The Scandinavian languages, Danish, Faroese, Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish, are also referred to as the Northern Germanic languages because they are closely related to German and English. Around 20 million people use these languages in their everyday lives. They are part of the Indo-European language family and share numerous linguistic features that help many people understand each other and bring cultural unity to the region. However, each of them has numerous characteristics that make them unique and complex. Here are a few:
The Swedish alphabet has 29 letters, including three that do not feature in the English alphabet: å, ä and ö.
Sandberg primarily offers translation services into the Scandinavian languages from English, and to a lesser extent from German, French and the other Nordic languages. See the language combinations below.
The similarities between the three most widely spoken Scandinavian languages have given rise to a curious localisation solution known in the translation industry as “Scandimix”. Products to be sold in the Scandinavian countries need packaging with labels that list ingredients and provide user instructions. Separate texts and labels on the product packaging for each national market would be expensive, so Scandimix provides a solution in a form of multi-language adaptation: it is a process where the final target text is a combination of two or more languages. For us at Sandberg, the usual combination clients ask for is Danish/Norwegian/Swedish – and mostly in that order.
Read more about how we provide this service here.
Sandberg was the first company in the UK to achieve both ISO 17100 and ISO 18587 certification. Whether the translation is done by our in-house experts or one of our carefully sourced freelancers, you can be confident that a translation produced by Sandberg will hit the mark.