Institutional Translation: Balancing Multilingual Legal Discourse between EU and Switzerland

This chapter attempts to outline how EU multilingualism interacts with legal drafting and institutional translation in multilingual Switzerland. Although it is not an EU Member State, Switzerland is an official trilingual country that incorporates much of the European Union’s legislation. Focusing exclusively on linguistic aspects and legal discourse, this study highlights the features of institutional translation and the impact of language contact. The analysis is twofold and navigates between macro-textual features, such as text structure and organisation, and micro-linguistics aspects, like modality and sentence structure. While the former aims to shed light on concordance with other texts in the same legal system and within the same language, the latter examines interlinguistic consistency in terms of meaning and effects across different languages. The preliminary findings show that the EU language does not have a massive impact on Swiss legal discourse and that Swiss authentic translations maintain a notable degree of autonomy.