Some folks might think that Google requires that when you use hreflang and make a multilingual web site, that each page that is translated from one language to another must be done word-for-word. That is absolutely not the case. In fact, it is best to translate the page normally and not do word for word translation. Have someone fluent in both languages look at the page and translate it into a fluent and natural way to read the page. That means some words might not be on the page at all.

Google said this on Twitter this morning. Google said that “equivalent across languages / regions doesn’t require word-for-word translation.”

Here are the tweets:

So just be normal, have someone naturally translate the page, but not word-by-word.

Forum discussion at Twitter.