A French aerospace company opened a subsidiary in Montréal. Their standard supplier agreement, drafted in France under the Code civil français, was translated into French by their Paris-based legal translation provider. The translation was accurate by the standards of metropolitan French legal terminology. Sixteen months later, during a contract dispute with a Québec supplier, the Superior Court of Québec ruled that several key clauses were unenforceable under the Civil Code of Québec because the terminology used reflected French legal concepts that don’t exist in Québec law. The company’s indemnification clause, drafted around the French concept of responsabilité délictuelle, was invalid because Québec civil law uses the concept of responsabilité extracontractuelle — a distinction that looks like vocabulary but operates as doctrine. The settlement cost CAD 4.7 million.
Most organizations working in French assume that French is French. It isn’t. France and Québec share a language, but they do not share a legal system. Both are civil law jurisdictions, and both derive from the Napoleonic tradition, but they have diverged substantially over two centuries, and their legal vocabularies have diverged with them. A legal translation that is correct in Paris may be wrong in Montréal, and vice versa, not because the words are different, but because the legal concepts behind the words are different.
The Civil Code of Québec (CCQ) and the Code civil français share ancestry but have evolved on separate tracks. The CCQ was substantially revised in 1994, replacing the original 1866 code that was itself based on the Napoleonic Code. The 1994 revision modernized Québec’s civil law in ways that created terminological and conceptual gaps with French law. France’s own code has been amended repeatedly, most significantly in 2016 with the reform of the law of obligations (ordonnance n° 2016-131). The result: two civil law systems that use overlapping but non-identical terminology to describe overlapping but non-identical concepts.
The practical consequences show up in contract translation. In France, a contract is formed by the meeting of an offer and an acceptance under Article 1128 of the Code civil. In Québec, contract formation requires the meeting of offer, acceptance, and cause — and the CCQ’s concept of cause operates differently than the French code’s cause after the 2016 reform, which largely subsumed cause into the requirement of contenu licite (lawful content). A French translator who works from the current French code may translate cause-related language in a way that doesn’t align with how the CCQ treats the same concept, because the 2016 French reform changed the doctrinal significance of cause while the CCQ retained it as a distinct formation requirement.
Liability terminology is the most dangerous divergence. France distinguishes between responsabilité contractuelle (breach of contract) and responsabilité délictuelle (extra-contractual liability). Québec uses responsabilité contractuelle and responsabilité extracontractuelle. The French term délictuelle derives from délit (a wrongful act), while the Québec term extracontractuelle simply means outside the contract. In French law, délictuelle liability encompasses fault-based liability, strict liability for things, and vicarious liability — a unified regime under Articles 1240-1242 of the Code civil. In Québec, extracontractuelle liability under CCQ Articles 1457-1474 is structured differently: Article 1457 establishes a general duty not to cause injury to others, and the following articles create specific regimes. A liability clause translated using French délictuelle terminology may be read by a Québec court as importing French doctrinal categories that don’t exist under the CCQ, potentially invalidating the clause or interpreting it differently than intended.
Property law diverges even further. France distinguishes between propriété (ownership) and possession as separate legal concepts with distinct regimes. Québec also distinguishes ownership and possession, but the CCQ includes the concept of propriété apparente (apparent ownership) that has no direct French equivalent, and Québec’s regime of hypothèque légale (legal hypothec) operates differently from France’s hypothèque légale. A real estate translation that uses French hypothèque terminology without verifying the CCQ’s specific provisions may create a security interest that doesn’t exist under Québec law, or fail to create one that the parties intended.
Then there’s Bill 96 (Loi sur la langue officielle et commune du Québec, le français). Since its adoption in 2022, Bill 96 has imposed stringent French-language requirements on commercial activities in Québec, including contracts of adhesion, consumer contracts, and employment contracts. Section 139 of the Charter of the French Language (as amended by Bill 96) requires that consumer contracts and contracts of adhesion be drawn up in French. The French version prevails over any translated version if there’s a discrepancy. This means that a contract translated into Québec French must not only use correct Québec legal terminology, it must be the governing version if the other party is a consumer or the contract is one of adhesion. A translation that uses French legal terminology — even accurate French legal terminology — creates a compliance risk if it doesn’t conform to the specific register and terminology of Québec civil law, because the French version is the one the Québec courts will enforce.
The translation workflow for French legal documents that will be used in both France and Québec needs to produce two versions, not one. A single translation that tries to serve both jurisdictions will either use French terminology that’s wrong in Québec or Québec terminology that’s wrong in France, or it will attempt a compromise that’s imprecise in both. The correct approach: identify the governing law of the contract, translate into the legal French of that jurisdiction, and if the document will be used in the other jurisdiction, produce a separate version adapted to that jurisdiction’s legal vocabulary. This costs more. It costs less than a CAD 4.7 million court ruling.
Artlangs Translation provides French legal translation services across 230+ language pairs: jurisdiction-specific translations for French and Québec civil law, Code civil français and CCQ terminology mapping, Bill 96 compliance verification for Québec-bound contracts, and dual-version production for documents used in both jurisdictions. Because French legal translation that doesn’t know which French it’s translating for isn’t legal translation.
