The typeface
17 of the 18 caption fonts cover French. Flying Bubble does not.
French captions
Add French subtitles to a video on iPhone
Capster transcribes French audio automatically — the language is detected, so there is nothing to choose — and exports the clip with the captions rendered into the frames. It is one of 99 languages the app handles, and the whole job runs on the phone in about two minutes.
Français · Latin · iPhone, iOS 16.0+ · Updated September 2026
What a French caption looks like
French creators searching for a captioning tool tend to land on web editors built for English, then discover the transcript mangles the liaisons.
Ajoutez des sous-titres à votre vidéo en deux minutes
Which fonts render French
Checked against every one of the 18 bundled caption fonts in September 2026, by reading each font's own character map rather than trusting its name.
Everything else in the style panel
Text size and colour, outline colour and width, letter case, background, word highlight, layout effect, animation and position all behave exactly as they do in English.
Three things to watch for in French
- Elision produces short, apostrophe-heavy words. l'homme, j'ai, qu'est-ce — French breaks into more, shorter tokens than English. With one-word-at-a-time captions that means a faster flicker, so a two-line layout usually suits French better.
- Silent endings are heard, not seen. Plural and verb endings that are not pronounced still have to be spelled. Transcription gets most of them from context, but agreement errors are the ones to scan for before exporting.
- French is longer than English. Expect roughly a fifth more characters for the same sentence. Check the caption against the platform interface before posting rather than after.
How to do it
- 1
Import the clip
Pick a video from Photos. There is no account and nothing to set up, and no language to choose — Capster detects it from the audio.
- 2
Let the French audio transcribe
The audio track is sent for transcription and comes back as French text with word-level timing. The video itself is never uploaded.
- 3
Read the transcript before you style it
Tap any caption to fix a word. Machine transcription of French is good, not perfect, and names are where it slips.
- 4
Pick a style
A style applies to every caption in the clip at once. 17 of the 18 caption fonts cover French.
- 5
Export with the captions burned in
You get one finished video with the captions rendered into the frames, ready to post without switching anything on.
Questions people ask
Can I add French subtitles to a video on my iPhone?
Yes. Capster transcribes French automatically — you do not pick the language, it is detected from the audio — and exports the video with the captions burned into the frames. It is one of 99 languages the app handles, and the whole job happens on the phone.
Which caption fonts work with French?
17 of the 18 caption fonts cover French. Flying Bubble does not. Every other style control works the same as it does in English.
Do I have to choose French before transcribing?
No. The language is detected from the audio, so there is no picker and nothing to get wrong. If a clip mixes two languages, the transcript follows what was actually said, which is usually what you want on short-form video.
Are French captions burned into the video?
Yes. The captions are rendered into the frames rather than attached as a separate subtitle track, so every viewer sees them by default and nothing is lost when the platform re-encodes your upload. There is no SRT file, by design.
Can I try it free?
Yes. 5 transcriptions per install, clips up to 2 minutes, and 2 caption styles, and the export is never blocked — free exports carry a small Capster badge and a short end card instead.
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Caption a French clip in about two minutes
5 free transcriptions, no account, and the export is never blocked.
Free to try: 5 transcriptions, clips up to 2 minutes, exports carry a small Capster badge. iPhone, iOS 16.0+. No account.