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SPF supports English, Spanish, and French across both the U.S. and Canada. But “supports Spanish” means two different things depending on what you’re asking about, and conflating them is a common integration mistake. Translating the interview changes the language of the questions you ask the employee. It works for any form. Serving a translated form changes the language of the official document they sign. It only works where the tax authority has published a translation, and it’s a different form ID. An employee can complete the New York IT-2104 with the interview in Spanish, but the PDF they sign will be in English, because New York doesn’t publish a Spanish IT-2104. Whereas an employee completing the federal W-4 in Spanish can sign the IRS’s own Spanish edition, because that document exists.

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Translating the interview

Question text, option labels, and notes can be returned in any of the three supported languages regardless of what language the underlying form is published in. API clients set the Accept-Language header on the question set endpoints:
Hosted and on-premise clients get this without doing anything. The SPF interface lets employees switch between English, Spanish, and French themselves, in both Guided Mode and Choose Mode. Send the header consistently across a session. Switching languages partway through means the employee sees a form that changes language on them.

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Officially translated forms

Where a jurisdiction publishes its own translated edition, SPF carries it as a separate form ID with a language suffix. See the form model for how those IDs are built. What matters here is coverage, and it differs sharply between the two countries. In the U.S., translation is the exception. Only some jurisdictions publish a Spanish edition of their form, so a Spanish-speaking employee will often answer questions in Spanish and still sign an English document. There is nothing to choose when no translation exists. In Canada, translation is universal. Every form has an official French counterpart, because federal law requires it. French is not an edge case there, and an employee who works in French should be signing the French document, not an English one.
Because a translated edition is a different form rather than a rendering option, it carries its own version and its own catalog entry. Pick one at the start of a session and stay with it.

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How the choice gets made

You don’t usually have to guess which variant an employee needs. SPF asks. In Guided Mode, jurisdictions that publish a translated form include the choice as a question in the flow. The employee picks their language, and the flow resolves to the matching form ID. This is why the federal flow and several state flows have a language question near the end. In Choose Mode, both variants appear in the list and the employee selects the one they want. If you’re driving determination yourself, look for the SP or FR suffix in the returned forms and present the pair as a single choice rather than as two unrelated documents.

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Practical guidance

Keep the interview language consistent for the whole session. The language of the questions is independent of the form’s own language, so an employee can answer in Spanish while completing a form the jurisdiction only publishes in English. Switching partway through means the form changes language on the employee mid-session. Let the employee choose the document, and let SPF ask. Where a jurisdiction publishes a translated edition, Guided Mode and Choose Mode both surface the choice, so you don’t need to decide on the employee’s behalf which document they should sign. Don’t translate SPF’s text yourself. Withholding form language is regulated. Much of what appears on these forms is reproduced verbatim from the official document, and the perjury statement in particular must be the jurisdiction’s own wording. If you need to adjust wording for tone or branding, use copy keys, which give you stable identifiers for the text that is safe to change. Remember Canada’s defaults. Canadian forms are bilingual by design, and French is not an edge case there: treat the French variants as first-class.

Canadian SPF API overview

Language support alongside the other U.S. and Canada differences.

Copy keys

Override SPF’s wording without breaking across form revisions.

The form model

How language variants fit into form IDs and form families.

Penalty of perjury statements

The one piece of text that is never yours to reword.