When a Translation Is Not the Law

Open a Swiss federal act in German and in French and set the two side by side. Where the wordings pull apart, there is no error to correct. Both are the statute, along with the Italian, and the interpretive question is what three equally binding texts mean together rather than which one somebody mistranslated.

That case breaks the frame most readers arrive with, which has two boxes, the original and the translation, and a rule that the first governs. Across the jurisdictions in this guide the relationship between a legal text and its other language versions takes at least six distinct forms, most of them published, and which form applies decides what a reader may do with the copy in front of them. It also decides whether two systems can be compared at all, which is why the tools for setting one system beside another are worth less than they look until the question has been settled for both halves.

Several texts and no original

The Swiss arrangement is the strongest form. The publications act has publication happen simultaneously in the three official languages and provides that in the case of acts the three versions are authoritative. None of the three is the original and none is a rendering of the others, which is a different thing from three careful translations of a master text. It also produces an obligation most citations ignore: quote the version you actually read, and say which one it was, because a reader cannot reconstruct that from a translated quotation.

The same statute is careful about what does not get that status. Romansh is one of the country's national languages and is not one of the three, and translations into Romansh or English are put into a category of their own. A further provision allows a text of major importance to be published in additional languages, English named among them, and none of that makes the English binding. A state can publish an English version and mean nothing by it, and this one says so in the same act that makes the other three law.

Two originals, arriving by two different routes

The Indian arrangement is the other multilingual case here, and it works quite differently. The Constitution provides that the authoritative texts of Bills, Acts, Ordinances and instruments made under them shall be in English until Parliament provides otherwise. A second authoritative text exists in Hindi, but it exists by statute rather than by the Constitution, and only where the President has actually published a translation of that instrument in the gazette.

The second text is therefore contingent, instrument by instrument. One Central Act may have a single authoritative text while another passed the same year has two, and the way to know is to look for the gazetted translation rather than to reason from the rule. That is an unusual research obligation and it is easy to skip, because the rule that creates the second text reads like a general one and behaves like a per-instrument one. The states run the arrangement in mirror image, so a state Act's binding English text is the one that state gazetted, which is also why a search of central collections will not settle a question about state legislation.

The state publishes a translation and disclaims it

The most common arrangement is a government translation with its status printed above it, and the clearest statement of it in this guide belongs to the Japanese translation database. The Ministry of Justice warns its users in four short movements: what it publishes has no official character, some of it is not a finished version, legal effect belongs to the Japanese originals alone, and a live dispute is to be argued from the gazette. Then it adds the detail worth more than the disclaimer. Where a title marks a translation tentative, nobody with English as a first language and nobody specialising in legal translation has yet read it over.

Germany reaches the same place from the publisher rather than the ministry. Its promulgation platform says of the consolidations and of the translations alike that neither is the official version, and that the official one exists nowhere but on the platform. Note what has been disclaimed there. It is not only the English. The consolidation is disclaimed in the same breath, which puts a translated statute two removes from the promulgated text: a rendering into another language of a rendering into a current wording.

A second language version that exists only by arrangement

Spain shows a fourth form, and it is the one most often misread as bilingualism. A decree has statutes appear in Castilian in the state gazette and makes their full effect flow from that appearance and from no other. A version in one of the co-official languages exists only where the community concerned has arranged for it, through an agreement that also settles where the result appears. So a text of a Spanish statute in Catalan, Galician or Basque is a real document, properly made and properly authorised, and it is not a second original. Its existence is optional and its status derives from the agreement rather than from the act.

Equal validity that has nothing to do with publication

Mexico looks at first like the Swiss case and is not. A rights statute makes the recognised indigenous languages and Spanish national languages of equal validity in the territory and context where they are spoken, and valid for any public matter. That is a statement about what a person may use rather than about what the gazette prints, and nothing loaded for the Mexican page identifies one official language for the Republic. Writing Spanish into that field as the official one would report the practice and contradict the statute, so the fact block on that page says less than a reader expects. That is the correct answer rather than a gap in the research, and the difference between the two is worth being able to tell apart anywhere in this guide.

A permission drafted to expire

Pakistan supplies the sixth form. The Constitution makes Urdu the national language and then, subject to that, permits English for official purposes while the arrangements for putting Urdu in its place are still being made. An English federal statute in Pakistan therefore has official standing rather than being a courtesy version of something else, and it holds that standing under a transitional clause. The Ministry's own compilation has an English side and an Urdu side and says nothing about which governs. Anyone working from the English there is working from a text whose status is real and provisional at once.

Where no rule could be found at all

Three of the twenty country records in this guide leave the language field open, and each says what would settle it. Argentina publishes in Spanish, and nothing in the ministry collection was found that names a language for federal legislation at all. Poland publishes in Polish, and the statute governing announcement mentions the Polish language twice without either mention being about the Polish journals. Korea has a statute on the language of public documents and every copy of it found here sits on a service whose stored bytes could not be tied to the address they came from.

Two more records leave something narrower open. Madagascar has two official languages, and nothing found here settles how a Malagasy text and a French one stand to each other where they diverge. The Tuvalu government site calls what it publishes the English versions of its revised edition, which implies others and does not say where they are. In all five the practice is visible and the rule is not. A researcher leaning on the practice should know that is what they are doing, rather than find it out from an opponent.

The risk is not that the translation is wrong

Bad translation is the risk everybody imagines and it is not the one that catches people. The two that do are staleness and status, and staleness is the easier of them to demonstrate. The Brazilian Chamber of Deputies serves the Portuguese constitutional text at the hundred and thirty-ninth amendment and its English version at the ninety-second, and both of those labels live on the web page and not inside the files themselves. Download the English one and the label stays behind. What you then have is a well made document, produced by the right body, describing a constitution as it stood a decade ago, with nothing in the file to say so.

Status is subtler because it fails silently. Nobody misquotes a Swiss provision by translating it badly; they misquote it by presenting one of three binding versions as the text. Nobody is misled by a Japanese translation marked tentative; they are misled by forgetting it was. The check that catches both takes a minute: find the page where the publisher states the status of the copy you are holding, and write that status into your note beside the citation.

Which leaves the awkward observation. The states that spell all this out, and several of them do it in the statute itself, are the ones whose translations are least dangerous to use, precisely because a disclaimer is a rule and you can work with a rule. The silence is what costs. Where no publisher has said what the second language version is for, the reader supplies an answer from habit, and the answer habit supplies is always the convenient one.

SOURCES

1. Loi sur les publications officielles, RS 170.512, text as at 1 July 2022. Chancellerie federale suisse, Fedlex. https://fedlex.data.admin.ch/filestore/fedlex.data.admin.ch/eli/cc/2004/745/20220701/fr/html/fedlex-data-admin-ch-eli-cc-2004-745-20220701-fr-html.html. Accessed 2026-08-30.
2. Legge sulle pubblicazioni ufficiali, RS 170.512, text as at 1 July 2022. Cancelleria federale svizzera, Fedlex. https://fedlex.data.admin.ch/filestore/fedlex.data.admin.ch/eli/cc/2004/745/20220701/it/html/fedlex-data-admin-ch-eli-cc-2004-745-20220701-it-html.html. Accessed 2026-08-30.
3. Constitutional provisions on official language, Part XVII and articles 120 and 210. Department of Official Language, Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India. https://rajbhasha.gov.in/en/constitutional-provisions. Accessed 2026-08-30.
4. The Official Languages Act, 1963, Act No. 19 of 1963. Department of Official Language, Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India. https://rajbhasha.gov.in/en/official-languages-act-1963. Accessed 2026-08-30.
5. Japanese Law Translation, the Ministry of Justice notice to users. Homusho, the Ministry of Justice of Japan. https://www.japaneselawtranslation.go.jp/en. Accessed 2026-08-30.
6. Promulgation Platform of the Federal Law Gazette, English description. Bundesministerium der Justiz und für Verbraucherschutz. https://www.recht.bund.de/en/home/home_node.html. Accessed 2026-08-30.
7. Real Decreto 489/1997, de 14 de abril, sobre publicación de las Leyes en las lenguas cooficiales de las Comunidades Autónomas, consolidated text. Agencia Estatal Boletín Oficial del Estado. https://www.boe.es/buscar/act.php?id=BOE-A-1997-8204. Accessed 2026-08-30.
8. Ley General de Derechos Linguisticos de los Pueblos Indigenas, DOF 13 March 2003. Diario Oficial de la Federacion, Secretaria de Gobernacion. https://dof.gob.mx/nota_detalle.php?codigo=698625&fecha=13/03/2003. Accessed 2026-08-30.
9. The Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, full text. Ministry of Law and Justice, Government of Pakistan. https://pakistancode.gov.pk/pdffiles/administrator9d8e2ecc414c6d3371ac41114b61a2c4.pdf. Accessed 2026-08-30.
10. Constituicao Federal de 1988, the Chamber of Deputies index of the formats it serves. Camara dos Deputados. https://www2.camara.leg.br/atividade-legislativa/legislacao/constituicao1988. Accessed 2026-08-30.
11. Description du droit national. DIRCNLEGIS, Secrétariat Général du Gouvernement, Primature. https://cnlegis.gov.mg/page_droit_national_cnL/. Accessed 2026-08-30.
12. Tuvalu Legislation On-line, home page. The Tuvalu Government. https://tuvalu-legislation.tv/cms/. Accessed 2026-08-30.

Reviewed 2026-08-31. 12 sources cited on this page.