Guide

Norwegian, Swedish, Danish and Finnish are one market and four languages.

Companies sell into the Nordics as one region and then discover the region does not read as one. Here is what that costs, from an Oslo company whose own site runs in all four.

The short answer

Three of the four are close enough to tempt you and different enough to embarrass you. Norwegian, Swedish and Danish read alike on the page and are full of words that look identical and mean something else. Finnish is not related to the other three and shares almost nothing with them. Norwegian also has two written standards, and the one you want for a commercial site is bokmål. So the Nordic job is four separate translations with a shared glossary, not one Scandinavian pass. The tool you pick should make the fourth language cost the same attention as the first, which is none.

The four, and what each one asks of you.

Norwegian (bokmål)

There are two written standards, bokmål and nynorsk, and a commercial site is written in bokmål unless you have a specific reason. Pick one and lock it in the glossary. A translation that drifts between them reads as careless to a Norwegian.

Swedish

The largest of the four by market size, and the one where Danish and Norwegian phrasing shows through most obviously if the same draft is reused. Worth a separate glossary pass on product nouns.

Danish

Closest to Norwegian bokmål on the page, which is exactly why the false friends bite. A do-not-translate list on product names does most of the protecting here.

Finnish

Not related to the other three. Word endings carry the meaning, so a phrase-by-phrase approach loses it, and interface text needs room to grow. Treat it as a separate project that happens to ship at the same time.

The proof is this page

Read this in Norwegian, then Danish, then Finnish.

The language links in the footer are not a demo. They are this site, translated by the product it sells, under the same glossary and do-not-translate rules a customer gets. If the Finnish reads badly, that is a real defect in something we ship, and you found it before paying us anything.

How the Nordic set is normally run.

One glossary, four outputs

Product names, feature names and the words your industry argues about go in the glossary and the do-not-translate list once. Every language then follows the same decisions instead of making them again.

What a translation management system does →

A page per language, or none of this ranks

Swedish customers search in Swedish. If your site swaps language in the browser at one URL, Google sees one page in one language and the Nordic expansion buys you readers you already had.

Why some translations never rank →

The fourth language costs what the first did

No tier limits how many languages you run, and none of them carries a separate fee. The plan counts words stored, and each language stores its own. So the cost of the Nordic set is the words, not the number of flags.

What does BeMyWords cost?

Free to start: 5,000 words stored, 1 site, no card. Paid tiers start at 199 kr a month, or 1 990 kr for a year. They count the words you store, the original plus each translation of it, and never people, pageviews or a cap on how many languages you run. Bring your own AI key and it is 199 kr a month flat with no word limit.

Which tier that is depends on how many words your site holds. Paste your address and we read it and tell you.

Every tier, and what it holds Size your site

Start with the market you already sell in.

Free to start, no card. Turn on one Nordic language today and judge the output in the one you can read.

Start free