In order to tell the story of the agency, we need to go back to the 1980s. Back then, our founder and CEO, Ave, was a little girl who loved the books of Astrid Lindgren. One of them – The Children of Noisy Village – was her absolute favourite. She used to spend summers with her grandmother in southern Estonia, surrounded by forests and fields, and the feeling she got reminded her of everything Astrid Lindgren described in her book. Then, when Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy of books was released in the 2000s, Ave found herself completely lost in their pages.
Two Swedish authors and an Estonian girl who was then living in Australia. She started to learn Swedish in order to be able to read her favourite writers in their original language. As a freelance translator, it occurred to Ave that she could also combine her interest with something useful – read the books and then translate them from Swedish into several different languages!
A seed had been sown, and in 2011 Ave launched the agency under the name Swesteng Languages, followed later by its subsidiary Swesteng Översättningar. Initially, she translated between Swedish, Estonian and English, hence the name of the company. However, she soon began to receive requests for other languages and the translation team grew.
The name Swesteng has evolved into meaning something other than just these three languages – we can offer much, much more…