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Swedish Translation Services

With a large network of in-country, professional Swedish translators, LeoSam  Translations can respond quickly and effectively to your Swedish language translation needs.

Verbatim Solutions provides professional, high quality Swedish to English translations and English to Swedish translations. Our Swedish translation services will help you maximize your global strategy.

Native Speaking Swedish Translators

Verbatim Solutions Swedish translation teams are professional linguists performing translation from English to Swedish and Swedish to English for a variety of documents in various industries including:

History
Swedish is closely related to, and often mutually intelligible with, Danish and Norwegian. All three diverged from Old Norse about a millennium ago and were strongly influenced by Low German. Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian Bokm l are all considered East Scandinavian languages; Swedes usually find it easier to understand Norwegian than Danish (but even if a Swede finds it difficult to understand a Dane, it is not necessarily the other way around).


Geographic distribution
Swedish is the national language of Sweden, mother tongue for the Sweden-born inhabitants (7,881,000) and acquired by nearly all immigrants (1,028,000) (figures according to official statistics for 2001).

Swedish is the language of the land Islands, an autonomous province under the sovereignty of Finland. In Mainland Finland, however, Swedish is mother tongue for only a minority of the Finns, or about six percent. The Finland-Swedish minority is concentrated in some coastal areas and archipelagos of southern and southwestern Finland, where they form a local majority in some communities.

There were formerly Swedish-speaking communities in the Baltic countries, especially on the islands (Dag, sel and Orms) along the coast. After the loss of the Baltic territories to Russia in the early 18th century, many of them were forced to make the long march to Ukraine. The survivors of that march eventually founded a number of Swedish-speaking villages, which survived until the Russian revolution when the inhabitants were evacuated to Sweden. The dialect they spoke was known as gammalsvenska (Old Swedish). (Today there exist a few elderly descendants in the village of Gammalsvenskby (Old Swedish Village) in Ukraine, who still speak Swedish and observe holidays according to the Swedish calendar.) In Estonia, the small remaining Swedish community was very well treated between the first and second world wars. Municipalities with a Swedish majority, mainly found along the coast, had Swedish as the administrative language and Swedish-Estonian culture experienced an upswing. However most Swedish-speaking people fled to Sweden at the end of World War II when Estonia was re-conquered by the Soviet Union.

There are small numbers of Swedish speakers in other countries, such as the United States. (See Languages in the United States.) There are also descendants in Brazil and Argentina resulting from Swedish immigration that have maintained a distinction by language and names, also against groups of European immigrants in the region.

There is considerable migration (labor and other) between the Nordic countries, but due to the similarity between the languages and culture expatriates generally assimilate quickly and do not stand out as a group. (Note: Finland is, strictly speaking, not a Scandinavian country. It does, however, belong to the so called Nordic countries together with Iceland and the Scandinavian countries.)
Official status
Swedish is the de-facto national language of Sweden, but it does not hold the status of an official language there.

In Finland, both Swedish and Finnish are official languages. Swedish had been the language of government in Finland for some 700 years, when in 1892 Finnish was given equal status with Swedish, following Russian determination to isolate the Grand Duchy from Sweden. Today about 290,000, or 5.6% of the total population are Swedish speakers according to official statistics for 2002. After an educational reform in the 1970s, both Swedish and Finnish are compulsory school subjects, mandatory in the final examinations: education in the pupil's own language is officially called mother tongue -- "moderns l" in Swedish or " idinkieli" in Finnish; and education in the other language is referred to as the other domestic language -- "andra inhemska spr ket" in Swedish, "toinen kotimainen kieli" in Finnish. The introduction of mandatory education in Swedish was by some seen as a step to avoid further Finlandization.

Swedish is the official language of the small autonomous territory of the land Islands, under sovereignty of Finland, protected by international treaties and Finnish laws. In contrast to the mainland of Finland the land Islands are monolingual - Finnish has no official status, and is not mandatory in schools.

Swedish is also an official language of the European Union.