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Maskinen skapades av företaget.

Maskinen skapades av företaget.
The machine was created by the company.
From Lesson 154:The passive agent (av)·Swedish

Questions & Answers about Maskinen skapades av företaget.

Why does av translate to "by" here? I thought it meant "of".
You are right that av often means "of". However, in a passive sentence like this one, where the action is done to the subject (Maskinen), av is used to introduce who or what actually did the action. In English, we use "by" for this. The noun doing the action (företaget) is called the agent.
How exactly is the passive verb skapades formed?
It uses the Swedish s-passive form. You take the regular past tense of the verb skapa (to create), which is skapade (created), and simply add an -s to the end. So, skapade becomes skapades (was created).
How would you say this sentence in the active voice?
If we wanted to focus on the company doing the action, we would say: Företaget skapade maskinen (The company created the machine). In the passive version, we flip the word order, add -s to the verb, and use av before the creator.
Just as a refresher, why do the nouns end in -en and -et?
Those are the definite endings, which give us the word "the". Because maskin is an en-word, it takes the -en suffix to become maskinen (the machine). Because företag is an ett-word, it takes the -et suffix to become företaget (the company).

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