This study investigates strategies used when translating compound nouns from German to Swedish. The source text translated and used for the analysis stems from the travel book Couchsurfing im Iran. Meine Reise hinter verschlossene Türen by Stephan Orth (2015). The focus of the study is twofold: 1) examining established compounds and 2) ad hoc compounds. The quantitative part of the analysis is based on Fleischer/Barz’ (2007) morphological classification of compound nouns and Vinay/Darbelnet’s (1995/2004) translation procedures, and also forms the basis for the qualitative analysis. The quantitative analysis shows that while nearly 60% of the established compound nouns were translated literally, quite a large number were rendered using other strategies, mainly paraphrases with nominal phrases. The translations of the ad hoc compounds showed the reverse pattern: only 36% were translated literally, while nearly 60% were translated with nominal phrases. The qualitative analysis suggests four major explanations for these shifts. The first is morphological limitation, where the Swedish language in some instances does not allow a certain word to be used as a compound modifier. The second is language preference, where a tendency towards a more verbal paraphrase in Swedish was noticed. The third is based on Toury’s law of growing standardization, which states that translations tend to be more explicit, in this case preferring longer and more transparent paraphrases to denser compounds. The fourth explanation is the lexical gap where ad hoc compounds proved to be particularly difficult to translate when one of their units did not have a direct counterpart in Swedish.