Along with most of the other languages of Western Europe, both French and English are daughter languages of proto-Indo-European. French is a Romance language, derived from proto-Italic via Latin (like Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and Catalan); English is a Teutonic language, derived from proto-Germanic via West Germanic (like Dutch, German, and Yiddish). French/English translation is made more interesting by the complicated history of English and the part French plays in this history, though the two languages are long-since separated on the Indo-European family tree.

English is often described as a German language with a Romance vocabulary. Old English was an amalgam of the languages of several tribes of northern Europe – the Angles, Jutes, and Saxons – who displaced the Celts as rulers of the British Isles. With the 1066 Norman Conquest of England, the language of the court became Norman French, relegating English to the language of the common people. As English was only used for daily affairs in this period, it simplified into Middle English, the language of Chaucer. During the 300 years the Normans ruled England, many French words drifted into English. By the time English came back into favor as the primary language of the Isles, it had transformed into Early Modern English, the language in which Shakespeare composed his sonnets and plays. It is estimated that between one fourth and one third of modern English vocabulary comes from French.

In the history of French-English relations, English has not only borrowed from French, but vice versa. With the rise of English as the international lingua franca of business and science, French has borrowed many English neologisms. The watch-dog committee that polices the French language, The French Academy, has tried in vain to limit borrowings; their numbers continue to grow.

Over the millennia, significant vocabulary has been borrowed from Latin into English. The Saxons, Angles and Jutes fought and bartered with the Romans before relocating to the British Isles and were thus already using some Latin words before their languages coalesced into Old English. Christian missionaries to England brought with them Latin religious terms and further borrowings occurred at the time of the English Renaissance. During the Industrial Age and up to the modern day, new knowledge and technology is often labeled with names that are either direct Latin borrowings or neologisms created from Latinate roots. Such that an additional one fourth of English words stem from Latin or its derivatives. This has led to the doubles in English that both enrich and complicate the language: a native Germanic noun paired with a Latinate adjective, e.g., spider and arachnidian, eye and ocular/visual.

The unusual history of the English language and its exchange with modern-day French makes French/English translation simpler as there is a large body of cognates translators do not have to change, such as direct borrowings from French into English (ballet, moustache); direct borrowings from English into French (weekend, marketing); and Latin derivatives common to both languages (allusion, molecule). Those involved in French/English translation do need, however, to take heed of the many false cognates, known as 'false friends.' Some are homographs that, despite identical spelling, have no linguistic relation, such as chair (a place to sit in English, 'flesh' in French) or coin (a form of money in English, 'neighborhood' in French). More problematic are similar words that have evolved easily mistakable meanings, such as attend/attendre ('to wait' in French), eventually/eventuellement ('possibly') or actually/actuellement ('currently').

In short, thanks to the vagaries of history, French/English translation is often more straightforward than translation between other language pairs. Their many cognates and common Indo-European foundation mean that the two languages are more alike than they are different.