Swedish Retail & E-Commerce Translation

About the Swedish Language

Swedish is a language spoken natively by 9.6 million people, predominantly in Sweden, and in parts of Finland, where it has equal legal standing with Finnish. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and to some extent with Danish, although the degree of mutual intelligibility is largely dependent on the dialect and accent of the speaker.

Modern Swedish (Swedish: nysvenska) begins with the advent of the printing press and the European Reformation. After assuming power, the new monarch Gustav Vasa ordered a Swedish translation of the Bible. The New Testament was published in 1526, followed by a full Bible translation in 1541, usually referred to as the Gustav Vasa Bible, a translation deemed so successful and influential that, with revisions incorporated in successive editions, it remained the most common Bible translation until 1917. The main translators were Laurentius Andreæ and the brothers Laurentius and Olaus Petri.

The Vasa Bible is often considered to be a reasonable compromise between old and new; while not adhering to the colloquial spoken language of its day, it was not overly conservative in its use of archaic forms. It was a major step towards a more consistent Swedish orthography. It established the use of the vowels "å", "ä", and "ö", and the spelling "ck" in place of "kk", distinguishing it clearly from the Danish Bible, perhaps intentionally, given the ongoing rivalry between the countries. All three translators came from central Sweden which is generally seen as adding specific Central Swedish features to the new Bible.

Though it might seem as if the Bible translation set a very powerful precedent for orthographic standards, spelling actually became more inconsistent during the remainder of the century. It was not until the 17th century that spelling began to be discussed, around the time when the first grammars were written. Capitalization during this time was not standardized. It depended on the authors and their background. Those influenced by German capitalized all nouns, while others capitalized more sparsely. It is also not always apparent which letters are capitalized owing to the Gothic or blackletter typeface which was used to print the Bible. This typeface was in use until the mid-18th century, when it was gradually replaced with a Latin typeface (often antiqua).

Some important changes in sound during the Modern Swedish period were the gradual assimilation of several different consonant clusters into the fricative [ʃ] and later into [ɧ]. There was also the gradual softening of [ɡ] and [k] into [j] and the fricative [ɕ] before front vowels. The velar fricative [ɣ] was also transformed into the corresponding plosive [ɡ].

Swedish Translation Expertise

Swedish uses a two-gender system (common and neuter) that affects article and adjective agreement, and the definite article is suffixed to the noun rather than placed before it, which can complicate structural translation. Compound words are written as single words in Swedish and can become extremely long, requiring careful decomposition for English translation. Official and legal Swedish tends toward formal, concise phrasing that differs markedly from everyday language.

Swedish uses the Latin alphabet supplemented with three additional vowels — å, ä, and ö — which are considered distinct letters appearing at the end of the alphabet, not variants of a, a, and o. These characters must be correctly rendered in translations, as substituting them with their base letters changes meaning.

Common Swedish Documents

Commonly translated documents include the personbevis (population register extract used as a birth certificate), marriage certificates, police clearance certificates from the Swedish Police Authority, and academic transcripts from Swedish universities.

NAATI certification for Swedish is available but the number of certified translators is limited, reflecting the smaller Swedish-speaking community in Australia. Australian authorities generally accept NAATI-certified Swedish translations for immigration and official purposes.

About the Swedish Language

Swedish has a unique vowel system with nine vowels, each having long and short variants, giving it 18 distinct vowel sounds — more than almost any other European language. The Swedish word "lagom," meaning "just the right amount," is considered so culturally central that it has no direct equivalent in English. Until 2009, the Swedish language had no official status in Sweden — it was simply assumed to be the national language without legal designation.