Some of our orders and invoices come in Spanish or French. Can AI handle them?

For a US company that buys from Mexico, sells into Quebec or sources across Latin America, a document in another language isn't an exception. Often the law where it was written puts it in that language.

• Mexican suppliers. Mexico's federal tax code, the Código Fiscal de la Federación (last amended April 9, 2026), makes the invoice a digital file, the CFDI, which is validated and given a folio and a digital seal before you see it. Article 29 says the printed version that comes with it only presumes the invoice exists. Article 29-A lists what the file carries: the issuer's RFC tax ID, name and tax regime; the folio and seals; the place and date of issue; the customer's RFC, or the generic one SAT sets when there is none, with name, tax postal code and a code for how the customer will use the invoice; and quantities, units and descriptions written with SAT's own catalogs.
• Quebec customers and vendors. Quebec's Charter of the French language, updated to October 15, 2026, requires catalogues, brochures and order forms available to the public to be in French (section 52), and invoices, receipts and similar documents too (section 57). Nobody may send one of those in another language unless the French version is available to the recipient on terms at least as favourable. So the order form a Quebec buyer fills in, and the invoice a Quebec vendor sends, may well arrive in French.
• Goods under USMCA. Article 5.2 of the agreement says a certification of origin needs no prescribed format, may be given on an invoice or any other document, and may be completed in English, French or Spanish. A Spanish certification at the foot of a Mexican invoice is normal, and an importing country may ask the importer for a translation when it isn't in one of that country's languages.
• Labels and inserts. Canada's Consumer Packaging and Labelling Regulations (current to October 19, 2026) want the required label information on a prepackaged product in both English and French, with narrow exceptions. Mexico's labelling standard, NOM-050-SCFI-2004, wants label information in Spanish, other languages allowed beside it (5.2.2), and instructions, manuals and warranties in Spanish (5.3.1).

Your team works in English and so does your system. The draft gives them the record they would have keyed, in two parts judged differently:

• The fields. Customer or vendor matched to your existing record, items matched to your part numbers, and quantities, units, prices, dates and terms in the form your system takes. Judged exactly, against what your team entered.
• A working summary. Delivery instructions, a note about a partial shipment, a change to payment terms, a complaint in the margin: one or two plain English sentences each, kept beside the original. Judged on meaning: nothing added, nothing dropped, no promise the original didn't make.

Numbers. The Office québécois de la langue française says the decimal sign in French is always a comma, never a point, and that digits are grouped in threes with a non-breaking space. Spanish-speaking countries differ from one another. A misread separator turns one price into another, so the reviewer checks every amount against what your team entered.

Accents. The Unicode Standard's annex on normalization (UAX #15, revision 58, August 2026) treats an accented letter stored as one character and the same letter stored as a plain letter plus a combining mark as equivalent, and only text normalized the same way compares as equal. Add the record someone keyed with no accents at all, and one Quebec customer can look like three. A draft that opens a new account for any of them is wrong.

Language labels. If the draft records which language each document was in, so you can count and route by it, use the standard tags. BCP 47 (RFC 5646) keeps the two-letter code where one exists, fr or es, and tags Latin American Spanish as es-419. The Library of Congress list of ISO 639-2 codes gives French two three-letter codes, fre and fra, so a filter that expects one can miss the other.

Some values stop meaning anything once translated. The draft copies them exactly, accents included, and your reviewer checks them character by character:

• Legal names. A razón social or a Quebec company name is a name, not a phrase to put into English.
• Tax and registration numbers. The RFC on a CFDI and its folio, which Article 29 lets a recipient check on SAT's website to see whether it was authorized to the issuer. Registration numbers on a Canadian invoice too.
• Codes from someone else's list. SAT's product, unit and use codes on a CFDI, a customer's own item numbers, tariff numbers on a certification of origin.
• The document itself. The original PDF, and for a CFDI the XML file, stays attached to the record. The English is a working copy beside it, never a replacement.

Build the sample from your own history, by language. Of the 20 to 30 old documents, include the Spanish and French ones your team really received, in roughly the mix a normal month brings, plus the mixed ones: an English PO template with Spanish line descriptions, a French invoice quoting your English part numbers, terms that change language halfway down a page. Those are what a single-language rule mishandles. If one language is rare, add a few more of it, and score each language on its own line, because a strong English result can hide a weak French one. Put a CFDI's XML in with its PDF, since the tax code treats the file as the invoice; if your team only ever kept the PDF, say so, and the test shows what can be drafted from the printout.

Your reviewer is the person who handled those documents, on many desks the one bilingual colleague everyone forwards them to. If the person who knows the work best doesn't read the language, pair them: the desk expert scores the fields, a colleague who reads Spanish or French checks the summaries and the copied values, and you agree before scoring who settles a disagreement. Add these lines to the list of what counts as wrong:

• A number read with the wrong decimal separator.
• An existing customer or vendor matched to a new record because of an accent or a translated name.
• A summary that adds, softens or drops an instruction.
• A name, tax number or code changed in any way.
• A page or line in the second language skipped because the rest was in the first.
• Handwriting in either language filled in rather than flagged.

An English record for your own desk is one job. A document someone else relies on in French or Spanish is another, and it stays with the people accountable for it:

• What you send to Quebec. Section 50.2 of the Charter gives consumers a right to be informed and served in French, and section 57 covers invoices and receipts. Whether and how those sections reach a US seller is a question for counsel. A person who reads French approves anything that goes out.
• Labels, manuals and warranties. Bilingual Canadian labels, and Spanish labels and manuals for Mexico, are signed off by whoever signs off your labels today.
• Origin and customs papers. A certification of origin, and any translation a customs authority asks the importer for, is prepared and signed by the person responsible for it.
• Certified translations and contracts. If a court, an agency or a contract needs a certified translation, that is a translator's work. Section 55 of the Charter sets its own rules for standard-form contracts, with an exception for contracts used with persons outside Quebec, and that is for counsel too. None of this is legal, tax or translation advice, and we don't certify translations.

Our free AI proof of concept runs on copies of 20 to 30 documents your team already finished, in whatever languages they arrived, sent after an NDA, with no access to your systems. The owner names your reviewer, the success criteria are agreed before it starts, and your reviewer compares each draft with what your team actually did on the same document. Nothing in the test goes to a customer, a supplier or a government. If the call is yes, the same job runs live for about 30 days, with a person on your team approving every item before it posts, in whichever language it went out.