Taking on French bureaucracy on equal terms, with AI”, and the other steps for foreigners setting up in France in the guide for foreign entrepreneurs.
Checklist before you send
- The prompt says: French as written in France, professional tone, « vous ».
- No « J’espère que ce message vous trouve bien » or other translations from English.
- Greeting and sign-off are French: « Bonjour Madame… » or « Madame, Monsieur », « Cordialement ».
- The text has been through a grammar checker.
- A new chat playing a French client has read the text, and its comments have been taken on board.
- Back-translation with another tool did not change the meaning.
- Your website, terms of sale and contract have been proofread by a native speaker.
Information correct as of 16 October 2026. Sources: Académie française, « Dire, ne pas dire »; FranceTerme; Loseva, Metelskaya, 2021 (MGIMO study); DeepL plans and DeepL privacy policy; LanguageTool; Scribens; Grammalecte; Toubon law; French Ministry of Culture on applying the law (in French).
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