The increasing multilateralism in international relations has led to the spreading of the principle of official multilingualism within the international and supranational organizations, which involves the need to produce legal texts in multiple languages. This paper aims to highlight the features of multilingual legal drafting within different contexts: first, within national legal systems, such as Canada and Switzerland; second, within international organizations, with particular attention to multilingual treaties and taking as paradigmatic example the United Nations’ activity; and third, within the European Union, highlighting the complexity of the multilingual legislative drafting in view of the independent, multilingual and directly applicable nature of EU law. These contexts are profoundly different in various ways, such as the reasons and the legal basis of multilingualism and the criteria and methods of drafting, adopting and interpreting multilingual legal texts.

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