Working language and translation

Each Canadian matter has a working language: English or French, set at matter creation. Drafting prompts and the resulting Word deliverables follow that choice. Every section is generated in the working language, not translated after the fact from an English draft.

Exhibits can arrive in either official language or a third language entirely. During evidence normalization, Petria detects each exhibit's source language and, by default, translates the tokenized text to the matter's working language before extraction and drafting see it. This runs on tokenized text, after PII interception, so client names and other identifiers never reach the translation step. Only anonymized content gets translated.

On Pro, set a per-exhibit translation policy instead of relying on the default: translate for drafting, or preserve the certified original untouched (Petria strips only filing-adjacent chrome, such as letterhead boilerplate, from a preserved exhibit, never the substantive content). Preserve is the right choice for a document where the certified translation itself is evidentiary, for instance a sworn translation you are filing alongside the original. Translate is right for background material where you only need the content, not the specific wording, to reach the drafting model.

The working language choice also determines which language the final Word deliverable is written in, cover letter through conclusion. If a matter needs both an English and a French version, that is two separate jobs against the same matter with the working language changed between them, not a single job producing both.

A matter's working language is independent of any individual exhibit's language: a French-working-language matter can still include English-language exhibits, translated automatically during evidence normalization, and the reverse is equally common in bilingual practices.

Changing a matter's working language after exhibits have already been normalized means those exhibits need to be renormalized against the new language before the next job runs. Set the working-language field once at matter creation rather than changing it partway through, especially once you have already run a job.

Translation quality is a real consideration for anything filed as-is rather than drafted from. If a document's own wording matters (a sworn statement, a certified vital record, an official government letter), preserve it and let Petria draft around it in the working language rather than translating it and risking a wording drift between what was actually said and what the model saw.