Translating a contract under Swiss law: how to stay true to the statutory text

Why three versions are equally authoritative

German, French and Italian are the official languages of the Confederation. Romansh is the fourth national language, and the Confederation publishes texts of particular importance in Romansh. In practice, federal acts appear simultaneously in German, French and Italian, and all three versions have the same legal force. None is presented as the translation of another.

The practical consequence is simple, and it often surprises legal experts trained in a monolingual system. When you translate a contract that cites Article 104 CO into German or Italian, you do not translate ‘intérêts moratoires’. You look up the word that Article 104 uses in the German version (Verzugszinse) or the Italian version (interessi moratori) of the same article. The term already exists. Using another one, even a perfectly correct synonym, creates a gap with the text the judge will read. The same holds for a contract in English: the Fedlex translation of Article 104 says ‘default interest’, which helps the reader, but the term with legal force is the one in the German, French or Italian version.

The second consequence is less well known. Where the three versions diverge, interpretation does not favour the ‘original’ version, because there is none. The three texts are read together to establish the intended meaning. A bilingual contract that faithfully follows the official terminology of both its languages is therefore on the right side of this exercise.

Abbreviations are not translated: they change

This is the most frequent error, and the most visible to a Swiss reader. Abbreviations of acts are not international acronyms: each official language has its own, and it cannot be derived from the translated title. A general-purpose translation engine that renders ‘CO’ as ‘CO’ in German produces a readable sentence and a wrong reference. English adds one more layer: the Fedlex translations use their own abbreviations, shown in brackets in the table, and they have no legal force.

Three traps lie behind this table.

• The form of subdivisions changes too. French writes ‘art. 104 al. 1 CO’, German ‘Art. 104 Abs. 1 OR’, Italian ‘art. 104 cpv. 1 CO’ and the English translation ‘Art. 104 para. 1 CO’. A paragraph (alinéa) becomes Absatz in German and capoverso in Italian; a letter becomes Buchstabe and lettera. A reference translated word for word leaves ‘al.’ in a German text, and it shows at once.
• Identical abbreviations are reassuring false friends. CO and CC are the same in French, in Italian and in the English translation. You get used to leaving them alone, and forget to change them in German.
• Competing abbreviations exist. The Banking Act is cited as LB in French and as LBCR in Italian, and both circulate in practice. Faced with a discrepancy of this kind, there is only one way out: open the official version and read the abbreviation the text itself gives.

English: indispensable in practice, with no legal force

English is not an official language of the Confederation. Yet it is the working language of many transactions, of international arbitration and of financial documentation. This tension produces two misunderstandings.

The first concerns the English translations of federal acts available on Fedlex, the official platform. The translation of the Code of Obligations, for example, opens with this notice: “English is not an official language of the Swiss Confederation. This translation is provided for information purposes only and has no legal force.” These translations help you understand; they cannot ground a legal argument. A contract that cites ‘Article 104(1) of the Swiss Code of Obligations’ is in fact citing a reading aid, not an official text. The term to use is the one in the German, French or Italian version.

The second concerns how to cite in English. Several conventions coexist: ‘Art. 104 para. 1 CO’, ‘Article 104(1) of the Swiss Code of Obligations’, ‘CO Art. 104, para. 1’. None of them is wrong. What is wrong is to mix them in the same document, or to let a tool produce a different one in each paragraph. Choose one convention, write it into your style guide and make everyone apply it.

Classic pitfalls, language by language

Swiss German

• There is no ß. Swiss Standard German writes gemäss, Grösse, Strasse, never gemäß. A single ß in a document shows that it was produced or checked with a spellchecker set for Germany.
• Thousands are separated by an apostrophe: 15'000, 1'250'000. A full stop or a thin space betrays a foreign origin.
• Company vocabulary differs. AG and GmbH are the usual Swiss forms, but corporate bodies, registers and procedures have names specific to Swiss law; the closest German equivalent is often a different institution.
• The highest court is the Bundesgericht, never the Bundesgerichtshof, which is a German court. The confusion is common in machine output, and it is immediately disqualifying.

Swiss Italian

• A company limited by shares is a società anonima in Switzerland, where Italy writes società per azioni. Likewise, the limited liability company becomes a Sagl, not an S.r.l.
• Institutions with the same name do not mean the same thing. In Ticino, the Consiglio di Stato is the cantonal government, whereas in Italy it is an administrative court. Translating one by the other changes the meaning of a whole sentence.
• The highest court is the Tribunale federale, and its published decisions are the DTF. The Corte di cassazione belongs to another legal system.
• Abbreviations of acts follow the Swiss nomenclature (LEF, LBCR, LDIP), not that of the Italian codes.

Formats, amounts and dates

• The currency is written CHF, usually before the amount. In German, French and Italian, thousands take an apostrophe (CHF 15'000); the Federal Chancellery's English style guide uses a comma (CHF 15,000).
• The date is commonly written 24.09.2026 in all three languages. In English, the same date becomes ambiguous if you leave it in figures: write the month in full (24 September 2026).
• Percentages, rates and time limits must be checked figure by figure after any machine translation. These are the most costly errors, and the least visible in a quick review.

Checking a term in an official source, in three minutes

The method takes four steps and needs no subscription.

1. Open the act on Fedlex, the publication platform for federal law. Every act is available there in German, French and Italian, and some also in an English translation with no legal force. Switch from one language to another on the same article: you read the official term in context, not a dictionary definition.
2. Note the abbreviation as it appears at the top of the text. It is the only source that settles a choice between two competing abbreviations.
3. Look for attested usage in the published decisions of the Federal Supreme Court, in the Federal Gazette or, for regulated sectors, in the publications of the authority concerned. A term used by the legislature and taken up by the courts is a safe term.
4. For an isolated term with no article to anchor it, TERMDAT, the Confederation's terminology database, gives the equivalents adopted by the Federal Administration in the four national languages and in English.

What costs time is not the research: it is doing it twice. Record each terminology decision as you go, with its source, in a file shared by the team. After three matters, you have an in-house glossary worth more than any generic list, because it is tied to your texts and your clients.

The checklist before you sign off a translation

• Every statutory reference has been reopened in the official version of the target language. For a text in English, that means the German, French or Italian version, with the Fedlex translation as a reading aid only.
• Abbreviations of acts match the target language, including in footnotes and annexes.
• Subdivisions (paragraph, letter, number) follow the nomenclature of the target language.
• The names of courts, authorities and registers are Swiss, not their foreign namesakes.
• No ß in German; an apostrophe as thousands separator in German, French and Italian.
• Amounts, rates, dates and time limits have been checked again against the original.
• The same source term is rendered by the same target term throughout the document, annexes included.
• Contractual definitions follow the same rule as the body of the text.