Terminology resources and a drafting checklist

Official and institutional resources

The most authoritative source of Swiss Italian legal terminology is the Italian version of federal law itself, published in the Systematic Compilation (Raccolta sistematica) on the Fedlex platform. The Italian text of the Code of Obligations, the Civil Code and the LEF fixes the terms that a Swiss-law document in Italian should use, and because each of the three versions is binding under Art. 14(1) of the Publications Act, the Italian term carries the authority of the statute.¹ Bilingual editions such as the mirror site droit-bilingue.ch, which juxtaposes two language versions article by article, are useful working tools. They should, however, be checked against Fedlex for the current version, since they may lag behind amendments.

The second resource is TERMDAT, the terminology database of the federal administration, with about 400,000 entries in German, French, Italian, Romansh and English. It records the official equivalents of legal and administrative terms in the federal languages, often with definitions, sources and notes on usage. The database is freely accessible online.² The Federal Chancellery also lists further tools for its translators: the European Union's terminology database IATE, which records the Italian terminology of EU law and therefore often the usage of the Italian Republic, a Glossario esecuzione e fallimenti for the vocabulary of debt enforcement, the financial glossaries of the Banca d'Italia and of Borsa Italiana, and Italian legal databases such as Brocardi and Normattiva.³ A translator who checks a term in TERMDAT and in IATE sees at once whether the Swiss and the Italian usage diverge.

Dictionaries, commentaries and the Italian edition of the codes

Bilingual legal dictionaries for German and Italian exist in several editions, some of them prepared with the Swiss situation in mind. The major Swiss commentaries are increasingly available in Italian or contain Italian terminology. Ticinese practitioners rely on annotated Italian editions of the Civil Code and the Code of Obligations, on the publications of the Ticinese bar and of the Rivista ticinese di diritto, and on the Italian-language decisions of the Federal Supreme Court and of the Tribunale d'appello, which together form a body of Swiss Italian legal usage.⁴ For Italian law the authoritative texts are those published on Normattiva, the official portal of Italian legislation, and in the Gazzetta Ufficiale. Annotated editions such as those of Brocardi provide the doctrinal context.

Linguistic research on Swiss Italian legal language has grown since the 1990s. The Osservatorio linguistico della Svizzera italiana in Bellinzona and the universities of Basel, Bern and Zurich have studied the Italian of the federal administration. The Federal Chancellery has organized conferences and published studies on the quality of the Italian federal texts.⁵ Practitioners rarely consult this literature, but it explains why certain terms are as they are and helps a drafter to defend his choice of term against a client who wants "proper Italian".

Notes

1. Publications Act, Art. 14(1) (above). ↩
2. Federal Chancellery, "TERMDAT" (above). ↩
3. Federal Chancellery, "Banche dati, glossari e altri strumenti", https://www.bk.admin.ch/it/banche-dati-glossari-e-altri-strumenti. ↩
4. Rivista ticinese di diritto (RtiD), published since 2002 by the Ticinese judiciary and bar with Helbing Lichtenhahn. ↩
5. Federal Chancellery, "Lingue" (above) (conferences and seminars of the Divisione italiana). Egger, Ferrari and Lala (eds.), Le forme linguistiche dell'ufficialità (above); Bice Mortara Garavelli, Le parole e la giustizia. Divagazioni grammaticali e retoriche su testi giuridici italiani (Torino 2001). ↩

For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of August 2025.