Introducing Gwyneth

I’m a British woman living in Gothenburg on the west coast of Sweden and I love my life here in Viking territory. I currently teach part-time at Senioruniversitetet as well as doing the occasional translation. After Brexit I took dual nationality, but even if you take the girl out of Britain you don’t necessarily take Britain out of the girl, and like most immigrants I still see some aspects of Swedish life through the eyes of a foreigner - and I suppose I always will.

My background

I owe my strange name, Gwyneth Olofsson, to my British mother and Swedish husband. I was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England and have an MA in English literature, and postgraduate qualifications in education and Teaching English as a Foreign Language. After working in England and Singapore I came to Sweden for a couple of years, established my own company, married a Swede, and never left. I taught English at many local companies, the biggest of which was the Volvo Group, and I wrote a regular column on intercultural matters for their internal magazine, Global, for 15 years. It was Volvo who asked me to give a TEDx talk on the use of English in the corporation.

I’ve had four books published – all now out of print. The first was Everyone Makes Mistakes, published by Studentlitteratur and illustrated by Christel Copp. When In Rome or Rio or Riyadh: cultural Q&A’s for successful business behaviour around the world, was published by Intercultural Press in the United States and in 2006 it was awarded an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice magazine (a publication of the Association of College and Research Libraries/American Library Association) and it was also translated into Arabic. English at Work for Speakers of Swedish was published in autumn 2012 by Stockholm publisher Prodicta. My fourth book, A Global Perspective for a Worldwide Workforce, came out in 2015 and contains most of the articles I wrote for the Volvo Group’s staff magazine, Global, between 2000 and 2015.

As a welcome change to medical translations, in 202I I translated a book on English literature for Studentlitteratur, Horror, Science Fiction and Fantasy by Anna-Karin Persson.

Write to Gwyneth at: gwyneth.olofsson@communico.se