[2][3] At the end of the 1950s, her father moved the family to Turku and Juva, who found it hard to make friends there, spent a lot of time in the library.

[2] Soon after finishing her schooling, Juva was having coffee at the Copper Pan Restaurant with Pennanen, who mentioned she had been offered the translation of The Lord of the Rings, but did not have time to do the project because of other work commitments.

[9][3] For the 1975 release of the third volume, Kuninkaan Paluu (Return of the King),[8] Juva worked alone and her translation was recognized with the State Prize for Literature in 1976.

[6][10] Juva went on to translate Watership Down (Finnish: Ruohometsän kansa) and Winnie the Pooh,[11] as well as almost the entirety of Tolkien's body of work.

In 1979, she fell in love with Mirkka Rekola[6][12] and joined the Finnish sexual rights organization Seta, becoming active in LGBT advocacy.

[2][14] Finland began a project to translate the Complete Works of Shakespeare into Finnish in 2004,[18] and Juva and Day moved from Oxford to Llanddewi Brefi in West Wales.

[20] In her preface to the translation of Much Ado About Nothing, Juva stated that the tradition of the iambic pentameter had been abandoned after the early-20th century in an attempt to modernize.

Juva has translated over 100 literary works in the course of her career,[10] including: L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Charles Dickens' Bleak House and Nicholas Nickleby, Henry James' Washington Square, and Alice Walker's The Color Purple.

[13] In 2014, she was inducted into the Hall of Fame of the European Science Fiction Society for her translation work[23] and was granted an honorary doctorate in philosophy by the University of Eastern Finland's Joensuu campus.

While they were in the United States, they participated in the 2017 Women's March and then married, sending the paperwork home to Finland to convert their registered partnership to a marriage.