Insolvency law

The twenty-third entry is scambio contestuale, and an English reader will mistranslate it with complete confidence. Both languages built a word on Latin contextus, from contexere, to weave together, but they wove different things with it. English « contextual » means one thing only: belonging to the surrounding matter, as in « a contextual reading ». Italian contestuale has that sense too, and then a second one that the law uses constantly — happening at the same moment, or contained in one and the same act. La firma è contestuale alla consegna says that the signing and the delivery happened together, and the adverb contestualmente is simply at the same time, which is why it is everywhere in administrative prose. So uno scambio contestuale is not an exchange read in its context: it is goods and money changing hands in the same breath, and that simultaneity is exactly what makes such an exchange hard to undo afterwards. The renderings that work are « simultaneous », « concurrent » and « made in the same instrument », and none of them looks like the Italian word.