Forms in four languages: more than a translation

A joinery in Murten puts its quotation form online. The German version takes an afternoon. The French one is meant to follow the next day — it is eleven labels and three sentences, after all.

The next day is gone too. Not because the translation is hard, but because in several places it is not clear what should be translated at all: a field is named one thing in one language and split differently in the other. A number is written differently. A label no longer fits its line. And the message “Please fill in this field” appears, although nobody wrote it.

Four languages, and what follows from them

The national languages are German, French, Italian and Romansh (Art. 4 of the Federal Constitution). The official languages of the Confederation are German, French and Italian; Romansh is also an official language when the Confederation communicates with people who speak it (Art. 70 para. 1). The cantons determine their own official languages (Art. 70 para. 2) — in the canton of Fribourg, for example, French and German are the official languages, and a municipality’s official language is French or German, or both where there is a significant traditional linguistic minority (Art. 6 of the Fribourg constitution).

Anyone approaching a federal authority may do so in the official language of their choice, and the authority replies in the language in which it was addressed (Art. 6 paras. 1 and 2 of the Languages Act). That provision applies to the federal bodies listed in Art. 4 of the same act — it says nothing about the languages in which a joinery offers its quotation form. That is the joinery’s own decision.

Everyday life is more mixed than a language map suggests. According to the Federal Statistical Office, almost two thirds (63%) of the population use more than one language at least once a week — with family, at work, or consuming media. At work the figure is 41% of employed people. 12% of the population have no national language as a main language; the three most common non-national languages are English, Albanian and Portuguese. Since 2010 the survey has allowed more than one main language to be given — for many people, “which language does this person speak” simply has no single answer.

For a form, two things follow. The choice of languages is a design question, not a legal one. And whoever makes it decides more than the labels.

Fields that do not map one to one

The usual assumption behind a bilingual form is: the structure stays, the words get replaced. These are the places where it does not hold.

Field	German	French	Italian
Name	Vorname / Nachname	Prénom / Nom	Nome / Cognome
Street	Strasse und Nummer	Rue et numéro du bâtiment	Via e numero civico
Town	PLZ / Ort	NPA / Localité	NAP / Località
Phone	Telefon	Téléphone	Telefono

The name row is the least conspicuous and the most awkward. French nom means the family name, but it can equally stand for the name in the broader sense — a field labelled only “Nom” allows both readings. Italian nome, by contrast, is the given name; the family name is cognome. Two words that look almost identical refer to the opposite half of the name in the two languages. Translate a label on its own, without its counterpart beside it, and swapping them takes no effort at all.

With the address, the question is how it is divided up. Swiss Post states that an address has to contain the complete official street name and the house number, and that the postal code and town must never be missing. Whether that becomes one field or two is open — and Post’s own examples show why a separate, numeric field for the house number becomes uncomfortable: “Bahnhofstrasse 4/8” and “Oltenstrasse 50A” are correct addresses. A house number is not a number.

The wording for postal code and town changes with the language: PLZ and Ort, NPA and localité, NAP and località. A field called zip in the code, still labelled “PLZ” on screen, is untranslated in three of the four languages.

That leaves the salutation. “Herr” and “Frau”, “Monsieur” and “Madame”, “Signor” and “Signora” are not a vocabulary problem but an assumption: the field asks for a classification before a name has even been recorded. A sign-up form for a woodwork course rarely needs it. A letter that should open with “Dear Ms” does — but then it is a decision about the letter, not about the form.

What is written differently

Alongside the labels, the notation changes. The Federal Chancellery’s writing guidelines set out, for federal texts:

• Dates. The binding order is day / month / year; for file names the reverse order year / month / day is recommended. A leading zero on single-digit days and months is not recommended for official texts — “but it is customary in forms, for example”.
• Decimals. Decimal places are separated by a decimal comma. For amounts of money, a decimal point goes between the currency unit and the subunit instead: CHF 1250.50, but 3,5 metres.
• Grouping digits. In groups of three, separated by a fixed space. The older notation with an apostrophe should no longer be used; grouping with full stops or commas is incorrect.
• Phone numbers. Domestically with a leading zero, the area code and the next three digits as a block of three, the remaining four in two pairs. OFCOM gives 032 765 43 21 as the national example and +41 32 765 43 21 as the international one, and notes that there are no legal requirements for publishing a number. The mixed form +41 (0)32 765 43 21 common in Switzerland may also be used, but can confuse callers from abroad.

An input field sees none of this. It takes a string. If someone types “1’250.50” and the evaluation does not treat the apostrophe as a thousands separator, the table holds a different figure from the one that was meant. If “3.5” arrives in a field that expects a decimal comma, the same full stop can mean a decimal point once and a thousands separator the next time. And “05.09.2026” is unambiguous, while “05/09/2026” is not.

Text that grows and shrinks

The fourth surprise is width. The W3C’s internationalisation material points out that short strings expand proportionally the most in translation: for an English source of up to ten characters it gives an expected expansion of 200 to 300 per cent, and around 130 per cent above seventy characters. Its example is English “views”, which becomes “consultations” in French and “-mal angesehen” in German.

Field labels and buttons are exactly such short strings. In German, compounding is added on top: “Rechnungsadresse”, “Ansprechperson”, “Geburtsdatum des Kindes” stand as one word and cannot be broken across lines the way “adresse de facturation” can. A table column that just fits in German does not fit in French; a label that looks right in Italian leaves a gap in German.

This is not a question of looks. On a phone 390 pixels wide it decides whether a line wraps, is cut off, or makes the page scroll sideways.

The messages nobody thinks about

That leaves the part that is almost always forgotten in translation, because it is not visible in the form at all: the response when something is missing.

The HTML standard describes validationMessage as returning a “suitably localized message” that the user agent would show. It is localised by the browser, not by the page. Open a French page in a browser set to English and you get the French label with “Please fill in this field” underneath it.

For a form offered in four languages, that means the messages belong to the content, not to the technology. They are written, reviewed and translated like any other line — all of them, from “Please fill in this field” to “This file is too large”.

What comes back is multilingual too

The last side of this concerns not the form but the answer.

A form offered in Italian produces answers in Italian. A free-text field then holds a paragraph that somebody has to read, place and reply to. The joinery in Murten may have two people in the office, one of whom answers in German and one in French — and the enquiry lands in the same table either way. In a bilingual canton that is the normal case, not the exception.

Which makes the language a form was filled in in a useful piece of information in its own right. Stored alongside the answer, it lets the answer go to the person who can deal with it, and the reply comes back in the language the question was asked in. Not stored, it gets guessed from the text.

To close

The work in a multilingual form is rarely the translation. It is in the decisions taken beforehand that stay invisible in a single language: how the name fields are split, whether the house number has a field of its own, what a numeric field does with an apostrophe, how wide a label may grow, who writes the error messages, and what happens to an answer that arrives in another language.

Printing out your own form and going through it line by line produces that list in twenty minutes — for a private individual setting up a form for an event or a group order as much as for a business.

With Formulare we are building a web app for Switzerland. In it, one form will have several language versions rather than existing as several forms, and the error messages will be part of the content like any other line. What a field is called and how it is split remains the decision of whoever sets the form up.