A message arrives in Spanish. Two questions land with it, and only one of them is about software. The first is whether you answer in Spanish at all, which is a decision about the whole relationship rather than about this message. The second is what you do when the draft comes back in Spanish and that’s a language closed to you. That’s the question this page mostly exists for, because it’s the one place where the usual advice about drafted email runs out.
- Matching the sender’s language is a fair default, and it’s worth one deliberate decision. Email is the cheapest place in a working relationship to be bilingual. A reply in Portuguese quietly promises a phone call in Portuguese.
- Most people in the United States who speak another language at home also speak English well. So the language somebody wrote in is evidence of a preference. One line asking which they want settles it for good.
- Reviewing a draft means reading it. In a language that’s closed to you, that reading is gone, and the draft reads as smoothly as ever, because fluent is the one thing machine writing has always been.
- Two of the likeliest errors are the wrong level of formality and the wrong grammatical gender. Both vanish when you translate the reply back into English, because English marks neither one.
- Some things carry across every language: the figure, the recipient, the form number, the attachment. That’s what you can still check, and it’s where the expensive mistakes live anyway.
Whether to answer in their language at all
Start here. If the answer turns out to be English, most of the rest of this page is optional.
The case for matching is simple and worth saying plainly. A client reading about their own money in their first language understands more of it. They ask better questions. They’re less likely to nod along to something that went past them. Comprehension is the entire job when you’re explaining a tax outcome, and comprehension goes up. That’s the work itself.
Then the argument on the other side, which rarely gets said out loud.
Email is the only channel where the language is free. Writing waits. It can be prepared ahead, and a machine can prepare it. A phone call happens live. So does a meeting. So does the quick question in the hallway of an office, and so does the follow-up you’ll owe in three weeks when they call about the letter. Answer in Portuguese and you’ve set the language of the relationship, in the one medium where it costs you almost nothing, and every conversation after this one inherits it. Somebody at your firm has to be able to hold that conversation. If nobody can, the first message wrote a check on somebody else’s account.
The same problem shows up smaller, inside your own paperwork. The engagement letter is in English. So is the return. So are the portal, the invoice, the e-signature request and the software your client logs into. A Spanish email pointing at an English K-1 has a seam in it, and seams are where clients get confused and call you.
All of which leaves it open, because the answer differs by firm and by client. Asking settles it cheaply. One line, in both languages, on the first exchange: I’m glad to keep this in Spanish or switch to English, whichever is easier for you. In Spanish that’s a single short sentence, ¿Prefiere que le escriba en español o en inglés?, and having it drafted is free. Then record the answer as a standing rule. It’s decided once and applied everywhere after that, which is what a rule is for, and it’s worked through in how Point learns your email habits.
One more arrangement deserves naming once. If somebody at your firm reads the language, the right shape is often that they send the consequential messages, rather than that you send them with help. That’s a staffing decision, and every drafting tool leaves it with you.
Your client may have said which language they want
Two facts are worth having before you read anything into the language an email arrived in.
The first is how common this is. The US Census Bureau reports that on the 2017 to 2021 American Community Survey five-year estimates, “More than 1 in 5 people (22%) age 5 and older in the United States spoke a language other than English at home” (checked September 6, 2026). The Bureau’s earlier account of the trend puts the count at 67.8 million people in 2019 against 23.1 million in 1980. This reaches most desks eventually.
The second fact cuts the other way, and it’s the more useful of the two. In the same release, the Bureau reports that “Sixty-two percent of those who spoke a language other than English at home also spoke English ‘very well.’” Roughly three in five are comfortable in English. So the message that arrived in Spanish tells you what that person chose to write in on a Tuesday. It’s evidence of a preference. Whether they need Spanish, and whether they want their fee schedule in Spanish, are two further questions with their own answers. Those answers come apart constantly, which is the whole argument for asking.
For a tax practice there’s a third thing, and it’s a matter of record. A taxpayer can tell the IRS directly which language they want their mail in. Schedule LEP (Form 1040), Request for Change in Language Preference, exists for exactly that. In the December 2024 revision the form lists twenty alternative languages. They run from 001 Spanish through 020 Chinese (Simplified), with 000 reserved for canceling a previous election. In between sit Korean, Vietnamese, Russian, Arabic, Haitian Creole, Tagalog, Portuguese, Polish, Farsi, French, Japanese, Gujarati, Punjabi, Khmer, Urdu, Bengali and Italian. The IRS says the schedule “should only be filed to request written communications from the IRS in an alternative language, or when you have changed to an alternative language and want to convert back to English.” It also says “You can state this preference only by filing Schedule LEP with your income tax return” (checked September 6, 2026).
Two things follow for you, and a third only looks like it does.
If you prepared the return, the preference is already in your own file. The client stated it, in writing, which makes it better evidence than the language of any single email. Look there before you decide how to write to somebody.
The IRS is also honest about the limits of its own program, and your client may have noticed. The form itself carries a caution: “You may not immediately receive written communications in the requested language. The IRS’s commitment to LEP taxpayers is part of a multiyear timeline that is scheduled to begin providing translations in 2023.” A client who filed that schedule and still gets English notices may be leaning on you rather more than you realize.
What stays out of it is obligation. Schedule LEP governs what the IRS sends. Your firm’s mail is your own to decide, and the form leaves it alone. What the schedule gives you is evidence, and evidence is a better thing to act on than a guess.
The check you were going to do is not available
Every honest page about drafted email, including the ones next to this one, ends in the same place: read it before it goes. That advice rests on a premise, and here the premise gives way.
A drafted reply waits for you, and the wait is there so you can do something in it. The case for that arrangement, and what the pause is worth, is why a draft waits for you by default. The pause is still there when the draft is in Finnish. The act it was built to make room for is what’s gone.
There’s one specific reason this lands harder than it sounds. A draft in a language you read badly still looks wrong somewhere. A sentence sits oddly. A word belongs to somebody else’s vocabulary. The third paragraph wandered off on its own, and your eye catches on it before your judgment does. That snagging is most of what a real review is made of. A draft in a language that’s closed to you reads smooth all the way down. It looks like Finnish. Fluency is the thing machine writing has been reliably good at for years, and fluency is exactly the surface you were using as your error detector.
So you have four options, and three of them are real.
Keep that class of message in English. Perfectly respectable, and for some messages it’s the right answer. Keep reading, because the sorting is in a later section.
Get somebody who reads it to read it. A colleague, a bilingual staff member, an outside translator on the ones that matter. This is the one option that gives you back what you lost.
Send both languages. That buys back half the review rather than all of it. Half of what you sent is in a form you can check, and half is better than none. There’s a section on this below.
Translate it back into English and read that. This is the one people reach for first, and it does less than they think.
Two mistakes that survive a trip back through English
Back-translation earns its ten seconds. Run a Spanish draft back into English and you’ll catch a paragraph that answered the wrong question. You’ll catch a figure that moved, or a promise that went past what you authorized. Those are content errors, they’re the expensive ones, and ten seconds is a good price. Do it.
The round trip shows you whatever English marks. Two of the most consequential errors in professional correspondence live just outside that, where English stays silent.
How formally you addressed them. Many languages split the second person into a familiar form and a respectful one. Choosing between them is a statement about the relationship. The clearest short illustration comes from the paper that built a benchmark for controlling it. It’s CoCoA-MT: A Dataset and Benchmark for Contrastive Controlled MT with Application to Formality, published in the Findings of NAACL in 2022. Maria Nadejde, Anna Currey, Benjamin Hsu, Xing Niu, Marcello Federico and Georgiana Dinu note that “the sentence ‘Are you sure?’ can be translated in German as ‘Sind Sie sich sicher?’ (formal register) or ‘Bist du dir sicher?’ (informal).” Both of those come back into English as “Are you sure?” The round trip hides the choice, and it’s the choice most likely to land badly. Address a client of nine years with the familiar form and you read as presumptuous or careless, depending on how charitable they’re feeling.
That work was building translation systems rather than writing your mail, so the numbers in it are numbers about translation systems. The part worth carrying is that formality control is a thing people have to build deliberately and then measure. The paper’s own fine-tuned models reached 82 percent accuracy in domain and 73 percent out of domain across six target languages. That’s a real result, and it’s a number short of always.
Which gender you assigned. In languages with grammatical gender, a great many ordinary nouns and adjectives have to agree with the person being described, and every available form picks a side. The systematic study is Evaluating Gender Bias in Machine Translation, presented at the Association for Computational Linguistics in 2019 by Gabriel Stanovsky, Noah A. Smith and Luke Zettlemoyer. They built a challenge set of English sentences that place people in roles against the stereotype, of the form “The doctor asked the nurse to help her in the operation.” Then they tested translation into eight languages with grammatical gender. Their finding: “four popular industrial MT systems and two recent state-of-the-art academic MT models are significantly prone to gender-biased translation errors for all tested target languages.”
That was a challenge set built to be hard, run on translation systems, in 2019. It measures those systems, rather than what an email client drafting from a whole thread does in 2026. What survives the caveats is the shape, and the shape is the part that matters here. Both el contador and la contadora come back into English as “the accountant.” If a draft has just described your client’s wife in masculine forms throughout, the English round trip reads perfectly.
The practical response is to settle these two things once, in advance, as standing rules. They hold steady per correspondent, and advance is the only place you can set them. Use the respectful form with Sra. Delgado. She’s a woman and the message is about her, rather than her husband. Those go in the same list as your sign-off, in plain sentences you can read back and delete, which is seeing what an AI learned about you.
What is still legible to you
Plenty of a message survives a change of language. The check that remains is a comparison, and it works on the parts a language change leaves alone. Six of them, and they cover most of what costs money.
The digits. A figure is a figure in every alphabet you’re likely to encounter, and $4,200 is findable in a Vietnamese sentence by somebody who reads only the numerals. The punctuation around it moves, though. A decimal comma is standard in Spanish, Portuguese, German and most of Europe, so the same amount can appear as 4.200,00 rather than 4,200.00. The two conventions are exact mirrors of each other. Check the digits first. Then check which mark is doing which job.
The date. You can read a numeral in any language, and a numeral is the worse form anyway. 03/04/2026 is March 4 to you and April 3 to most of the people you’d be writing to in another language. So ask for the month spelled out in words rather than in digits. A written month stays put for a reader who orders dates the other way round. In most of the languages a US firm actually encounters, the month names sit close enough to English that you can check them against a calendar. It’s better correspondence in English too, so it’s a fair house rule everywhere.
The recipient and the copy list. These carry across any language, and this is the field that actually fails, for reasons worked through in composing an email from scratch. Read the address the name resolved to.
The document and form names. These stay exactly as they were, which is the next section.
The attachment. Whether the file went on, and which file it is, reads in any language.
The length. Compare what you asked for with what came back. If your instruction was two sentences and the reply is five paragraphs, the difference is inference, exactly as it’d be in English. A paragraph announces itself by sitting there, and you can count paragraphs in any language.
The blunt summary: you can still verify arithmetic and identity. Meaning is the part that stays out of reach. That’s a real loss and a partial one, and the honest thing to do with it is sort your mail by it.
The words that should stay in English
Terms of art are the most dangerous thing in a translated professional message. A fluent translation of one is a false statement.
An S corporation, a grantor trust, an LLC, a Roth conversion, a Schedule K-1. Each of those names a creature that exists because a specific US statute created it. Spanish, German and Korean all have words for roughly the same commercial idea. Every one of those words names a different creature, under a different country’s law, with different consequences. A client who reads that they hold the local equivalent has been told something untrue by their accountant, in a sentence that reads beautifully. An awkward English phrase in an otherwise Spanish paragraph is the better outcome.
The rule is to use the name that already exists. Three cases, and they behave differently.
Where the agency publishes its own name, use theirs. The IRS produces Spanish-language forms and publications with their own official titles. The IRS’s name for a thing is correct, and your client can find it. A name you make up for the same thing sends them looking for a string that exists nowhere.
Where the published name runs out, keep the English and gloss it. Leave Form 1099-NEC as Form 1099-NEC. That’s the string they’ll be looking for on the piece of paper in their hand. Add a short explanation in their language after it. The number is the part that has to survive.
Your own nouns stay put. Your firm’s name, the name of your portal, the title of your engagement letter, the software you ask clients to log into. Those appear in English everywhere else the client deals with you. Translate them in one email and the match breaks at the exact moment they’re trying to find something.
This is a good candidate for a written rule rather than a per-message correction. It’s consistent, and it recurs on every message of the kind. It also lives outside your English sent mail, which is the test for what belongs in the list at all.
Sorting the mail before the draft exists
The judging happens before the draft exists, from what you’re about to say. Three piles, and the question that separates them is what a wrong sentence would cost.
A wrong sentence costs a shrug. Tuesday works. The file came through. I’ll call you after four. Scheduling, acknowledgments, confirmations that are pure logistics. Send these in their language, and check who they’re going to. That’s the whole review. These are most of the traffic, they’re exactly what the capability is for, and going slowly over them spends the attention the third pile needs.
It carries a specific. A number, a date, a document, a deadline, a form. The six checks above are all available here, so run them. This is where the decimal comma and the written-out month earn their keep.
Somebody could be harmed by getting it wrong. Advice. An opinion. Bad news. A fee change. A scope agreement. Anything that gets read twice by somebody looking for a lever. A draft alone carries the first two piles. This one wants a reader who has the language. The test is one question: if this message were fifteen percent wrong, would I find out from my client or from their attorney?
The third pile is smaller than it feels, and it’s real. It has three honest handlings: a bilingual message, an English message, or a message read by somebody at your firm who speaks the language before it goes. Which one you pick is a question about your practice. Sorting first means you decide while you’re still thinking about the content, rather than staring at a paragraph you can’t parse.
Writing it twice, and saying which one counts
For anything in that third pile, the strongest form is both languages in one message, with a line saying which version governs if they differ.
This is what serious cross-border correspondence has always looked like. Two versions of a statement are two statements. Somebody has to say which one you meant, and the cheapest moment to say it is before anybody disagrees.
The form gets dismissed as clumsy, usually by people going on how it looks. Here’s what it does. Four things.
You can review half of it, which beats zero, and the half you can review is the half your file will be judged on.
Your client reads whichever half they prefer, which was the entire point of writing in their language in the first place.
The thread keeps an English record, so the conversation stays legible to you, to a colleague, and to whoever picks the matter up in a year.
The disagreement is settled in advance. If the two versions ever come apart, you answered the question of which one you stand behind in a neutral moment rather than a hostile one.
The governing line is one sentence, and it goes near the top. Something in this shape: the English text below is the version my firm relies on, and the Spanish is provided for convenience. Say it in both languages. What it means for your engagement, and whether your terms should mention language at all, belongs in your engagement letter rather than in each email. That’s the sort of thing worked through in engagement letter language for AI.
The cost is real. The message is twice as long. To a client who wanted to be met in their own language it can read as a step backwards, a little formal, a little defensive. That’s exactly why it belongs on the third pile and stays off the first. A bilingual confirmation that Thursday works is just noise.
The one you cannot read is still yours
The reply goes from your address, threads under the original, and lands in your sent folder. That holds for every reply you send, whichever language it’s in, and it holds for the person who received it too.
For a US tax practitioner there’s a rule that says the relevant part out loud. Circular 230, at 31 CFR 10.22, requires due diligence “in determining the correctness of oral or written representations made by the practitioner to clients with reference to any matter administered by the Internal Revenue Service” (checked September 6, 2026). The section stays silent on language and on software. It’s a diligence standard rather than a set of steps. What it settles is that the obligation attaches to a written representation you made to a client. A sentence in Spanish sits in the same category as a sentence in English.
The same section is also, usefully, the model for the answer. Paragraph (b) treats reliance on another person’s work as presumptively diligent where the practitioner “used reasonable care in engaging, supervising, training, and evaluating the person, taking proper account of the nature of the relationship between the practitioner and the person.” That’s written about people rather than about tools, and it’s worth leaving there. But the shape of it is the shape of a defensible arrangement: on the messages that matter, somebody who reads the language reads it.
Then the quieter version of the same problem, which is about the file rather than about a rule. A year of correspondence in Portuguese is a year of your own record in Portuguese. When a matter goes sideways, the first thing anybody does is read the thread from the beginning. You’ll be doing that through a translation, at the worst possible moment, under time pressure. So keep an English version in the thread for anything consequential. That’s the version of the file you can actually read. The account of what was done for you, and when, sits apart from the mail itself and answers a different question: the activity log behind every action.
What answering in their language does not fix
Five things sit outside this, and each one is somebody else’s job or simply a fact of the arrangement.
Drafting in Spanish leaves your Spanish where it was. The relationship runs into English at the first phone call, and the software stays behind. If the answer to that is a colleague, arrange it now rather than in the middle of it.
Register and accuracy are separate things. That holds in every language, and it’s the running theme of getting AI replies that sound like you wrote them. A perfectly idiomatic Spanish sentence about the wrong quarter is still about the wrong quarter, and now the wrong quarter has somewhere to hide.
The documents stay in English. A Spanish email attached to an English K-1 leaves the client with an English K-1. The email was the easy half.
The message stays yours. Your address, your sent folder, your name at the bottom. That’s the point of the arrangement rather than a flaw in it, and it’s why the sorting matters more here than it does in English.
Whether the work should be yours stays your call. If a client’s affairs genuinely require advice given in a language nobody at your firm reads or speaks, the honest answer may be a referral. That’s said once here and left there, because the ordinary run of mail sits well clear of it.
How Point handles a message in another language
Point is an email client that runs on the Gmail or Microsoft 365 account you already use. Your mail stays where it is, your address stays yours, and anything sent leaves from your own mailbox.
A message in a language that’s closed to you still arrives with a plain summary on the thread, the same as any other conversation, so its subject reaches you before you’ve opened anything. In Point’s recorded walkthrough of this, a customer named Antti writes from Finland about a delivery date. The thread carries the substance: he ordered twelve access points and needs the delivery date so he can book his installers. That summary is the arrangement that makes the rest of this workable at all, and the general case of a summary standing in for the thread is the summary that arrives before you open a thread.
The reply is drafted in the language the message arrived in, on its own. In the walkthrough, the Finnish question gets a Finnish draft, and the narration puts it as answering “in the language the customer wrote in.” The set of languages Point handles is unpublished. If a particular language is central to your practice, that’s a question worth asking before you build a workflow on it.
Drafting starts at review. The words are prepared and the sending stays with you, until you raise that setting for drafting yourself, one kind of work at a time. Where that decision lives, and how the three positions differ, is setting how much your inbox does on its own. When you do send, the reply goes out from your address, threads under the original message, and turns up in your real sent folder. The walkthrough shows it as a Finnish reply sitting under a Finnish question in Gmail.
Standing rules ride along with a draft in another language exactly as they do with one in English. Use the respectful form with this client. Never translate a form number. Sign client mail with my cell number. Those live as ordinary sentences in one list, newest first, each one editable and removable, and how they get there in the first place is how Point learns your email habits. This is the mechanism to lean on here, because a preference you can state in advance is worth more than a review you’d have to run afterwards in a language that’s closed to you.
The limit is the honest one, and it’s the subject of this whole page. Point drafts in the language. The reading stays with you or with a colleague, and that holds for every arrangement of software there is. So it comes back to which messages you’re willing to send on a draft alone, which is what the sorting above is for. The rest of what’s already finished by the time you open the inbox is on the benefits page. Why the drafting belongs beside the thread, the calendar and ten years of your own correspondence, rather than in a browser tab next door, is set out in what an AI email client is.
Common questions
Should I reply in the language they wrote in?
Usually yes for ordinary correspondence, and it’s worth one deliberate decision rather than a reflex. Answering in their language raises how much of your message actually lands, which is the whole job when you’re explaining somebody’s money. It also sets the language of the relationship through the cheapest channel you have, and the phone call that follows costs a good deal more. The way out of the dilemma is to ask once, in both languages, and record the answer so it’s settled for good.
How do I check a draft written in a language I cannot read?
By comparison rather than by reading. Six things carry across the language change. The digits in a figure, the numerals in a date, and the address the recipient’s name resolved to. The form and document names, whether the right attachment went on, and how long the message is against what you asked for. Run those. Then say plainly what you have: arithmetic and identity, checked. Meaning is the part still open, which is fine for a scheduling note and thin for an opinion.
Does translating it back into English work as a check?
Partly, and it’s worth the ten seconds. A round trip will show you a paragraph answering the wrong question, or a figure that moved. What it shows you is whatever English marks, and English stays silent on the two errors most likely to embarrass you. Formal and informal address collapse into the same English “you.” Masculine and feminine forms collapse into the same English noun. So the round trip is a check on content, not a check on those two, and leaning on it reports the draft clean in exactly the cases where it is not.
Which languages does Point handle?
The recorded walkthrough shows a Finnish message getting a Finnish reply, and describes the behavior as answering in the language the customer wrote in. The list itself is unpublished, so if your practice depends on a specific language, ask before you rely on it. An answer in writing beats an inference from a demonstration, and it’s the kind of thing worth putting on the list of questions to ask any AI email tool.
Can I tell it to always write to one client in English?
Yes, and that’s exactly the shape of a standing rule. It’s one sentence with the audience inside it. An instruction reaches every correspondent you have until you name one, so put the person or the category into the sentence rather than writing “use English.” The list is plain sentences you can read back, edit and delete, so a rule that turns out to be wrong is undone in the time it took to make.
Is an email my firm sent in Spanish as much my responsibility as an English one?
Yes, in every sense that matters to your client and to your file. It went from your address, and it sits in your sent folder. For a tax practitioner the diligence obligation in Circular 230 attaches to written representations made to clients about matters the IRS administers, and it reads the same in every language. That’s the practical reason the third pile above exists. The sentence is yours either way.
My client writes to me in Spanish but speaks perfect English. What should I do?
Ask them. Roughly three in five people in the United States who speak another language at home also speak English very well, so writing in Spanish is often a preference, and a preference is a thing people are happy to state. Some will say Spanish because it’s more comfortable. Some will say English because every other document in the engagement is in English and they’d rather things match. Both answers are useful, and the only way to learn which one you have is to ask.
Should I tell a client that the Spanish version was drafted with AI?
That’s a firm policy question rather than a language question, and the answer should be the one you’ve already given for your English mail. The thing worth deciding separately is who checked it. A third-pile message that went out on a draft alone is a fact about how the work was done. It belongs in whatever you’ve told clients about how your firm works, rather than in a footnote on one email.
The short version
Decide the language before you decide anything else. Email is the one channel where being bilingual is nearly free, and every later conversation inherits the choice you make here. Ask the client rather than reading it off the message in front of you, since most people in the United States who speak another language at home also speak English well. Store the answer as a rule, so it’s settled once.
Then be clear-eyed about what happens to the review. Reading the draft was the whole point of the pause, and the reading is the part that goes. Translating it back into English catches a wrong figure and lets the formality and the gender straight through, because English marks neither. What you can still check is the arithmetic and the identity. The digits and the separator. The month written out in words. The address the name resolved to, the form numbers left alone, the attachment, and the gap between what you asked for and what came back.
So sort by cost before the draft exists. Confirmations go in their language and take a glance. Anything with a number in it gets the six checks. Anything that could be read out in a dispute goes bilingual, or goes in English, or goes past somebody at your firm who reads it. That last pile is small, and it’s the one part of this worth being slow about.
Which pile most of your mail lands in depends on the desk. An accounting practice mostly sends specifics, so the numbers and the form names are the daily discipline. A consultancy mostly sends commitments, where the sentence that agrees to something is the one to keep in a language you can read. If neither of those is your morning, there are other versions of it.