“Our current website is old, difficult to navigate and resource intensive to manage. We’re therefore working hard to build a new website which should be ready early next year,” Linda Widmark, communications director for the Migration Agency, revealed in an email reply to The Local.
We contacted the agency after migration consultant Saaya Sorrells-Weatherford, co-founder of Emigreat, in a post on LinkedIn highlighted discrepancies between the Swedish version of its website and the various versions translated into foreign languages.
For example, she noted that the Swedish version accurately stated that the salary threshold for an EU Blue Card was 59,850 kronor from July 23rd 2024, whereas the English version of the same page still referred to the previous salary of 57,450 kronor, from August 28th 2023.
And when The Local looked, one page in English about work permits still referenced the previous salary threshold for work permits, two months after the figure was updated, although the correct salary threshold was also mentioned on the same page.
Both mistakes have since been corrected.
Sorrells-Weatherford argued that the discrepancies meant that permit applicants, whose native language usually isn’t Swedish, had to resort to consulting the Swedish website to ensure the accuracy of the information, sometimes by relying on Google Translate.
“If the purpose of the Migration Agency’s page is to inform immigrants of their requirements, rights, and processes, having the most comprehensive information in Swedish defeats that purpose. People are using the website for information about their future, and having the information directly from the source be wrong or out-of-date breaks trust with the agency,” she told The Local.
She also pointed out that the “news” section of the Swedish website was updated far more frequently than the English version, although the English version does tend to focus on news updates that are of particular relevance to permit applicants.
Widmark from the Migration Agency described keeping the detailed and comprehensive information on its website up-to-date as “a major challenge, linked to cost and quality”.
“We use outsourced translators and a translation usually takes a week. Sometimes when it’s extra urgent to get the information out, we publish the Swedish page first, before we have all the translations ready,” she said.
“It happens that we miss changing figures on some page in some language. We apologise for that and are very grateful if readers get in touch so that we can correct them.”
The Migration Agency publishes information in more than a dozen foreign languages, although the Swedish and English websites appear to be the most fleshed out, with some languages – for example French and Spanish – mainly focusing on asylum migration.
The new website will focus less on having a large range of languages, said Widmark.
“Because the reliability of the information is so important, we will not have 10-15 different languages on the new website, but focus on clear and comprehensible Swedish and English, so that we can work both faster and with better quality on our digital information.”
Sorrells-Weatherford welcomed the news of a new website.
“I think focusing on at least matching the English to the Swedish content is a step in the right direction,” she said. “But I also believe that with the technology available today, having the information and even the applications themselves in a few other languages would be beneficial for faster processes. Some of the English wording used in applications like sambo* are a bit tricky to understand even for native English speakers.”
In the meantime, she urged applicants to double check all information by consulting the Swedish website.
“Applicants should always source from the Swedish page as their last check before applying. If something isn’t explicitly stated in the agency website, they should also call the Migration Agency’s help line at least twice with the same question to check that they are receiving consistent information.”
* Editor’s note: A sambo (short for samboende) is a Swedish word for living together in a serious relationship without being married. The Migration Agency explains in English about residence permits for spouses or partners: “Cohabiting partners are two persons who are not married but live together and have a ‘marriage-like’ relationship with each other. It is not enough for you to have been living together when visiting as tourists, for example.”
Am I alone in thinking it’s strange that one must call the agency twice with the same question to ensure the receipt of the same information? To me this speaks of an underlying problem within M’verket: each agent is given too much latitude to make personally colored decisions regarding dis/approval of applications and how much processing must take place to reach their decision. This kind of agency shouldn’t have this kind of inconsistency.
“We use outsourced translators, and a translation usually takes a week.”
This is incredible. Especially now, with the latest advancements in LLM AI, webpage translations should take a few hours, if not less. Not a week! I wonder how much money the agency is paying these outsourcing companies. Throwing taxpayers’ money down the drain, more like.