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English and French subtitles for Canadian videos

By the BolCaps team · Updated 4 November 2026

Canada has two official languages, and about one in five Canadians speaks French as their first language. If you make videos for a Canadian audience, whether you are a creator, a small business, a school or a nonprofit, offering both English and French subtitles opens your video to the whole country. It is also expected for federal institutions and often required in Quebec for business communication. This guide shows a free workflow that gives you both subtitle files from one video.

Pick your setup

Video spoken in French: get both files

  1. Open the free Caption studio and add the video.
  2. Set the spoken language to French, keep Captions in on Same language and press Generate captions.
  3. Fix any words, especially Quebec expressions, names and place names. Export SRT. This is your French file.
  4. Now switch Captions in to English (translate) and generate again. The AI writes English subtitles from the French speech.
  5. Read the English through for meaning, fix idioms, and export a second SRT.

Video spoken in English: get both files

  1. Generate English captions in the Caption studio, check them and export the SRT.
  2. Open the SRT in a text editor. It is plain text: numbers, times and words.
  3. Translate only the words, line by line, keeping every number and time exactly as it is. A professional translator or a bilingual colleague gives the best result for anything official; machine translation is a fair first draft for casual content.
  4. Save the new file as UTF-8 with a name like video.fr-CA.srt so the accents (é, è, à, ç) show correctly.

French usually runs 15 to 20 percent longer than English. If a French line feels crowded, split it into two captions rather than shrinking the text.

Make French or English subtitles

Upload both to YouTube

  1. In YouTube Studio open the video, then Subtitles.
  2. Set the video language (English (Canada) or French (Canada)).
  3. Click Add language and add the other one.
  4. For each language, click Add, then Upload file, With timing, and pick the matching SRT.

Also translate the title and description under the same page's Title and description column, so French-speaking viewers see a French title in search. Vimeo, Wistia and most course platforms have a similar Captions or Subtitles section with a language picker. Step-by-step details are in how to add closed captions to YouTube.

Burned-in versions for social media

For Reels, TikTok and LinkedIn, export two MP4s from the Caption studio: import the English SRT, pick a style and export, then import the French SRT and export again. Keep the same style and colors so the two look like one campaign. Post the French version to your French-speaking audience, or post both with the caption text in the matching language.

Style rules that differ in French

Quick checklist before you publish

Make French or English subtitles

Free tools for this

More guides