Our vision

A world, where people who speak English or Estonian understand one another as easily as they understand their compatriots.

What we do

We create the best translations in Estonia. In other words:

• our translations are effective – they achieve their end goals in the target audience.
• our translations are natural and seamless – the text is a pleasure to read and the reader cannot tell that they are reading a translation.

Our goal

To become the leading translation agency in Estonia by 2015. We want to be recognized by our clients, as well as the wider translation community, for providing the best translations in Estonia.

How we do it

We only select the very best of the best translators. We prefer people:

• who have specialist work experience in their field of translation.
• who have lived both in Estonia and in an English speaking country.

We help our translators:

• always consider the cultural context, and the local communication customs of the target audience.
• focus on translating the wider meaning, as opposed to translating in a word-for-word fashion (i.e. we see the forest, not just the trees, and translate the forest).

We also offer our clients:

• Quick turnaround times.
• Delightful customer service.
• A competitive price.

History

Our agency was founded by Taavi Tillmann, who grew up in the UK. Upon returning to Estonia he began work as the top editor in some of the largest translation agencies in Estonia. While editing some of these so called “professional” translations, he was struck by the amount of incomprehensible text and the generally low level of quality of the Estonian-English-Estonian translations he saw. As a response, Taavi wanted to go back to the drawing board, and design a new translation agency with people who are passionate about providing superior translations.

English Only Translation Agency (Estonian: Ainult Inglise Tõlkebüroo OÜ) was incorporated in 2005. At first we selected 20 of the best of the best translators based on translation ability along. To our surprise, most of these had not actually studied a language degree at university, but were talented young professionals who had studied or worked in an English-speaking country.

The company’s development got a kick-start when Sigrid Jaasi joined us as project manager, as she was built an impressive network of clients and translators. We believe to currently be half-way toward our goal, of being known as the translation company in Estonia with the highest quality. Take a look at our existing clients here. Our team of translators, too, has grown to more than 50 employees, and you can meet them here. Although we specialize in Estonian-English-Estonian translations, more and more clients are beginning to ask us about translating other languages too, so don’t be afraid to ask us for other languages too.

In our company, we consider translations to be something much more than simply routine work that has to be done. Each and every one of us approaches a new job with the curious mindset of “How can I make this translation the best that it ever could be?”. Sometimes we have to be inventive, and sometimes we may even disagree with the tone of the original author. But ultimately, all this boils down to our passion for making sure that our clients have the perfect text that is not only highly-functional, but also flawless and beautiful. We are proud of what we do and we to be of use to you in helping Estonian- and English-speaking people understand one another as easily as they understand their compatriots.