trader
noun · Unternehmer
In consumer law the trader is the Unternehmer of § 14 BGB, anyone acting in the exercise of their commercial or independent professional activity. The German word carries two further lives, the building contractor of the works contract and, in ordinary speech, the entrepreneur, while the merchant of commercial law is the Kaufmann and the undertaking of competition law das Unternehmen.
Which translation, when
Why
Trader in a consumer-law text is the Unternehmer of § 14 BGB, anyone who on concluding a legal transaction acts in the exercise of a commercial or an independent professional activity, and unlike the consumer definition this one covers natural persons, legal persons and partnerships with legal capacity alike. The pair Verbraucher and Unternehmer decides which protective regime applies to a contract, and the consumer entry holds the other half. The translation difficulty lies on the German side, where one word does three jobs. Beside the consumer-law Unternehmer stands the Unternehmer of § 631 BGB, the contractor who owes a work under a Werkvertrag, so a building contract names one party Unternehmer without any consumer-law implication whatever; and in ordinary speech the word carries the sense of entrepreneur, the person who runs a business. Two neighbouring terms complete the picture. Der Kaufmann is the merchant of the Commercial Code, a status that brings its own rules on form, on the duty to examine and give notice of defects and on commercial custom, and it is narrower than Unternehmer, so a freelance translator is an Unternehmer but not a Kaufmann. Das Unternehmen is the business as an entity, the word competition and merger control work with, corresponding to undertaking rather than to trader. English supplies four words for this field, trader in consumer legislation, business in commercial documents, undertaking in competition law and entrepreneur in ordinary usage, and none of them maps onto a single German term across the board, so the branch of law has to decide each time.
Typical mistakes
- The Unternehmer of § 14 BGB is the consumer-law counterpart while the Unternehmer of § 631 BGB is the contractor of a works contract, so the same word in a building contract carries no consumer-law meaning.
- Kaufmann is the narrower commercial-code status, so using it for every trader imports rules that do not apply to all businesses.
- Undertaking in competition law is das Unternehmen, so rendering it as Unternehmer moves the text from the entity to the person.
What matters
Working through a bilingual consumer contract: the German should say Unternehmer for the trader under § 14 BGB, keep Kaufmann for commercial-code status and Unternehmen where the source means the business as an entity.
What the machine misses
Automatic output for trader lands on Händler or Gewerbetreibender, and consumer legislation works with the Unternehmer of § 14 BGB, whose counterpart is the Verbraucher; the machine words also miss that German uses Unternehmer again for the contractor of a works contract and keeps Kaufmann and Unternehmen for quite different roles.
Examples
| a trader within the meaning of the Civil Code | ein Unternehmer im Sinne des Bürgerlichen Gesetzbuchs |
| the business customer | der gewerbliche Kunde |
| an undertaking within the meaning of competition law | ein Unternehmen im Sinne des Wettbewerbsrechts |
| the contractor owes the work | der Unternehmer schuldet das Werk |
More notes on these sections
consumer Verbraucher