macos – Can’t copy files from Windows to Mac with accents in their filename

I recently went through some French language training for work. As part of that, I gathered a lot of worksheets, grammar reference PDFs and other related files that have french accents (é, à, ç, ô, etc.) in their filename. I’m trying to copy those files from my work Windows computer to my personal Mac to continue my training and for long term retention. I’ve copied them from the work Windows PC onto a USB stick (formatted as exFAT), but when I try to copy from that USB stick to my Mac, the copy fails with error -43.

Here’s some of the troubleshooting steps I’ve taken already:

1. I can’t even see the files with the accents in their filenames when I look at the directory in the Finder on my Mac. However, I’ve confirmed that the file is there in the directory by plugging the same stick back into a Windows computer. I can also see the files in the directory if I use Terminal and look at the directory contents with ls -la

2. I tried using Disk Utility to image the stick and it is the same result with the image as it is with the stick. Files can be seen with Terminal but not in the Finder and the copy fails.

3. I tried using Terminal’s cp -R to copy the directory, and while the copy doesn’t fail, it does throw and error and the files with the accents in their names are not in the resulting copy.

Any advice on how to fix this other than manually going file by file and removing the accents (which is completely impractical due to the number of files I would have to do this on)? Surely this must be fixable. I’ve searched Google and not found a solution. I even tried asking ChatGPT 4o and the solutions it gave me were not helpful.