A Vancouver company selling equipment into Mexico asked me whether they could translate their website with AI instead of paying a translation firm. The honest answer has two halves. For most of their pages, yes. For two of their pages, absolutely not, and those two are where the money is.
That split is the whole subject. Machine translation crossed a real threshold in the last few years, and the mistake companies make now is applying one policy to everything.
How good machine translation actually is now
For English into Spanish or French, current AI translation produces text that a native speaker will read without stopping. The grammar is correct. The vocabulary is appropriate. Someone reading a translated blog post will not think "a machine wrote this", which was not true five years ago.
Two things drive the improvement. These tools now translate with the surrounding context rather than sentence by sentence, so pronouns and tense stay consistent across a paragraph. And you can instruct them: tell the tool this is technical documentation for industrial buyers in Mexico, written formally, and the output shifts accordingly.
What it produces is a strong draft. It is not finished work, and the gap between strong draft and finished matters more in some documents than others.
The four places it still fails
Idiom. English business writing is dense with phrases that mean something other than their words. Ballpark figure, touch base, in the weeds, moving the needle. A translator either renders these literally, which reads as nonsense, or substitutes something that changes the meaning. The practical fix is upstream: write the English source without idioms in the first place. That also makes the English clearer for every reader.
Industry terms. This is the failure that costs deals. Every industry has words with a specific accepted equivalent in each market, and a general translation tool picks a reasonable-sounding alternative instead. A buyer reads a term that no one in their industry uses and concludes you do not know the business. Build a glossary of your twenty most important terms with the agreed equivalent in each target market, confirmed by someone who works in that industry there, and give it to the tool every time.
Tone and formality. Spanish distinguishes formal and informal address, and the right choice varies by market and by context. Mexican business writing tends to be more formal than Colombian; a startup audience differs from an industrial procurement audience. AI picks a default and applies it consistently, which is fine only if the default happens to match. Tell it explicitly which register you want.
Legal and safety wording. Contracts, warranties, terms of sale, limitation of liability, handling and safety instructions. Here the translation must carry a specific legal effect in the target jurisdiction, and a phrase that reads naturally may not do that. Machine output is a starting point for a qualified professional and nothing more. Do not publish it on its own.
A blog post and a contract are different jobs
What changes between document types is the cost of an error, so the process should change too.
A blog post, a case study, a service description, or a general company page can tolerate a small imperfection. An awkward sentence costs you nothing. Machine translation plus a read-through by a native-speaking colleague is reasonable for this tier, and it lets you publish thirty pages instead of three.
Product specifications, pricing pages, and anything a buyer relies on to make a decision need a native speaker with industry knowledge reviewing every line. An error in a specification is a returned shipment or a legal argument.
Contracts, warranties, regulatory filings, and safety instructions go to a professional translator qualified in that jurisdiction. In some cases the law requires a certified translation. Do not economise here. The saving is a few hundred dollars and the exposure is the contract.
Sort your pages into those three tiers before you translate anything. Most companies have far more tier-one pages than they expect, which is the good news.
Which Spanish are you writing
Spanish is not one market and treating it as one is the most common error I see in Canadian companies expanding south.
Vocabulary differs across countries in ways that matter commercially. Everyday business words, product category names, and technical terms vary between Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Chile, and Spain. Spain uses a form of address in the plural that Latin America does not use at all, so text written for Spain reads as foreign in Mexico from the first paragraph. Argentina uses a different second-person form again. Currency formats, date formats, and the words for common business documents all shift.
A buyer notices. They may not be able to say why the page feels off, and the conclusion they draw is that you do not do business in their country.
So pick one market and write for it. If most of your opportunity is in Mexico, write Mexican Spanish and accept that it reads as foreign-but-clear in Colombia. Neutral Latin American Spanish exists as a compromise and it is defensible when you sell across several countries, though it will feel generic everywhere.
Tell the tool which one. "Translate into Mexican Spanish for an industrial buyer" produces different output from "translate into Spanish", and the difference is visible. If you are working across the Canada and Latin America corridor in either direction, the guide for Canadian companies entering Latin America covers the wider set of decisions around this.
Quebec French is its own problem
A workflow built for Spain and Latin America does not prepare you for Quebec, and Canadian companies discover this late.
Quebec French and French from France differ in vocabulary, in accepted business terminology, and in how strongly English loanwords are resisted. Quebec French tends to use a French term where France has adopted the English word, which is the opposite of what most people assume. Ask an AI tool for "French" and you will usually get France French, which a Quebec buyer identifies immediately.
There is also a legal layer that has no equivalent in your Spanish work. Quebec language legislation sets requirements for commercial and public communications, product labelling, and business practices for companies operating in the province, and those requirements have been strengthened in recent years with obligations extending to commercial websites serving Quebec customers. The specifics depend on your size and how you operate there, so this is a question for a lawyer familiar with Quebec business law rather than something to settle from a blog post. What matters for planning is that French for Quebec can be both a compliance matter and a marketing choice.
Practically: specify Quebec French every time, and have a Quebec-based reviewer rather than a French one. A Parisian reviewer will correct your text toward France French and make the problem worse.
The native-speaker review step
Every published translation needs a native speaker to read it. The question is what kind and how much time.
For tier-one content, someone who speaks the language natively, lives in or knows the target market, and ideally understands your industry. A read-through of a 1,200-word page takes twenty to thirty minutes when the machine draft is decent. You are looking for four things: terms nobody in that industry uses, sentences that read as translated, the wrong level of formality, and anything culturally off.
Where to find them. Your own staff, if you have Spanish or French speakers who are willing and whose judgment you trust for public-facing writing. A distributor or partner in the target country, who has an incentive for your material to work and knows the industry vocabulary better than any generalist. A freelance reviewer, which costs far less than full translation because they are checking rather than producing.
Give the reviewer the English source alongside the translation. Without it they cannot tell whether an odd sentence is a translation error or an odd sentence in the original.
Feed corrections back into your glossary. After three or four documents the reviewer's corrections drop sharply, because the recurring term problems are fixed at the source. The review cost falls over time, which is the argument for setting the process up properly at the start.
Whole site or one landing page
Most companies translate the whole site first and then find that nobody visits it. The better order is the reverse.
Start with one landing page in the target language, built for one specific buyer and one specific product or service, with a contact route that a person who speaks that language actually monitors. That last part is where these projects die. A Spanish-language page that generates an enquiry answered four days later in English has done harm rather than nothing.
Run it for a quarter. If enquiries come, expand: the pages that support that first one, then the case studies, then the blog. If nothing comes, you have spent one page instead of forty and you have learned that the problem is demand or channel rather than language.
Translating everything also creates maintenance you did not budget for. Every English update means a translation update, and out-of-date translated pages are a worse signal than having no translated pages at all. If you are bringing a Latin American business into Canada, the reverse-direction guide works through the same sequencing question.
The takeaway
Sort your content into three tiers. General marketing gets machine translation plus a native-speaker read. Anything a buyer relies on to decide gets a native speaker with industry knowledge on every line. Contracts, warranties, and safety instructions go to a qualified professional translator, with no exceptions.
Name the market, never just the language. Mexican Spanish, not Spanish. Quebec French, not French. Build a glossary of your twenty key industry terms with the agreed equivalent in each market, and give it to the tool every time.
Then start with one page rather than forty, and make sure someone who speaks the language is ready to answer the phone. My verdict: the translation is the cheap part now, and the follow-up is where these projects are won or lost.