I was updating an article from The Local’s archives on giving birth in Sweden, when I spotted a leaflet on dietary recommendations titled “advice about food for you who are pregnant”.

It had been issued by the Swedish National Food Agency, and it was obvious Swenglish.

“For you who are pregnant” is a direct translation from the Swedish för dig som är gravid, and also shows another classic English mistake for Scandinavian speakers: mixing up “is” and “are”.

“What shall I eat?” the leaflet continued, directly translating Swedish ska as “shall”, rather than “should”, which to my ears sounds like someone from the 18th century despairing about a famine.

It’s not the first time I’ve spotted mistakes like these, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. Thanks to immigration, Sweden is full of copywriters who write English – or other languages – at a native level. So why are Swedish companies with marketing budgets well exceeding the cost of hiring a native speaker so bad at using their expertise?

“I call it the Swedish Dilemma,” Irishman Paddy Kelly, who moved to Sweden in 1997, writes in his book We Can English, which is full of examples of Swedish companies trying and failing to write copy in English. “Excellent English skills combined with an over-confident belief that your command of the language is so good it does not need to be checked by a native speaker, ever.”

“I’m not making fun of people’s skills in a language that isn’t their mother tongue,” he adds.

“What I’m mostly making fun of here are enormous companies with advertising budgets in the millions who can’t be bothered to run their expensive ad campaigns past a single speaker of the language in which they are written.”

I reached out to Stockholm-based Native Translation, a translation agency that only hires native writers and communications professionals, to hear their thoughts. They recently started Native Network, which Kelly coincidentally is a member of. Its aim is to match up native-English speaking copywriters with Nordic organisations and stamp out “Swenglish” copy.

“Swedes in general are very good at English,” said Native’s CEO and founder, Erik Wennberg.

“If you’re writing for another Swedish person you might have the same references, you have similar vocabulary and so on, but when you’re writing for a truly international audience I think Swedes, myself included, sometimes tend to underestimate how different it is from the English we actually speak.”

There’s no doubt that it’s easy to get by in Scandinavia if you speak English. Denmark, Norway and Sweden are consistently ranked among the best non-native English speakers in the world, placing 4th, 5th and 6th in EF Education First’s English Proficiency Ranking last year.

Being good at a language is all well and good, but when it comes to advertising or brand communications, there’s a real benefit to hiring someone who has spent significant time in the country in question and is able to spot both small language mistakes and cultural slip-ups.

Maybe a native speaker would have realised that when a boutique Stockholm tea shop put up signs about “tearapist”, therapy over a cup of tea was not the first thing customers thought of.

“Scandinavians are quite sharp when it comes to spelling, grammar, things like that,” Wennberg’s colleague, Younes Maouane, told me. “But then when it comes to certain cultural aspects of advertising or brand communications, there’s a discrepancy there. A sort of cultural difference, I suppose.”

Cultural differences can be a potential minefield for a company looking to expand outside of Scandinavia, market itself to English speakers or simply use English puns in their copy, as an ad company producing merchandise for the Ystad IF handball team – who play in white – found out when it put its logo on a powerbank, marking it with the slogan “white power”.

The ad company quickly apologised and said they had just wanted to joke about the powerbank and the colour white, but it is likely that a native English speaker would not first have needed the local newspaper to point out to them that “white power” is commonly used by white supremacist groups.

“If there’s a Scandinavian person who has written something in English, they have this idea in mind that this will work everywhere,” said Maouane. “But you have to have this cultural aspect in mind all the time – will this work in the UK, will it work in Germany, will it work in Sweden, even?”

Mistakes in non-native English copy don’t have to be as controversial as the Ystad IF powerbank to be awkward. Advertising campaigns in Scandinavia for example reflect the region’s informal attitudes to topics which are taboo in other countries, like sex and religion.

An English-speaking Melodifestivalen fan told The Local in 2017 that he was “gobsmacked” when that year’s hosts repeatedly introduced the normally family-friendly show as “Melo-fucking-difestivalen”.

Similarly, Malmö’s moaning rubbish bins, for example, may have grabbed generally positive headlines in Sweden, but would not have worked as well in a society where sex is taboo.

“Some advertisements are all about stirring controversy and creating buzz, but you don’t want to create buzz for something that sounds wrong to a certain group of people or doesn’t fly in a certain market. That’s not the kind of attention you want,” said Maouane.

Hiring native-level writers can also be an opportunity to improve the level of copywriting in other languages across the company as a whole. But there’s a risk in over-reliance on native speakers, because having spoken the language since birth doesn’t automatically make you a good writer.

“I think we’re less critical of English texts, as we don’t speak it as well. If it’s Swedish copy, it’s scrutinised, every word is considered extremely carefully. If it’s in English, it’s more like ‘ah, it’s in English, it sounds all right, or ‘this sounds a bit weird’ but maybe it actually is completely correct English that just sounds weird to Swedish ears,” said Wennberg.

“That all means that Swedes are slightly more careless when it comes to who actually does the job. For Swedish it’s like ‘we need a UX writer to do the website, a journalist for the company magazine’, but in English it’s like ‘oh, you’re from Australia? Great! You can do the UX and the company magazine and interviews, because you speak English’.”

Offering information in multiple languages is a great first step, but the next step is to make sure that that information accounts for any cultural differences and includes any important contextual information which the receiver might need, which is much easier for a native speaker.

Going back to the leaflet from Livsmedelsverket, do non-Swedes really need to be warned not to eat surströmming fermented herring more than three times a year, and are there other foods more commonly eaten by foreigners in Sweden which should be included?

Language can also act as a bond between the receiver and the sender of communication, so it can be a useful tool for a brand or public authority to build a relationship with its target audience by communicating in their native language.

“You should think about communication as a friend or someone who speaks to you,” Wennberg said. “In order to make it relevant to the receiver, it’s an advantage to share something – a language, a story, a cultural gem, whatever, something that makes you feel closer to the sender.”

It’s not always easy for a Swedish company to find the right kind of writer, with demand increasing as more and more companies launch internationally, at the same time as Brexit has made it harder for English-speaking writers – at least those from the United Kingdom – to come to Sweden.

For immigrants who are already in the country, it’s notoriously hard to break into the labour market. We might not speak perfect Swedish, Danish or Norwegian, but we do speak our own languages perfectly, meaning we can be a real asset for companies and authorities who regularly communicate with people from all over the place.

“Writing correct copy is not something that can be summarised in a few bullet points,” Kelly writes in the epilogue to We Can English. 

“There is only one way to be sure your English will look good, convey your message, say one thing and one thing only, and not end up on Twitter as an example of a million wasted dollars, to be giggled at by people like me, and that is to run it by a native English speaker.”

“Or, even better, hire one.”

We Can English is available in both Swedish and English here, as well as on Amazon and Bokus.

Hear Erik Wennberg from the Native translation agency discuss the benefits for companies of hiring native-level writers and copy editors in the The Local’s Sweden in Focus Extra podcast. 

 

 

 

 

 

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