Supply chains don't speak one language. And that's a challenge for compliance.
In order to comply with EU Deforestation regulation (EUDR), buyers in the EU sourcing in scope commodities from markets across Africa, Asia, South America and Europe itself like Gabon, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and Brazil, among others, will end up having to interpret and clarify crucial details within a variety documents provided by suppliers and 3rd parties. The documents themselves (e.g export licenses, forest management plans, bill of ladings, etc) often look different from one country to another.
Under the EUDR, every one of those documents may need to be reviewed, verified, and retained as part of a defensible due diligence file. If compliance teams cannot read and interpret these documents, that's not a minor inconvenience, it's a bottleneck that slows down supply chain risk assessment, onboarding, increases risk of misinterpretation, and makes supply chain audits harder to prepare for.
It's a problem the Interu product team is working on to actively address.
Why translation is harder than "just use Google Translate"
Off-the-shelf machine translation tools are good, but they weren't built for the messy reality of trade documentation. That's where our expertise makes the difference:
- Our team has firsthand experience in both exporter and importer compliance roles, giving us a practical understanding of the requirements for regulations such as the EUDR.
- We have supported compliance with previous legislation, including the EUTR, over several years, providing valuable insight into evolving regulatory expectations.
- Through extensive engagement with enforcement authorities, we understand how they review and assess compliance documentation across multiple languages. This experience has given us clear insight into the format, quality, and content enforcement authorities expect from translated documents.
- We have worked extensively with customers' supply chain documentation, giving us a deep understanding of real-world compliance challenges and bottlenecks.
- Our practical expertise enables us to identify and solve compliance-related issues efficiently, helping businesses meet regulatory requirements with confidence.
After being dissatisfied with various, existing translation solutions (due to having to work with poorly handled handwritten text, stamps, missing text and very little supply chain context awareness) our product team designed and built their own proprietary language translation solution.
A core part of developing an effective translation solution is identifying recurring, specific failure points. For example, the reality in the timber trading industry is that documents do, at times, come with marks (e.g company stamps, a signature overlay, an ink imprint), all of which may be directly on top of the text. When characters are obscured this way, standard, existing translation tools simply can't read what's underneath, and the translation process breaks down.
Teaching AI to read handwriting (and industry jargon)
Handwritten documents also introduce their own layer of difficulty, and the Interu product team is treating this as an evolving capability rather than a solved problem. Accuracy depends heavily on the handwriting itself, so the approach is being built around continuous evaluation against real-world submissions rather than a fixed, one-time model.
Part of that evolution involves building industry-specific knowledge into the system. For example, a growing database of common terminology used in Malaysian log removal passes, including which columns and fields typically appear on that document type. The goal is translation that's aware of industry context, not just a generic word-for-word conversion.
Human oversight stays in the loop
Two features stand out as deliberate design choices, not afterthoughts:
Interu language experts will validate translation quality. Interu's own team includes language specialists who review the language translation of the documents submitted. Ultimately, the user (e.g a compliance officer of a European timber importer) of the Interu language translation function bears the responsibility of determining if the accuracy and trustworthiness of the translation is satisfactory for compliance.
Users will be able to edit translated text, marked as an optional step.
Consider the scenario: you're a supplier working with a buyer who doesn't speak English, and you've submitted documents in French or Malaysian. If you want to eliminate any risk of mistranslation or ambiguity, Interu will give you the ability to correct the translation output directly, so the person closest to the original meaning has the final say. It's a small feature with an outsized impact on trust: it means translation accuracy is double-checked and validated by the people with the most context, not left entirely to the model.
Some of our clients have voiced the need for such a feature, being open to using AI to analyse large documents, but still crucially and necessarily needing human verification (given that not all AI translations can be 100% accurate or acceptable). Lastly, efficient in-platform translation also can significantly help to clearly educate the regulatory requirements to non-English speaking suppliers in global markets, enabling them to act co-operatively, and better yet proactively, by sending the correct documents and information to their buyers / customers in Europe on time.
This fits a broader pattern in how Interu builds with AI
None of this is happening in isolation, it reflects how Interu approaches AI more generally. AI is a powerful tool that Interu is incorporating to help clients streamline their operations, enhance decision-making, and boost productivity, but not one intended to replace human judgement.
Automated document translation is explicitly called out as one of the use cases Interu is exploring, and overall, Interu envisions users being able to view a translated version of a foreign-language document at the click of a button, stored alongside and connected to the original.
That sits alongside other AI-assisted capabilities Interu has been developing for traceability more broadly - from document classification that can suggest how to split a scanned PDF into individual documents and identify each one's type, to optical character recognition that speeds up and improves the accuracy of data entry from scanned forms, to fraud detection checks that flag when a newly uploaded document closely resembles one submitted earlier.
The throughline is consistent: AI is positioned as a co-pilot rather than a replacement for human judgement. A principle that shows up directly in the translation roadmap, through internal expert review and user-editable output.
Why this matters for EUDR compliance
For operators and traders working through EUDR due diligence, document language shouldn't be the bottleneck standing between "compliant" and "unclear." A translation workflow that can work around stamps and overlays, learn the vocabulary specific to a document type like a log removal pass, and let the actual supplier confirm accuracy, is a meaningfully different proposition from dropping a PDF into a generic translation tool and hoping for the best.
Get in touch
At Interu, we help businesses navigate the evolving landscape of EUDR compliance with precision and ease: from collecting and validating supply chain data to organising records, assessing risk, sharing information securely, and maintaining audit-ready documentation.
If you have questions about EUDR or want to explore how Interu can support your compliance journey, you can reach us at here. You can also sign up for a free trial account to run an initial gap analysis and start applying EUDR risk assessments.
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