Does A Contract Need To Be Bilingual To Be Valid?

Today we shall talk about whether or not a contract needs to have an English version to be valid, and what happens if there are discrepancies between the two versions.

A contract can be in Chinese only, in English only, or in both languages. All of these would be valid contracts once signed or sealed by both parties, so the language does not affect the validity of the contract. In fact, it can even be in Italian, French or Arabic. However, as this is China, if there is a dispute arising from the contract, such a contract has to be translated into Chinese by a translation agency before being admissible in court. Therefore, my advice would be to always make a bilingual version with Chinese being one of the languages on the contract to save such future expenses.

I have seen many contracts where both languages are not 100% the same, as people will try to sneak something into the Chinese version which you would obviously not understand. In this case, we need to look at whether or not there is a clause at the end of the contract that says which language prevails in case of a legal dispute. For obvious reasons, I would suggest you to choose English because it is the language you understand. If such a clause does not exist, a judge would compare both versions, and make a decision on which wording to choose based on equality and fairness. Placing such power in a judge’s hands is dangerous as you do not know what that person’s values are, so the best way to protect yourself would be to hire a lawyer to check the contract before signing it.

To sum up, having an English version is not a requirement for validity of a contract even when one of the parties does not understand Chinese. If you have to sign a contract without having ample time to get a lawyer to check it, at least you should use google translate or something of the sort to convert the text into your language before just trusting the person who orally translates it for you. It would be too dangerous to do so, and the only people you should trust is yourself and your lawyer.