What it is
Some strings in a running text are set in a sloping face and the rest are not. The classes that take it are small and closed: wording felt to be foreign, the titles of publications, the names of ships and aircraft, the parties to a case. The choice is one of type rather than of spelling.
What the language leaves open is which of those classes exist at all. A community may mark foreignness by type, by quotation marks, or not at all; it may set a publication title in italics or fence it; it may have a rule positively forbidding the sloping face for a class another community italicizes.
The cut against case-law-citation is stated in both records. This one owns which elements of a citation carry italics: the parties' names do, the "v" between them does not, and neither the case number nor the ECLI identifier nor the paragraph reference does. case-law-citation owns which elements are present and in what notation. Removing the italics leaves a complete citation wrongly typeset; removing the ECLI leaves an incomplete one.
Where the expectation comes from
Every positive rule opened for this record is the rule of a named body, and the one code consulted declines the subject.
- The English Style Guide italicizes foreign words and phrases used in English text, at 9.1, excepting wording that has become naturalized in English. It gives publication titles italics when cited, at 4.11, and the names of ships and aircraft italics at 5.15; and it declines quotation marks for both classes at 2.37 because italics have already done the work. Its front-matter list of tips fixes the footnote form for Court of Justice cases and directs that the parties' names but not the "v" go in italics. All of it binds that institution's texts.
- The Office québécois de la langue française supplies the one non-English rule opened, and it runs the other way: the names of bodies "s'écrivent en caractères romains, et non en italique". A rule forbidding the sloping face is worth more to a translator than one requiring it, being the case in which a carried-over habit shows.
- The Amtliches Regelwerk der deutschen Rechtschreibung claims capitalization in a chapter of its own and claims no chapter on typography at all. That is weaker evidence than a rule, being an argument from the code's list of chapters rather than a statement about its own reach, and it is offered as the weaker thing it is.
The tier is House, and the German observation makes the reason visible. Inside one language and one community, capitals fall within what the code claims and italics fall outside it, so capitals-in-institutions-and-offices and this record sit at different tiers for the same readers. The span rule has until now been applied across languages; here it applies within one.
Consequences for translation
Type is content, and it converts.
- Italics do not travel with the string. A body name italicized in an English text because it is foreign is set in roman in a French text because it is the name of a body, and both are right. Carrying the type across is the commonest way to be wrong in the target community while reproducing the source faithfully.
- Most of the class is mechanically checkable and one part is not. Case names, publication titles and ship names have one right typesetting once the guide is known. Whether a borrowed word has naturalized enough to lose its italics is a judgement on which two competent translators may differ while both complying. The split is stated rather than resolved by reassignment, the checkable part being much the larger.
- Where no guide governs, nothing does. A German target has no code answer here, so the expectation falls to a publisher's guidance or the client's sheet, and a finding raised without naming one of those has named no authority.
Examples
EN>FR
- Source: the opinion of the European Economic and Social Committee
- Target: l'avis du Comité économique et social européen
- Comment: Regulation (EU) 2016/1191, preamble, both official versions. Both print the body's name upright. The French side has an express rule for it; the English side has no rule either way. A translator applying 9.1 to the French name inside an English text, on the ground that it is foreign wording, would italicize a string neither version italicizes.
FR>EN
- Source: Malgožata Runevič-Vardyn et Łukasz Paweł Wardyn contre Vilniaus miesto savivaldybės administracija
- Target: Runevič-Vardyn and Wardyn, C-391/09, ECLI:EU:C:2011:291, paragraph 32
- Comment: The parties of Case C-391/09 as the French judgment heads them, and the same parties in the English footnote form the guide's tenth tip prescribes. Only the names slope: the case number, the identifier and the paragraph reference stay upright, and so does the connector. The diacritics are a separate obligation, treated in
diacritics-in-names.
References
- English Style Guide. Directorate-General for Translation, European Commission, eighth edition January 2016, file consulted 3 August 2026. Sections 2.37 (Other uses), 4.11 (Publications), 5.15 (Names of ships, aircraft and other vehicles), 9.1 and 9.2 in chapter 9, "Foreign imports", beginning at page 54; and item 10 of the front-matter list headed "Top 10 Tips".
- Banque de dépannage linguistique, "Majuscule aux noms d'organismes uniques dans un État", Office québécois de la langue française, last updated 2024, for the rule on roman type.
- Amtliches Regelwerk der deutschen Rechtschreibung, 2024 edition, chapters A to F as listed by the edition published at the Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache, cited here for what its chapters cover and not for a rule.
- Regulation (EU) 2016/1191, English and French language versions, preamble.
- Judgment of 12 May 2011 in Case C-391/09, Runevič-Vardyn and Wardyn, ECLI:EU:C:2011:291, French language version, head of the case.