The situation
A Montreal IP firm has three files on the translation desk. The first is a German-language PCT application entering the Canadian national phase next month, which needs an English translation. The second is a direct Canadian filing, due at the 12-month Paris Convention deadline, based on a client's unpublished Japanese priority application. The third is the client's covering email, which asks the firm to narrow the claims on entry and mentions an improvement the client plans to file separately. A translator under deadline pressure pastes all three into a free AI tool. Only one of them was public.
What the rules actually say
Timing and language at CIPO
Under section 154 of the Patent Rules, an applicant who designates Canada in an international application must enter the national phase within 30 months of the priority date. If the description or claims are entirely in a language other than English or French, the applicant must file a translation into English or French. If the deadline is missed, subsection 154(3) allows entry within the following 12 months if the applicant requests reinstatement, states that the failure was unintentional, and pays the reinstatement fee. CIPO's PCT kit describes the same process.
Section 46 of the Patent Rules requires the abstract, description, drawings and claims to be entirely in English or entirely in French, which is why a Quebec applicant may prepare a complete French text. Sections 155.1 to 155.5 add translation rules: a corrected translation can replace an erroneous one before allowance only with a statement that, among other things, the error occurred despite due care, and a translation must not add matter that cannot reasonably be inferred from the original filing. Accuracy is the applicant's responsibility.
What is public and what is not
Under Article 21 of the PCT, an international application is published promptly after 18 months from the priority date. By the 30-month national phase deadline, the application as published is usually public, and translating it with an AI tool does not disclose anything new about the published text. Section 10 of the Patent Act similarly keeps Canadian applications from public inspection until an 18-month confidentiality period has expired, unless the applicant approves earlier access.
That leaves a lot that is still confidential at translation time:
- Unpublished applications. Paris Convention filings at 12 months, early national phase entries, and priority documents are often translated before anything is published.
- Amendments not yet filed. Proposed claim amendments for national entry or a response to an examiner's report are the client's strategy until they are filed.
- Client correspondence. Instructions on which countries to enter, budgets, and decisions to abandon are confidential business information.
- New matter. Improvements and material intended for a divisional application in Canada or a continuation in the United States may never have been published.
The CPATA Code requires agents to hold client information in strict confidence and take reasonable care to protect it, and its commentary says that duty applies even when others know the information. The guide to the CPATA Code and generative AI covers those duties. For unpublished inventions, the added risk is novelty, discussed in keeping pre-filing inventions out of public AI tools.
Why policies and bans fall short
Translation is one of the most tempting uses of AI in an IP practice: long, technical, repetitive text on a fixed deadline. A rule that says "no client documents in AI" is hard to follow when the published PCT text is fine to translate and the unpublished priority document sitting next to it is not. Staff need to distinguish the two at the moment of use, and a written policy cannot do that for them.
A blanket ban also pushes translators, many of them freelancers or contractors, toward whatever free tool is open on their own device. Whether a given provider retains or trains on the text depends on the account and its settings, as explained in does ChatGPT train on company data, and the firm often cannot see which account was used.
What a practical control looks like
- Check publication status first. Before any translation, confirm whether the text has been published and whether the file also contains unpublished material.
- Separate the work. Translate published text in an approved tool, and handle unpublished applications, draft amendments and new matter only in tools the firm has vetted for confidential work, or without AI.
- Vet the translation tools. Review retention, training and access terms for any AI or machine translation service used on client files, including those used by outside translators.
- Put it in contracts. Require freelance and agency translators to follow the same rules and to disclose which tools they use.
- Keep a qualified reviewer. Have a person fluent in both languages check every translation against the original before filing, given the limits on correcting errors later.
- Have an incident path. If unpublished material reaches an unapproved tool, record it, tell the responsible agent, and assess with counsel whether the client needs to be told.
Sanitized Ai is a browser extension that supports steps 2 and 6 at the prompt. When someone is about to submit invention details, draft claims, client names and identifiers or other sensitive data to an AI tool, it redacts or blocks that content before submission and explains in plain language what was flagged and why. Because a submission cannot be recalled, the check has to happen before it.
Administrators see a dashboard of flagged-event metadata (which tool, what type of data, which policy, when) without seeing prompt content, which gives the firm a record of reasonable care it can point to if asked, without guaranteeing any outcome. It does not check translations for accuracy. See Sanitized Ai for law firms, and confirm filing requirements with CIPO or your counsel.