Translate a PDF into Swedish with the layout kept

What Swedish changes in a PDF

Swedish uses the Latin alphabet, left to right, with three extra letters: å, ä and ö. Nothing in the layout has to be mirrored, but two things deserve attention.

Closed compound words. Where English writes «work environment regulations», Swedish writes one word: arbetsmiljöföreskrifter. «Delivery terms» becomes leveransvillkor, «customer service» kundtjänst. A twenty-letter word with no space cannot wrap, so in a narrow column, a table cell or a form field it dictates the width. Because Manuce reduces the text size until the translation fits its box, those small boxes are where the type may end up noticeably smaller than the rest of the page.

å, ä and ö in the font. A PDF often embeds only part of a font: the characters actually used in the source. If your original never contained an «å», that glyph may be missing from the embedded font, and Manuce then sets the translation in an equivalent font. It stays legible, but a heading can look slightly different, so check covers and page headers.

Also worth knowing: the Swedish definite article is a suffix. «The document» is dokumentet, «the pages» sidorna. A Swedish text therefore often has fewer separate words than English or French, without necessarily looking shorter on the page.

Swedish conventions to check in the result

A PDF holds plenty of material that is not running prose: dates, amounts, tables, headings. Swedish usage differs from English in several places:

• Dates: the usual numeric form is 2024-03-15; written out, 15 mars 2024, with the month in lower case.
• Days and months: always lower case, måndag, januari.
• Numbers and amounts: decimal comma, a space between thousands, currency after the figure: 12 500,75 kr, not 12,500.75.
• Quotation marks: Swedish uses ”…”, with the same mark opening and closing.
• Headings: sentence case only, Information om behandling av personuppgifter, never Title Case on every word.
• Plurals: just two forms, singular and plural: 1 sida, 10 sidor.

Register matters too. Informal du is standard in Sweden, including in manuals and customer-facing documents. Using plural ni to address one reader can sound distant or old-fashioned. If your source is formal, a translation in du is not over-familiar; it is simply how Swedish documents are written.

What Manuce delivers, and what it does not do

Manuce reads your PDF block by block, noting each block’s position, font, size and colour. It removes the original text, places the Swedish translation in the same box in the original font or an equivalent, and leaves images and background in place. If the Swedish needs more room than the source, the text size of that block is reduced until it fits.

You receive:

• the PDF in its original layout, with the text replaced in place (layout work is included in the price);
• a Word version, handy for fixing a compound or adjusting a heading;
• a formatted PDF and the plain text.

What Manuce does not do:

• it cannot read a scanned PDF: if the page is an image and the text cannot be selected, nothing is translated;
• it does not produce sworn or certified translations. If a Swedish authority asks for a translation by an authorised translator (auktoriserad translator), for instance for a civil-status record or a diploma, Manuce is not the right service for that use.

Swedish carries a surcharge: the per-word rate is multiplied by 1.25, and the quote appears as soon as you upload, based on the exact word count.

Preparing the PDF and checking the Swedish version

Before uploading:

• try to select a sentence in the PDF; if you cannot, it is a scan, and you need to go back to the source file and export it to PDF;
• use the PDF exported from the original application rather than one that was printed and rescanned;
• note the tight areas: table cells, captions, form buttons, table-of-contents columns.

Use the free sample, one paragraph translated at your chosen level, to check that a term you want kept as it is, such as a product or brand name, comes through unchanged, and that å, ä and ö display properly.

On delivery, check first: cells where a long compound like kundtjänstmedarbetare has shrunk the text, dates and amounts, and headings in sentence case. If a block has become too small, the Word version lets you shorten or rephrase before producing your own PDF.

In practice

1. Check that the text in your PDF can be selected (not a scan).
2. Upload the file and choose Swedish: the quote appears straight away.
3. Read the free sample: names intact, å, ä and ö displayed correctly.
4. Pay and receive the re-laid-out PDF, the Word version, a formatted PDF and plain text.
5. Check tables, dates and amounts, and edit in Word if a block is too cramped.