The paper aims to discuss the specific characteristics of Italian employment contract from a linguistic point of view as well as from the point of view of the translation. First of all, the employment contract as a legal document will be discussed in regard to the text classifi cation proposed by Sabatini (1990). Moreover, the general typology of Italian and Polish employment contracts will be taken into consideration. The analysis is complemented by Polish equivalents of the main Italian terms and phrases used usually in the employment contact. The fi nal comments will be dedicated to the issue of translation procedures used for dealing with the translation shifts proposed by Vinay and Darbelnet (1958) and Cosmai (2007).