svLatin script

How to translate WordPress to Swedish

Swedish (Svenska) reaches roughly ~10 millionspeakers. Here's what's actually involved in translating a WordPress site into it — the technical setup, the Swedish-specific gotchas, and the SEO.

hreflang
sv
Native
Svenska
Direction
LTR
Text length
+about the same, occasionally longer
Plurals
Multiple plural patterns by noun class
“Welcome”
Välkommen

What's specific to Swedish

Most of translating WordPress is the same in any language, but each language has quirks that break layouts or SEO if you ignore them. For Swedish:

  • Extra letters å, ä, ö sort after z — don't assume a-z ordering for lists.
  • Compound nouns run long, like German — leave room in navigation.
  • Formality: du (informal) is now standard even in business; De is archaic.

Step by step

1. Add Swedish as a target language

Set your source language, then add Swedish (sv) as a target. With an automatic plugin you don't create a translated copy of every page by hand — it translates on the fly.

2. Translate — automatically or by hand

Machine and AI translation get you Swedish coverage in minutes; review the strings that matter (navigation, calls to action, legal) for the right register. Estimate the cost with the translation cost calculator.

3. Serve it under a clean URL

Publish Swedish under a language-prefixed path like /sv/. Give pages readable slugs with the slug generator.

4. Get the Swedish SEO right

Add reciprocal hreflang pointing at your sv version (with x-default), set <html lang="sv">, and translate titles and meta descriptions. Build the tags with the hreflang generator and verify with the hreflang checker.

Doing it the easy way

Gloty translates your whole site into Swedish automatically with the AI provider you choose, stores it in your own database, and emits the correct hreflang and lang/dir attributes for you. See how it stacks up against Weglot and WPML, or read the pillar guide on making WordPress multilingual.

Add Swedish to your WordPress site in minutes — automatic AI translation, stored in your own database.

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